Shifting server to other country, how much risk is here?

[zahirshah]

HI

Unfortunately we have to shift our web hosting server from Dubai to USA/UK, our main targeted market is Dubai/UAE and we rank higher on Google.ae for a long time. We are also dealing internationally but the more targeted market is UAE.

how much risk would be here if we move from Dubai to USA or UK, I personally think that we will face a drop but after a while we can recover it by getting some more good links from UAE related sites (and as we have lots of already).

What’s your opinion regarding this risk?

Will we loss our ranking for ever or …… what suggestion would you give?

*my site is a .com one (TLD)*

many thanks in advance

[tedster]

I would say there's more risk moving to a UK host than a US host, but I agree with you, backlinks can help you carry the day. You may not see any drop in the general results at all - or just some and a few new links from UAE websites would fix that up.

If you are concerned about the "pages from United Arab Emirates" search, you may lose that traffic after the move. But those "from the country" searches are still strange, so who knows?

[wheel]

I moved a site from one country to the US and had a heck of a time getting Google to realize it was a US site. In fact it still shows up occassionally on the country specific searches. And as Tedster notes, the 'from country' searches are a bit odd. Some of it's your location, but some of it has got to be where your backlinks are coming from. So get lots of UAE backlinks. And can you not tell Google in webmaster tools that your site belongs to the UAE?

[tedster]

By choosing the UAE as the target country in Webmaster Tools, you would be forfeiting a lot of international traffic, however. And I noticed in your first post that you said "We are also dealing internationally."

[zahirshah]

Thanks for your replies !

I think it’s not necessary to have server in the specific country for “the web” results, it just need relevancy. There are lots of sites which are hosted in US but come in “the web” results from other countries as well …… so our site gets 80% of traffic from UAE and have lots of content and back links related to UAE, I think it should be removed in “the web” result.

But still not sure, let see what does Google do, I will let you know with this experiment once I got the result.