I've seen nothing official, but it seems to be wide-spread common knowledge that Search Engines do take geographical location in account. Just how much weight over other variables, I have no idea. The topic has come up here a few times so you should find quite a bit of discussion on this in the archives.
I have one .com site, hosted on an NZ server, that ranks much higher in NZ searches than global, without targeting NZ traffic at all. That makes it technically confirmed for me. There is no other variable for this site that should cause that to happen. (Not a problem for this site) If I were targeting primarily Australian traffic, I would host in Australia. Aaron ----- Original Message ----- From: Bruce Clement To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, December 08, 2009 9:40 AM Subject: Re: [phpug] [ot] Geographic location of hosting environment vs SEO Not anything definitive, but I host off-shore and my .co.nz domains show up in searches as New Zealand sites while my .co.uk domains show up as British. As I understand it, .coms won't do the same, which is yet another reason to always have the domain name for your target market. 2009/12/8 chris burgess <[email protected]> What's the current word on SEO and geographic location of servers? Is a .com.au site which is physically hosted in NZ or USA likely to suffer any form of penalty in search engine listings for Australian users? -- Bruce Clement -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected]
