The Perils of Web Hosting on Search Engine Placements

by Ewen Makepeace on January 29, 2010

Yes indeed, who would have thought it, but your web hosting provider might indirectly be costing you the chance of excellent placements in the main search engine Google.

How can this be? Well the matter is that the physical location of the hosting centre itself. Currently, while you’ll feel you have got signed up with a UK hosting company, really all their hosting centres will be in a totally different country such as the US or Germany for example.

Currently this little quirk doesn’t extremely have several facet effects as you’ll rather be getting terribly good price and sensible technical support from your host, however what it does mean {is that if} you are doing not have a geography specific domain suffix such as .co.uk

for the UK and instead you choose for a .org, .web, or .com then Google will use the geographical location of your hosting centre as the method for determining that local index your results should be found in.

By this I mean if you were to go looking www.google.co.uk with the radio button switched to UK results only, and your .com web site was hosted by a UK hosting provider but during a German datacentre, then you’d never appear in the search results. In fact, you’d appear within the www.google.de search results, but obviously not many German google users are trying for websites and businesses in English or relevant only to a UK audience.

There are plenty of studies out there suggesting search patterns on Google that say it is approximately 50 : fifty on the amount of people that click the “all the net” results on google.co.uk compared to looking solely UK results. However, I personally do not believe this, if I am wanting for a business where a product desires to be delivered or a service provided to me that involves phone or individual to individual support and make contact with, am I very going to go looking every web site on the Web?

No, I’m only going to search across UK specific sites, and if I am unable to notice what I want then I can expand my search to include sites outside the UK.

It is unknown to me at this point whether a .co.uk website hosted outside the UK suffers any type of penalisation from Google in its ranking placements within the google.co.uk index, and is kind of difficult to prove either means as search engines are notorious for providing as very little data as potential as to how they operate.

Unfortunately there is no real approach around this downside if you’re already trapped in it alternative than move your hosting to an ISP that is truly primarily based within the Country that they claim to be on all advertising etc. Continually check beforehand if you’re trying at a non .co.uk domain name for your website, as you are doing risk never obtaining the 100’s or a thousand’s of search engine referrals that www.google.co.uk will give you.

Below is a link to a tool that’s helpful for telling you the geographical location of your website, make sure you try it out if you’re concerned about your website not being included in your native Google index, because there is nothing your hosting supplier or Google will or will do regarding this case, so get educated and build certain your website gets seen in your local Google index.

Tools for locating where your website is hosted (http://www.dnsstuff.com/)

Instructions

one) Using the “Ping” tool, type in your domain name and you’ll be given the IP address of the machine your site is hosted on.

two) Copy and paste that IP address into the “tracert” tool, the final hop is the physical location of your website, therefore check this against the “Country” data on the correct-hand side.

I don’t see this downside changing or easing any time in the close to future, as the service provided by Google for geographical indexed is basically sound and they have to use some methodology of discerning that Country group a site is relative to when it’s a non-geographical domain suffix, but a lot of and additional folks are being caught out by this while not even realising it, because they believed they were signing up to a hosting supplier in their own Country.

I hope this text helps, and please email me any of your stories / problems in this area. Smart luck!

Paul Rudman is that the director and head of optimisation at Commercetuned (http://www.commercetuned.co.uk/), he is been concerned in developing search strategies and search engine optimisation for 7 years.

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