Does IP Location Matter?

[jane]

My new website has IP location of England but is for Indian audience. Will having an IP location of England create hindrances for me to rank on Google India. Also can the IP location be changed by contacting the vendor. Please help...

[tedster]

Yes, IP address is one of the location signals Google looks at. The top level domain is more important, however. If it's a country code domain such as .in, that pretty much locks it in. However, you can always geo-target even an international top level domain from within your Webmaster Tools account.

[leadegroot]

As this is the Google forum - the easiest way to be sure that Google has a site geolocated correctly is to verify an account in Google Webmaster Tools and tell them the locale for the site.

Google seeing you as local normal gives you better results on the appropriate CCTLD google.

In theory a provider can give you an IP 'located' elsewhere, but the odds of an English provider having access to an Indian set are pretty low. You could ask. I wouldn't expect a 'yes'

[jane]

oh great thanks. my TLD is .com IP location England :)I hope just setting seo target India should help in attaining rankings in Google India

[jane]

I have another small query, if my target audience is UK and my TLD is .co.uk, then by setting the geo location to Global in webmaster tool, means that I would start ranking on Google.com as well?

[leadegroot]

I don't know about .uk but for .au I *can't* set it to global - its preset to .au. Very annoying!

Yep - I was feeling paranoid and checked I wasn't being an idiot and the help says "You can only use this feature for sites with a neutral top-level domain, such as .com or .org. Country-specific domains, such as .ie or .fr, are already associated with a country or region."

[tedster]

A .co.uk is a country code TLD - a ccTLD. The Webmaster Tools geo-target option will be greyed out. Such sites are stuck with UK targeting.

[jane]

but my competitor with .co.uk is ranking for the most competitive keyword on the first page of Google.com :( how is that now

[StoutFiles]

but my competitor with .co.uk is ranking for the most competitive keyword on the first page of Google.com :( how is that now

Same reason the BBC ranks first for the keyword "BBC". If you dominate a keyword you can rise up the global serps, it's just easier with the .com or .org.

[jane]

yea but its not a .com its a .co.uk TLD and still manages to rank on 1st page of google.com for most of the top keywords

[leadegroot]

High probability of really good backlinks. :)

[jane]

thanks buddy :) u have answered very promtly

[tedster]

Just because Google doesn't let a wesbite TARGET a country doesn't mean that they can't rank well there ever. In some situations, that site may clearly be the best search result.

[HuskyPup]

Will having an IP location of England create hindrances for me to rank on Google India.

I have several .in sites and all of them outrank my .com sites in Google.in when selecting "pages from India" and all of them are hosted on the same UK IP.

Of course when searching "the web" the old .coms strength kick-in however my .ins are doing well even in Google.com

If your .com was hosted in India I don't think you would have too much of a problem but in this case you may well struggle.

Let us know how it pans out:-)