Where to host a world wide targetted audience website...

SERPS based on IP...?

[pardo]

We're based in the Netherlands and developed a client website. The clients is manufacturing widgets and ships them worldwide. A read a lot of topics about IP-addresses and displaying local based search results but until now didn't figured out what the best way is.

Question: what is the best location to host this website (currently all english text)
Question: will it be an advantage to split the application and make the widgets that are targetted for Germany for example in a separate application/website and host that in Germany?
Question: what is better? make the application/main website multilingual on 1 domain (www.widgets.com/de/deutsche-widchets.html) or to break the domain and application up in more applications and translate it then on the seprate domain and host that in the country where the target users live (www.widgets.de/deutsche-widchets.html)

With local search being a hot topic this and the coming years I hope someone can share some experience on this.

[Tropical Island]

Don't know if this will help but we are located in South America and, as a vacation location, we attract visitors from around the world.

One of our sites which is in two languages - English & Spanish - has number one posistion for our main key word in all Google search engines we have looked up.

This site is a .com hosted in Atlanta by a large well known US hosting company. Certainly for your English language site you couldn't go wrong by following that path.

[jo1ene]

I'm not sure if G serves up results based on hosting IP. I am hosted in California and I get MANY hits from Google Mexico, Google UK, etc. There may be something to it, one of many factors, but I'm not sure if it's worth the grief to find "the right" IP.

[lammert]

Pardo, I am from the Netherlands just like you and moved one site to the US recently. Number of visitors has increased a little bit, because the site is now also available for peoplewho search on "sites in US only".

On [google.nl,...] there is no such thing as searching for sites in the Netherlands, we have only the option to search for sites in the Dutch language, but on [google.de,...] there ís the option to search for sites in Germany only. The same goes for many other localized versions of Google, like the French and UK versions.

Therefore if you are targeting specific customers in a country with their own language, i.e. German users with a German language version of the site, or French users for example, you will increase your number of visitors if you use a host based in that country. It is because many of those users do not speak the English language very well and to avoid seeing sites in an unknown language they search the web with the option "sites in country XXX".

So in my opinion from a Google SERP point of view, I would split the language versions to different domains www.widget.de, www.widget.co.uk, etc and host them in that specific country.