Moving the site to a different country - how will Google react?

[pavlovapete]

We have a website that has been hosted in county x for over 10 years.

The majority of our traffic comes from Google. I don't want to mess with this at all.

I need to find a new hosting provider.

Is moving the website offshore to a new country a good idea? I know I can set the country in GWT.

Have you moved your site to a host another country? Did your Google traffic suffer as a result?

Thanks

[tedster]

Are you talking about a domain with general TLD (.com, .net, .org) or a country-code TLD? And likewise, are you concerned about international traffic or mostly about traffic within a country?

[pavlovapete]

Thanks tedster

We have county specific TLD and the majority of our traffic is from the same country.

Looking forward to your advice.

Cheers

[tedster]

If you have a country-code TLD then your country targeting is automatically set - you cannot change it through WMT. I can't see how moving to out-of-country web hosting would hurt in your situation. The problems seem to come for people who have a .com and try to target a specific country but host in a different one.

If anyone has had a negative experience in a situation like this, please share.

[hmk61]

I have a .ca targeting Canadians. I was hosted in the US and moved to a Canadian host in part because I wanted to test this and see if it had a positive impact on rankings. I did not see any change on Google.ca.

[graeme_p]

I am about to launch a .co.uk with US hosting because of a lack of UK hosting for the platform (Django). I am happy enough about the SEO aspects of it that it has not been a concern at all.

I moved my (.co.uk) blog to US hosting with no effect, and I set up a .lk for someone else on the same US hosting which is ranking fine for its (admittedly VERY niche) search terms with no SEO effort at all.

However, I am wondering about whether it might make the site slightly less responsive. Given that there is a lot of transatlantic bandwidth, I think that the quality of the hosting probably makes more difference, but if anyone has experience that says otherwise, please tell us!