The question really goes down to this: is there a difference between the google.com and google.co.uk indexes? From what I've read, I would have answered 'no' to this question - but if that were true, then what does it mean to check the "Search pages from the UK" on the UK Google search page? How does Google determine what to filter on in this case? (Filtering this way produces results from all sorts of TLDs, .coms included ...)
If Google _does_ take the location of your service provider into account, then where would our site reside from their point of view (i.e. where the DNS is held or where the site is actually hosted)?
It would make no sense for Google to make any geographical assumptions based on the IP address of the authoritative DNS server for your domain name.
So if I understand what you're saying correctly then having the site hosted in the States would mean it's considered a US-based site, irrespective of the DNS provider's location?
I find this confusing ... I don't understand why it would make more sense to make geographical assumptions based on the location of the hosting IP? For example, there are many hosting companies in the States that seem to offer better value for money than those you find in the UK. We have a UK site (and want it to be considered as located in the UK) but it's more cost effective for us to host it in the States.
So if I understand what you're saying correctly then having the site hosted in the States would mean it's considered a US-based site, irrespective of the DNS provider's location?
Basically, yes.
I'm not saying that location of DNS isn't or won't ever be taken into account, i'm just saying that it's unlikely. It is after all just a directory - it's where you're at that matters.
As for hosting a UK website in the US, you do realise you will be doubling/trebling the network round trip time for the majority of your visitors?
ie ping time to Imperial College:
16 packets transmitted, 16 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 24.297/44.065/162.795/33.949 ms
16 packets transmitted, 16 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 94.563/119.693/202.150/36.479 msIt does take a fair bit of time for those packets to cross the Atlantic twice.
As for hosting a UK website in the US, you do realise you will be doubling/trebling the network round trip time for the majority of your visitors?
Yes good point. I suppose I had it in the back of my mind that it would be longer (though hadn't thought about it carefully enough).
There are small differences between the Google search results in different countries. Some of my pages rank 4 in one country, but 11 in another. I tracked this down to be an effect of the spell algorithm Google uses.
In some languages Google might see "cow" and "cows" as one keyword and in others it might be treated as two separate words. (I haven't checked this particular word, but you get the point I think).
So in some countries a particular page might have more matching keywords for the same search string than in other countries. As you are living in the UK and your pages are probably in English language it won't make any difference.
I moved some of my sites from the Netherlands to US because of the lower hosting price there. If you have a lot of small images try to combine them to one big image. This will increase loading speed as every small image needs about 200 msec to load (see ping time in a previous post). Overall loading time doesn't seem to be problem, because of the huge bandwidth available in the Atlantic Ocean.
Thanks for your input and useful advice. Although (as pointed out by others previously in this thread) there would be disadvantages to hosting a UK site in the States, it's still tempting because of the better hosting packages available.
Unfortunately this happens at prime time in Europe.
Depends
