Geographical location of web host

[bekyed]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone was experiencing problems with their .co.uk domain hosted in the US?
After jagger, our website tanked and has never regained the rankings in the google.co.uk listings.
Should we move our server to the UK, and is this more important now than it was before jaggger?

Beck.

[lammert]

Not knowing for .co.uk, but I have a few .nl's hosted in the US. Rankings in www.google.nl are excellent and rankings in www.google.com are decent. The DNS server is still in the Netherlands though and the contact information in the whois also mentions a Dutch address. When moving the hosting from the Netherlands to the US I haven't seen the slightest movement in rankings.

[bekyed]

Anyone else care to share their experiences with moving servers, good or bad.

Beck.

[MHes]

>Should we move our server to the UK, and is this more important now than it was before jaggger?

I don't think so. We have a .co.uk hosted in the States and achieve top (very) competitive search positions before and after Jagger. If anything, we have improved since jagger, so my guess is there is no evidence of a problem.

[selomelo]

I have a website registered with a USA based registrar, and hosted in USA with a target audience in Turkey. 99% of my visitors are from Turkey, and the site performs well in Google.

[tigertom]

I understand .co.uk domains can be hosted anywhere, and still rank in 'UK only' searches on Google. A server move shouldn't affect your ranking solely on that criterion.

If in doubt, search on a term peculiar to your site, and then use the 'UK only' option on google.co.uk.

If your site went down in SERPs post-Jagger, look at the list of things Jagger filtered sites on.

As for a Turkish .com ranking for Turkey-only searches while hosted in the USA, if the site is in the Turkish language, that's probably what's flagging it to Google as Turkish. Even if mainly in English, Google might be able to divine its content by the Turkish terms in it.

Also, the competition between, and number of, Turkish websites is not so high, compared to English ones.

Google is very good at classifying and ranking sites, or so I've heard :)

[Wibfision]

As an aside, I have a .net domain that targets the UK. Because I need to appear in the google.co.uk results, I am forced to physically host my site in the UK, rather than use the better priced and more efficient hosts in the US.

I wish that a geotarget meta tag would be introduced, or something along these lines, to avoid this. There are plenty of none .co.uk domains around that actively seek UK traffic and this would be beneficial to them all.

[bekyed]

MHES,

We are not ranking on google.co.uk only, which is where our target audience is, we were no3 before jagger. Do you think the move to the uk domain will help us a bit?

Is it possible to have a .co.uk domain pointing at an ip address in the UK, but keep your existing hosting account in the US?
Is this legal as regards google and the other search engines?

Beck.

[MHes]

So your .co.uk domain is ranking OK on Google.com but not for the same searches on Google.co.uk with the UK sites only ticked?

That is strange. There could be other factors at work. Have you got decent UK sites linking to you? If they are predominantly US sites maybe that is a problem. Have you a listing in Dmoz under the UK section or worldwide? A long shot but is your content using a lot of American spellings/placenames etc.? Is your whois data showing US addresses?

[natasha499]

I have the same question. The only response I see here is that everyone has there site hosted in the usa; and google is a usa company. But what if you are hosting in another country.. say russia with a .com and are targeting the usa market. Would that affect things?

[wheelie34]

If you have a .co.uk with whois details saying UK you can host it anywhere in the world, I have a server in dallas with hundreds of .co.uk domains on it, they all fair well for uk only searches.

I had a .com on that server and it suffered, long before Jagger, for uk only searches, moved it to uk hosting IP problem solved.

[natasha499]

Why would co.uk hosted in usa do well for uk searches
but
.com hosted in USA not do well for uk searches?

but
.com hosted in Uk do well for UK searches.

That means that it does matter where you are hosting.

[Vadim]

That means that it does matter where you are hosting

Yes. It was discussed here several times. The reasons probably are the response and download time. If your seriously target US customers you should take into account that US customers have better experience when the host is in US.

Vadim.

[Munster]

There was another thread on this topic recently

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