Does hosting overseas affect seo, and where does this leave cloud computing?
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47answers:
4
A:
SEO is a bit of a dark art and I am unsure as to whether it is actually worth it or not. I don't know if anyone who doesn't work for the search engines themselves would be able to give a definitive answer.
Failing to ask the search engines themselves (who are probably secretive about their algorithms), if you really want to pay for this sort of information the best SEO companies to ask are probably the ones ranked top on a Google search for "SEO" ;)
Your main concern and by far the biggest influence on search placement would be content. High quality, unique and well written content will rank you highest. It sometimes takes time though for your content to soak into the wider web, so patience is also key. Keep creating good consistent unique content and it will eventually climb its way up.
Even if server location does affect placement (which doesn't make much sense to me), then as cloud computing becomes more popular and mainstream the search engines would change their algorithms to take this into account.
So nothing to worry about really. Stay away from micro optimisations and spend your efforts on content.
Tom Gullen
2010-07-22 13:41:24
Thats pretty much what i figured, I'm based in the UK, and being that hosting in the USA and Canada is alot cheaper its seems obvious to use them. However the reason i raised the question was because I've seem blog posts similar to my question that seem to say hosting aborad does affect your ranking to some degree.However the are old posts and cloud computing was readily available. It would be intersting to here what others say?
ivordesign
2010-07-22 14:04:44
The only way it could affect you as far as I can think is by the country specific searches, for example in Google you have "Only show pages from the UK" which I imagine finds UK servers. If you think this is important to you, doing some research on search trends should give you an indication as to how damaging moving the server could be.
Tom Gullen
2010-07-22 14:15:39
I don't know about other search engines, but I know Google now takes response time into account. If your servers are far enough away from Google's servers, then Google might rank your page poorly. However, that probably won't matter too much and most of the time will probably be spent on generating the content on your side.
icktoofay
2010-07-24 06:51:37
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Google has said that location of the server is one of the factors they use to determine location determined results. You can use Google Webmaster tools to officially declare your targeted location and that removes all doubts and overrides other factors. That's friendly to cloud hosting as well.
allesklar
2010-07-23 08:22:49
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The location of the server is factored by Google in IFF: a) your tdl is not a country one (so, it 's a com,org,net and not for example co.uk or .de) b) In webmaster tools, you have not specified the location of your site.
john
2010-07-24 06:43:33
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It's not really possible to determine where a server is based on IP. Many front end loadbalancers are geographically redundant, and modern routing protocols account for this.
I doubt that google will use this to determine webserver ranking.
MakerOfThings7
2010-08-05 16:31:34