Does anyone know whether any of the major Search engines consider the physical location of the servers on which a site is hosted as a ranking factor? Intuitively it wouldn't make sense, since the most reliable hosting may not be in the same physical location as a site's user-base, does anyone disagree with this? Surely the key thing is the language it's in and whether it has a local domain - if I am designing a site for German speaking Europe based users the important factors that will be considered are that the site is in German (if the users search in German) and that I have a .de (or possibly .ch / .at) domain, is this right? If it's hosted on servers which based and owned by a company based in Hawaii, Uzbekistan or on the moon this shouldn't make difference? Or am I being a real idiot and missing something important?! Afterall, the best hosting for my purposes may well be in the US - or anywhere else in the world. I'm thinking about doing some research into this, but think it may be a bit of a waste of time. If I do I will share the results with this forum, but any initial thoughts / reactions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
As an internet user I would trust a site more if it was hosted in the same country as the company that owns the site is based. I would also assume it is more relevant if it is in the same location as the user. I reckon google does take this into account and rightly so.
Yeah i've heard lots of discussions that support the idea that server location has a small impact. Particularly if the search terms are in geographic in nature. Plus it makes some sense for google.com to show sites that are served in the US as it makes sense for google.co.uk to show sites that are in the uk. I wouldnt be majorly concerned though. If this is a factor i would bet it is a very minor one.
I see what both of you are saying, but there have to be cases where a firm has it's own servers - but operates in more than one country. If they have .com, .co.uk, .de, .at, .li, .ch, .ru, .fr, and so on sites - all of which contain similar content, but in the language of the targetted country and specific to that country, it may make most economic sense for them to host them all on their servers based in one physical location (rather than set up servers in their local offices, or buy hosting in these locations). So server location, as a factor, isn't definitive in providing information about a site in the way that what is written on the page is, or the domain is (i.e. .li or .co.uk). The .de version of eBay seems to be hosted in the US, and in the same places as the .com version of the site. Even Google.de seems to be hosted in the US! I suppose from a logistics perspective you may (?) get faster response times from a local server than from one on the other side of the world, but that's not really an SE ranking consideration as such (unless the response times are so poor the site doesn't operate - in which case this is a problem any which way). I'm inclined to agree with BILZ's statement - "If this is a factor i would bet it is a very minor one." Does anyone else have any thoughts? Is location of servers on which a site is hosted a factor considered by SEs?
I have a site hosted in my city (india) and is on page 2 for my main keyword in google.co.in and not even in 500 results in google.com So, i belive hosting location is also a factor
Location is definitely a factor. Google geotargets based on the end user's location (sites that are hosted physically closer to the end user will get more ranking weight).
what if I use a U.S server hosting; but I'm stationing in Japan...cos' my market is in U.S & the Europe? Does that affect my ranking too? Thanks.
If the server for your site is not located in the country that you are targeting, then you will not do well in that country's google search.
Is there a piece of code that can get around this problem? I have a dot.com hosted in germany, but I want it to show up in Google.co.uk results. Any advice?
Not necessarily true. I have a .ca site that ranks #1 for many search terms and in the top 5-10 for pretty much all relevant search terms -- it's hosted in the US. http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/faq.html#country In general, you'll find that ranking in a regional Google primarily means you need (1) hosting in that region, OR (2) a regional domain name, but not both. You will need to do one of (1) or (2) above - a "mirror" site that is not exactly the same in terms of content but which crosslinks to the German site would probably work.
Hosting does play an important factor. For example if a website owned by a U.S. citizen is hosted in UK, and the website is about information, then it can also come up on Google.com, the US one.
But if a website owned by a citizen {of any country} is hosted in UK {or any other country}, and the website is about {anything at all}, then it can also come up on Google.com ...
Minstrel, thanks. I'm aware of options 1 and 2. I just don't want the hassle. Think about blogspot.com blogs. I guess they're hosted in the US. So under no circumstances would they show up under a Google.co.uk search if the "UK only" radio button is used. I've put in a line of code that seems to work with Yahoo.co.uk. But not Google and MSN.
You have a physical presence in the UK, though, right? Does the whois info for that site indicate this?