Move Webhosting Country - How Long Until Google Updates?

[allyhazell]

Hi,

I own a .com website that was hosted with a UK company. It has achieved good rankings in google.co.uk, but hasn't really achieved very good rankings in google.com . It is a tool that would equally be used by anyone around the world - so it isn't UK specific. Despite changing the settings in Google's Webmaster Tools, about 5 months ago, to say that the website was US, my traffic from google.com stayed the same (as did the traffic from google.co.uk).

To cut a long story short, I changed host to a US host about a month ago, hoping that Google would now register my site as US rather than UK. However, my traffic is still the same - 3/4 from google.co.uk and less than 1/4 from google.com. My question is - does anyone know how long it normally takes for Google to update its rankings to take account for a change in hosting country?

Thanks

Alastair

[tedster]

We've had a number of other threads here this past year about the hosting/geo-location struggle. The report is not hopeful - this thread [webmasterworld.com], as an example, reports of the country not updating for a year after the hosting move.

[jaffstar]

We moved from one continent to another about 3 weeks ago and we were picked up quickly.

Try this tool: [google.com...]

Google will list if you were picked up in the new location.

[tedster]

Thanks, jaffstar. It's really good to hear a positive report on this issue.

[allyhazell]

Thanks for your advice, both of you. I had a quick look at the tool that Jaffstar suggested. I entered my URL and it came back with a report of no malware and this:

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What happened when Google visited this site?

Google has not visited this site within the past 90 days.

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Does that mean that the Googlebot hasn't visited at all in the last 90 days?

[fishfinger]

You say Google is still sending you traffic, so this seems strange.

What is the date given for your cache in Google's SERPS? What does Webmaster Tools say? What do your server logs say?

There could be a problem with your new hosting setup. I've not experienced it myself or heard of it for a while, but it's been known for some hosts to stop Googlebot crawling sites.

Try making a small change to one of the main pages in your site (even a comment in the source code would do) and waiting to see if this is reflected in Google's cache of your site.

[allyhazell]

Hi fishfinger,

I've had a look at Google's cache of my site and it says "It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 15 May 2009 09:25:45 GMT". I've also checked Google Webmaster Tools and it doesn't indicate any problems with spidering. The report shows that it has crawled, over the last 90 days, an average of "148 pages per day".

I can only assume, therefore, that the regular Googlebot is continuing to spider pages. But whatever this other 'malware' spider is hasn't spidered in the last 90 days.

I guess the question then is - which spider looks at the geolocation of servers and updates the listings?

[fishfinger]

That I don't know.

Where are your links hosted? Perhaps you could convince Google that you're US-centric by getting some (more) good links from US sites (i.e. for US users and hosted in the States).

[allyhazell]

Thanks fishfinger.

I have links from a number of US websites and also social networking sites such as stumbleupon. I can only think that they take a while to re-spider for geolocation. I just wish I knew how long I might have to wait.