The Perils of Web Hosting on Search Engine Placements
Yes indeed, who would have thought it, however your web hosting provider could indirectly be costing you the possibility of fine placements in the key search engine Google.
How will this be? Well the problem is the physical location of the hosting centre itself. Now, whereas you’ll feel you have got signed up with a UK hosting company, really all their hosting centres will be in a very different country like the US or Germany for example.
Currently this small quirk doesn’t very have several facet effects as you will preferably be obtaining very sensible value and good technical support from your host, but what it will 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 strategy for determining which local index your results should be found in.
By this I mean if you were to look www.google.co.uk with the radio button switched to UK results only, and your .com website was hosted by a UK hosting supplier however in a very German datacentre, then you would never seem within the search results. Of course, you’d appear within the www.google.de search results, but obviously not several German google users are wanting 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 fifty : fifty on the quantity of people that click the “all the net” results on google.co.uk compared to looking out only UK results. But, I personally don’t 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 person to person support and contact, am I very going to go looking each web site on the Internet?
No, I’m solely going to look across UK specific sites, and if I am unable to notice what I need then I will expand my search to include sites outside the UK.
It’s unknown to me at this point whether a .co.uk web site hosted outside the UK suffers any type of penalisation from Google in its ranking placements in the google.co.uk index, and is quite difficult to prove either method as search engines are notorious for providing as little data as doable as to how they operate.
Unfortunately there is no real manner around this downside if you are already caught up in it other than move your hosting to an ISP that is truly based mostly within the Country that they claim to be on all advertising etc. Always check beforehand if you’re trying at a non .co.uk domain name for your web site, as you do risk never getting the a hundred’s or a thousand’s of search engine referrals that www.google.co.uk can provide you.
Below could be a link to a tool that is useful for telling you the geographical location of your website, create certain you check it out if you are involved regarding your website not being included in your local Google index, because there’s nothing your hosting provider or Google can or can do regarding this situation, therefore get educated and build sure your website gets seen in your local Google index.
Tools for locating where your website is hosted (http://www.dnsstuff.com/)
Directions
1) 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.
a pair of) Copy and paste that IP address into the “tracert” tool, the final hop is that the physical location of your website, thus check this against the “Country” data on the right-hand side.
I do not see this drawback changing or easing any time within the near future, as the service provided by Google for geographical indexed is fundamentally sound and they have to use some method of discerning that Country group a website is relative to when it’s a non-geographical domain suffix, however more and a lot of folks are being caught out by this while not even realising it, as a result of 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 / issues during this area. Smart luck!
Paul Rudman is the director and head of optimisation at Commercetuned (http://www.commercetuned.co.uk/), he’s been involved in developing search methods and search engine optimisation for seven years.
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