Forum Moderators: phranque
This is my first post on this forum and I have a query if some SEO professionals can put forward their opinions on this.
I have been reading over the years that if you have a .com or .net domain then you would need to host the site within the country you want to target but if you had the country's tld for example for Indian you have a .in domain you wont need to host it in India in order to rank well for searches originating from India (Google)
Now that was that but Google webmasters have this option for some time now where you can select the target country for any country neutral tld like .com .net .info .org
So my query is that would hosting a .net domain in the country I want to target still make any difference?
Please do not push this thread towards the site speed angle referring to upcoming caffeine update reason being I am able to get 50-90ms if I host in the targeted country and if I host in a near by country the latency only increases by 10ms and is a lot cheaper as well so site's speed or loading time will not suffer.
Any one with practical experience here in thing exactly the same thing or something similar? I would really appreciate lengthy subjective replies :)
And thanks for
you may find some useful information in this WebmasterWorld thread where the GWT location targeting option was discussed after it was first announced:
Tell Google Your Site's Location with Webmaster Tools [webmasterworld.com]
this more recent post by matt cutts in his blog may give some clues regarding your questions:
More about generic TLDs in (say) UK results [mattcutts.com]
