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Hosting a UK .com site in the US - what's the latest?

         

JackR

1:17 pm on Jun 26, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hey everyone,

I've been away from SEO for a while and my site has doing just fine with very little work for more than a year. Before you say it: yeah, I'm lazy! Following a spate of DDOS attacks recently, I started looking for a more reliable host, and noticed that most appear to be based in the US.

As my site is a .com service provider targeting customers in London in the United Kingdom, I don't know if US Hosting will be detrimental vis-a-vis the Google SERPs.

Although the site is now running just fine with Staminus, a hosting company in California, I'm starting to think I should move it back to a UK-based host. What do you guys think?

As Google no longer offer a 'pages from the UK' option, does the physical location of a host still largely determine the geolocalisation of results?

Finally, although I prefer the site to target as wide an audience as possible, would you guys recommend I set Webmaster Tools to 'UK'?

Thank you!

tedster

7:24 pm on Jun 26, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I don't think so. There are a lot of factors, and I think that backlinks are a big one. If you've got a lot of UK websites linking to you and if your pages include UK information, pricing, addresses, language usage etc, then US hosting should not be a problem.

Matt Cutts recently did a video about Google's current focus on making sure the UK SERPs have a the right geographic mix. It's not a simplistic algorithm anymore.

tedster

6:06 pm on Jun 27, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



As Google no longer offer a 'pages from the UK' option


The 'pages from the UK' option is still available, but just moved to the left side menu on the results pages. It's just not displayed right on the google.co.uk Home Page. So they are still doing that kind of geo-targeted processing.

FranticFish

9:03 am on Jun 28, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Just switching location in GWT can be enough to get into the regional index. I saw a 'servicecity' .net domain hosted in Germany that was not featured in the UK index. It had one or two (UK hosted) links and was optimised. The domain name and the content were locally relevant.

Set the location in GWT to the UK and it was showing in the UK index within a few days.