Heya all

I'm hoping that at least one of you can answer this for me:



Is this really true?? If so the company is going to have to move all of its sites/domains/hosting back to the UK.

I've got a meeting with a different SEO company tomorrow so I'm going to have to ask them the appropriate questions and I've not heard that hosting in another country is a bad idea.

Thanks in advance.

Pj

This post has been edited by Popje: Jun 23 2008, 05:47 PM

Yes it is best to host your site in the country that you reside. Sorry... that's the truth!

Oh crap! Why didn't our last SEO company tell us this last year???

Thanks eversomuch Linda, I know someone here could help! May I ask just why you should as I would like to tell my brother-in-law (boss) just why we should.

This is going to cause a hell of a lot of trouble at work now. Oh dear.

This post has been edited by Popje: Jun 23 2008, 08:33 PM

Is it the truth? Search engines don't "judge" ip addresses, do they?

I guess Popje will have the answer for us tomorrow

How does that affect your SEO? Never heard anything like this before. How search engines would even know where your company is located? I'm also very eager to hear an answer for this.

IP ranges are linked to countries. By hosting your website abroad you will affect your 'local' SEO. For example if you lived in England and your site was hosted in America then something would happen. I cannot tell you what exactly but from the serach engines perspective it will look like you are a foriegn company trying to list a '.co.uk' website. This would be detrimental in some way.

But how does the search engine know my company is in another country than the ip?

I don't know about IP address but I do know that many major search engines give sites a boost in relevancy if they are hosted in the same location as the local search market. If you are promoting a site primarily geared toward the U.K., you would want to host that site in the U.K.

The IP of the host is all the engine needs. It can determine the country that site is being servered from. When you go to google.com and select "only pages from [country x]", it searches by IP country as well as domain (.co.uk for example).

Ideally, you want to have you site hosted in the country of the potential market. With Geo-Targeting being included more and more in Google searches now it is a larger factor as well.

I think I'm glad I'm hosting in Canada then

Old SEO company has just sent this in an email:



What do they mean?

All I did when I set up the google webmaster tools was to add a verification for google. They [seo company] did whatever it was tht they did to the bits and pieces.

Possible new SEO company agrees that you should host in country that you are 'pitching' at.

Do any of you mind if I quote your answers in an email to my colleagues?

Cheers in advance
P

Guess this would also affect hosting a german site in england :S

How easy would it be for a non german-speaking person to host a site in Germany lol?

can't you make a deal with c010depunkk?

sure thang. I got a beautiful little VPS sitting in Frankfurt. We're running Linux with Apache/PHP 5/MySQL.... everything your heart desires.... and I'll give you the TWS discount on hosting costs
PM me if ur interested

See this info for geographically setting your webmaster tool.

This tool was introduced last fall. Sounds like it has some glitches however it might be worth a try for your situation.

Thank you for this, it really has helped.

This one comment however, did make me somewhat!
Oh dear!

P