Does it matter where your website is hosted?

Posted by Henrik Madsen on July 5, 2008

Parallel to our on-going search engine optimization work for clients, we’re conducting an experiment at the moment to see if search rankings take into account where a website is physically hosted.

Professional opinions differ. Some SEOs claim all that matters is the domain extension (ie .com.au); others say the actual location of the host also plays a role in where a site appears in search results.

In other words if someone in Australia searches for “widgets Australia” sites hosted in Australia will rank higher in search results than sites hosted abroad (all things being equal as far as the other aspects of SEO are concerned).

So we’ve picked the ideal candidate to experiment on. Our own website - www.igenerator.com.au

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

We’ve hosted abroad since Generator was established in 2001. In Canada, as it happens, for no other reason than force of habit because that’s where I’ve hosted my previous business and personal websites, going right back to the early years of the internet

Drawn in by a special offer initially, the service was pretty good, our hosting needs weren’t great, so it was a case of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…’

That was until a few years ago when we started becoming involved in search engine optimization. The process of researching, implementing and refining the various methods available to gain better positioning in search results.

But because our clients all host in their own country (Australia, UK, Denmark etc), we hadn’t really probed the question of locality until relatively recently when a new client, a business here in Perth, suggested registering a ‘.com’ address and hosting in the States. As it turned out (long story) they settled on an Australian domain extension and hosted locally.

Anyway, that’s what prompted this experiment.

Benchmarks

To set some benchmarks we first conducted an audit of our current search positions vs. our targeted search terms. At Google, Yahoo and a couple more. Some quite good results; some not so good; some dismal - probably a symptom of us having focussed more on SEO for our clients’ websites than our own.

And then, last week, we migrated our hosting to an Australian host, whose servers are in Canberra (thanks to the guys at the Australian Web Industry Association for recommendations).

Before settling on the new host we checked the physical location of their servers, as some ‘Australian’ hosting companies are actually resellers for hosts with hardware located abroad. Incidentally, do you know where in the world your website is hosted?

Next, we took the opportunity to tidy-up the site a bit and integrate the iOnline blog. That meant updating some internal links, revising our robots.txt file and submitting a new sitemap.xml, which hopefully won’t skew the final outcome.

Do they even care?

Now it’s a waiting game until the search engines re-crawl. Re-delegation was surprisingly quick but as of today the searchbots haven’t yet come round again. Will they notice we’re now hosted in Australia? Won’t they? Do they even care? And will we see any impact on our search rankings?

Check back soon for the results.

Tip: If your website doesn’t have a ‘.au’ domain extension and your primary market is Australia you can/should set your preferred geographic target using Google’s Webmaster Tools. It’s a free service that also helps you diagnose potential problems, see how Google indexes your pages, find out about the visitors that arrive at your site and much more.

 

Filed Under Hints & Tips, Search Engine Optimization

 

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2 Comments so far
  1. css issue: footer div at top of markup - WebProWorld July 12, 2008 8:20 am

    [...] the h1 tag and main content but in the markup we’ve put it in below. Our current SEO experiment: Does it matter where your website is hosted? __________________ Website Design | Email Marketing | SEO | Brand Building | [...]

  2. David September 28, 2008 1:04 pm

    the other question is if you have an australian hosted site, with a .com

    or if you have an australian domain pointed to your .com

    i agree it can make a difference, but it depends on the clients target audience, no use being #1 if most of your clients are outside australia…

    has their been any major change since july 2008?

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