Hi! I want to know, if it's any kind of problem with indexing and better search position if my site is on server in Europe, but my main traffic would mainly be from USA? Thx for any info. Have a nice day.
We have our sites hosted in Oslo, Norway and I do see a slight disadvantage in the serps of Google especially. I thing we loose 3 positions in average compared to if they were hosted in the US. I could be wrong of course, but that's the way it looks like to me.
I'd have to agree with that, Google seems to place a large importance on the location of the server. I've had .co.uk sites not even turn up in the UK serps before when hosted on one of my US servers.
I've never specifically checked, though the small amount evidence that I have points to the same being true.
MSN does not give any weight to the location as far as I have seen. Neigher does Yahoo. I have many top rankings with them for extremely competitive english keywords for the sites at our server in Oslo.
I've got a .co.uk on a US server, it's ranked well in the MSN US SERPS but not at all in the UK version. I guess it needs testing to be sure though.
I was thinking a little also on Local Search, MSN has already it (BETA?) and I think Google and Yahoo! will do on that IMO.
Our sites are hosted in the US, and on Google UK for example our primary site drops from #1 down to #3 or #4 for most of the search terms I tried. It would appear that the disadvantage in serps that you have observed with your site may work the other way too. Prior to three minutes ago I didn't realize that the drop was so consistent Thank you for your posts Frisby and Basicus! It was quite an eye opener to try our search terms on non-US datacenters and observe the results
I realized it when we moved our sites to Oslo. I find this practise to not be very logic. What does placement of server have to do with the target market for the sites hosted there? We run sites with target markets in Norway and US. How can Google judge the placements based on the IP-adddress of the server? I don't get it.
I've thought about this also, after a while it does kind of make sense. Using the TLD doesn't always work as many trademark names use the .com no matter what market they are in. Simply lumping all of these in with the .com SERPS wouldn't make sense. At least using the server location it gives people a little control over which SERPS they wish to show up in. The major problems come with US hosting as it usually a lot cheaper than elsewhere. Also many local hosting companies simply buy rackspace in the US and resell it so you have to check when buying hosting that your actual geo-location is where you think it's going to be.
I imagine there might be a little or negligible difference you can observe in indexing in any search engine. For target traffic in US, an affilliate program such as CJ would be going to help you lot.
I'm not 'quite' sure what you mean, but there is a huge difference in traffic between bing #1 in the .com SERPS and the .co.uk SERPS. It's just a question of which brings more targeted traffic which in the case for most of my sites is the .co.uk results.