I was wondering if the site's IP location has any effect on rankings in a country specific Google engine. 1) For example, if I have my .com site hosted in Australia would it have a better chance ranking higher on http://www.google.com.au/ than if I had that exact same site in the USA? 2) Different Google data centers in different countries show slightly different results. So, would the .com site rank higher on google.com when searched in Australia if the site's IP was in Australia? My feeling is that it doesn't really influence rankings and even if it does it is just a slight difference, but I would love to hear what others think or if someone have had experience with something similar .
Yes. All of the major search engines give a great deal of weight to geo-location, even when the user does not request a country-specific search. This is the main reason why the results differ among the various country-specific versions of Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Traditionally, a Country Code Top Level Domain Name will be considered to have a geo-location within the corresponding country. For sites with generic Top Level Domain names like .com, .net, .org, or .info, etc. the major search engines mainly rely on the physical location of the server that hosts the site, based on its IP address. Of course with Google, you can request a change in geo-location for any site through the Webmaster Tools console so you can get your site hosted anywhere you like.
In the case your asking about, the IP address doesn't play a known role. However, the domain extension will. You would rather have *.com.au and *.com to rank locally on the Australian data center. You can try geo-targeting in your Webmasters Central account on your *.com, but you would see much better results using a *.com.au extension. Before you ask, no extensions do not provide an SEO value.
Though in theory it does make sense that with a local Google search, where your site is hosted will play a role in where your site is positioned, especially if the user selects to view results from that specific country, in practise I don't think it does work like this. On Google.gr ( Greece ), if you do a search for Î ÏŒÎºÎµÏ ( Poker ) and limit the search to show results ONLY from Greece, you will see the following page ... http://www.google.gr/search?hl=el&q=%CE%A0%CF%8C%CE%BA%CE%B5%CF%81&meta=cr%3DcountryGR The 9th result is for ΠόκεÏ.com ( an IDN Domain that I own ). However, in theory, this site should not be showing up in the search results, because the site is actually hosted in Texas USA. Yet I have specified the search to show results ONLY FROM GREECE !!! I am sure that in most cases, having your hosted in the same country as the local google will be beneficial, but whether it works as we think it works, I am not sure. Alex
Matt Cutts at the 2006 Pub Con already made a statement about this issue. The question I believe was "Does the web hosting location effect the ranking in Google data centers". His overall answer was no, many people can find much better hosting deals in diffferent regions or even countries, this is a main factor of buisness. Some countries don't even allow certain things to be hosted, so they out source to other countries. Googlebot uses domain ccTLD extensions much more to determine localality than IP address.
a related question... if I use server redondancy, lets say I have a server with a different IP in each and every country, and lets say that every day, the main server changes, so that Monday the site loads from USA, then from Canada, then from UK etc.. How will Google manage this problem? Will he believe that because you are located everywhere on the planet, then you must be an important site, related to every country?
Googlebot crawls pages by the hostname, not the IP address, you can tell this if you can access your internal web server active logs. Why would you do this? Load balancing would be a much better solution.
No specific reason to do this of course, its only a theorical case The point is that I already observed, that by changing my hosting from USA to Canada, I now have relatively better rankings in Canada. One of my client has 2 servers, not located in the same region, with different regional variables, including language, and using some load balancing, but their hosting solution is not very stable, so the servers change regularly. So I want to know to what point it can affect their rankings in those specific regional markets
Yep.. Location also affects the rankings. If you have optimized a website in a certain location for example in Asia, then you might have higher rankings in Asian countries
IP Locations matters only with TLD and Only if you used some other Language instead of english.... m not sure about this but this is what i had seen with some websites.
I don't think geo-location of hosting server affects in ranking. My guess is 60-70 percent websites hosted on US servers (I maybe wrong). If location has anything to do with ranking why many of these sites rank well in some countires (even in top10) but not in US?
Well.......I think it depends on datacenters where your site host and also on IP of your inbound links if you have your site hosted in Australia and most of links from same geo location and in other case if your incoming links from other GEo locations then may be there some difference in ranking on http://www.google.com.au and http://www.google.com
Thanks guys. I see most people says the IP location does matter. I know that TLD matters, I just wasn't sure about the IP location. Thanks again to everyone who replied to this.
So, if a .com at UK IP with UK audience and no geo-location set in Google webmaster tools moves to a US IP what might be the outcome and how would this be handled?