If you have your web hosting overseas, the question arises, does this affect your search engine rankings, and how? There are many reasons why you might want or need to host your sites in a country other than the one where you reside or do the majority of your business. Let’s look at some of these and the possible outcomes for your sites.
Location, Location: Much like real estate, location matters. The closer your server is to your clients, the faster those clients will be able to access your website. Even in a virtual existence, the physical distance between servers and end users can make a difference. Most internet marketers target United States and European citizens, so by hosting halfway around the globe, website response time for target demographics may be adversely affected.
Businesses will often choose to have a country specific domain (.uk .ca etc.) if they have a subsidiary outlet in that country doing business, particularly if it has a physical address. The benefits are very good for any local search that finds your company within the search for any particular geographical area.
Companies opting for an international reach without using any approach other than a virtual one, still may find it useful to employ a country specific domain, and the associated web hosting, to try and capture some of the market share to be found there.
Other savvy webmasters, in their attempts to try and set up a network of sites with varying IP addresses, will use web hosting overseas to accomplish their ends. Usually these network sites are of little value, except for their short term use in gaming the search engines in search of higher rankings.
The effects of hosting your sites in a country other than the one in which you do business are difficult to quantify, but there is some anecdotal evidence that suggests that sites with a country specific domain, say a .uk domain extension for example, will be favored more than a .com, .net or other extension in that particular market. Geo-location plays a part in how the search engines (particularly Google) view who a site is intended to serve.
The consensus seems to be that if you are aiming to target a specific audience, you should use a country specific domain extension, use web hosting in that area, and focus on building links that come mainly from sites in that geo-location. This and a few tweaks to your meta data and it will be abundantly clear to any robot that happens by who you’re targeting.
The search engines can read not only the domain extension, but incoming links, IP addresses, physical addresses in your content and more for use in determining where you intend your market to be. If you want to rank for terms in a specific region or country, doing your best to line up all the factors that affect how your pages are viewed only makes sense.
This can make a great difference in your rankings for certain countries. While a .com might have a hard time ranking for your terms in a global or US market, that same site may do a great deal better in a more limited market, especially by virtue of a highly targeted site, domain extension, IP address and more that it would have working for it. Definitely worth thinking about, if you are chasing global business.
As you can see, there is some thought that needs to go into your decision about where and how to host your sites if you are thinking of using overseas web hosting. Hopefully these thoughts will help get you on the right track!
