Friday 15 April 2016

Importance about SEO and Website’s Hosting Server Location

A business website uses SEO or Search Engine Optimization for having better rankings in the Search Engine results, so that it can have more website traffic, and consequently sales. 

Websites are hosted on web servers, and the location of the web server may have little or no impact on the SEO of the website.

Websites Having a Single Language and Targeting Web Traffic in Any Given Country

Leading search engines, including Google and Bing, give you permission to set the country target in the webmaster tools section. You can set any given country in the country tab section’s drop down menu. 

So if your website uses the French language and the users are located in France, then you can select “France” in the dropdown menu, given in Webmaster tools section. But where the location of server attains significance is in the area of website’s speed of loading.



If the website is hosted in France itself, then it will be loaded in lesser time, when users in France surf it. If the web server of this given website is located in the USA, then the speed of loading will be slow, and depending on the quality of server the speed difference will be noticeable or negligible.

Hence, a country-specific website should be hosted in a specific country, for faster loading speeds. On the other hand, there are also high-quality servers in the USA that can host your website with fast-speed loading in any given country. That is why a number of country and language specific websites are hosted in the USA. 

So for good website loading speed, you should either host your website in the given country or should use a high quality web hosting service in India. The impact on SEO is minimal, but you can, and should, aim to offer a good navigation and user experience to your visitors.  

When your Website Is in a Single Language and Targets Users from Across the Globe

When your website is in English or some other language that is spoken in multiple continents and countries across the globe, then you need to choose the “Unlisted” option in Goggle Webmaster tools.  

In this case, the server location of the website is not relevant for SEO and other areas, and it can be located anywhere.

What is important here is the use of CDN service. CDN or Content Delivery Service provides different server nodes to the users so that they download resources faster and easily. 

Important about SEO : How SSL Certificate Can Help SEO Rankings?

As the nodes of a high-quality CDN service are located everywhere around the globe, they also have a close proximity to users located anywhere on the planet. “Cloudflare” and “KeyCDN” are some of the CDN services available today.

Websites Which Target Users throughout the Globe and Are Run in Multiple Languages

A number of websites run in different language versions (languages include French, English, Japanese and German among others). They target users across the globe. These websites can operate in 2 ways. They can have country specific web servers, but this is a more costly option. 

The other way is to have all language versions of the website hosted on a single server, along with a proper CDN service. Most of the multilingual websites run this. The path is more easy to manage and cost-effective as well.

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Hence, it is not necessary to have a website server in a country and region where you want SEO. The significance is little and may also be irrelevant in most of the cases.

John Mueller from Google holds the same view and explains that if a business website uses gTLD and ccTLD (Top Level Domain) and the Webmaster tools, then the geo-targeting of Google is based on these parameters and not on the location of the server. 

Hence, any business can have the location of its website server anywhere it wants and choose what works best for it.