Hosting Country of Website

Marketing
1

In your opinion how big impact does the actual location of your hosting have on your search result. Meaning if your market is both in U.S. and Europe and your website is hosted in the U.S. would it hurt you in reaching your European market?

Cheers,

2

Both.

If it is a country specific domain then the search engine assumes that the site is targetted to people in that country - exceptions are made for country specific domains commonly used by people anywhere such as the Montenegro, Federation of Micronesia, Tuvala and similar country specific top level domains that are being marketed for world wide use.

For country specific search results sites hosted in that country also gain an advantage even where they use an international top level domain

3

So whats the actual factor that affects the search engine result. The domain extension (com.eu,se.de, etc) or the actual location of the hosting company. Or is it correlated, for example that you cant have a .eu domain while your site is hosted in the U.S.?

Cheers,

4

I see, so if your target market is global a strategy would be to create several different domains with country specific extensions and hosting solutions…I am right or wrong?

Thanks for all the help felgall and stevie

5

One alternative is to get a second domain name with a .eu TLD and redirect that to the same hosting. The search engines will then be able to tell by the “country” sepcific TLD that people in Eurpoe are the intended audience. Having a .com point to the same US hosted site will tell the search engines that the US audience is also important (since for international TLDs the country the hosting is in is taken to be the more important part of the audience).

With the two domains you may be able to get the .eu one to rank highly for European search results even though the site itself is hosted in the US.

6

I would suggest you to mirror your site in European host servers. Google does pay attention where your site is hosted.

7

The evidence seems to be that you will not do as well in searches in Europe. Google does seem to look at where the site is hosted, and assumes that it is more likely to be relevant to people in that country.