If I am targeting visitors in Ireland - how important is it that my website be hosted in ireland? US hosting is a good deal cheaper - is hosting my irish site in the US a bad idea? Also, irish sites have the .ie domain. Will a .ie domain hosted in ireland rank better than the .com equivelant also hosted in ireland?
Yeah! .ie domain will do better in local results. So if you want to specifically target Ireland market, go for it. Besides Google can look into your ip address and if you use hosting server from Ireland, you may get better results for Google Irish searches.
thanks aniroy. irrespective of domain name - can it be confirmed that local hosting results in better ranking for local searches?
I believe local hosting is very important. I have a french chateau site (english owners out to attract mainly English customers) which is hosted in UK. Top for most searches made from the Uk but when I switched to French searches it was way down.
Yes, that is the general idea, though nothing is official about it. Local ip will help you get priority in local search results.
I totally agree with aniroy1986. Yes, If you targeting visitors in Ireland then you must host you site in Ireland.
If I have a domain name which is country specific like realpaisa.in but hosting in US , will it still affect my rankings? Also can anybdy suggest whether changing the hosting frequently like every year or changing dedicated IP .... like IXWebhosting every year gives spl discounts to its new users, to avail tht I create a new account and port the old site there....... will it also affect rankings or its only concerned with the domain name and not the IP address?
I think that you can only specify certain domains to target a specific country (you ca for.com's) other country specific domains are targeted by default. as for as the ip and location of the server goes, we host on an international hosting service and are still number 1 for most of our searches, im sure that some of the companies that we are about use local hosting, so in fact the location doesn't matter in our case, but i have always wanted to know this for sure as well!!