This is my first post in what looks like an excellent forum :)

There's a post questioning where the best place to host is, the UK or the US. I was going to post on that thread but I think this would be useful info to anyone hosting sites outside the US...

Basically I've been doing some research over the last couple of weeks on how Google ranks. (I think most people would agree Google's one of the most important places to get listed) I would say where you host your site geographically has serious affect on your listings.

It was spawned after a couple of my sites have had their listings dropped right down the index... Some of the pages have been dropped altogether.

I had three sites (all .com's and all aimed at at primarily a UK audience). They were all hosted in the UK on Donhost... All had great rankings (within the first top 10 on multiple search queries).... Due to bandwidth problems I changed 2 of the 3 sites to a friend's server he has in the US. While the bandwidth issues have been fixed those 2 sites have had their search engine listings affected in a big way... I know the first thing that comes to mind is that there may have been some errors or outages between making the transfer. I thought that initially, but it's been about 3 / 4 months now and the listings are getting worse... And there's nothing wrong with the server. The 1 site I'd left hosted on Donhost was fine, it was unaffected... I've just had to change it over though to the US server and if I don't do something soon, I expect it will drop in rankings like the other 2.

I should point out before I moved any of the sites, all had great listings in the UK (google.co.uk) and the world search (.com)... I got results in the top 10 - 20 in both. The 2 sites I initially moved had their rankings basically blown out of the .co.uk results, although they still maintained an average return in the .com search... The 1 that was left on Donhost has been unaffected so far - still good rankings in both searches... for now, until Google updates.

Just from all of this I suspected that where you host would play an important role in search engine rankings... Too many coincidences.

I've done loads of random searches over the past couple of weeks (in both google.co.uk & google.com) on various categories and I've looked at the first top 30 results. I've checked where their sites are physically hosted... And it's no suprise, they were all practically hosted on UK servers, maybe a handful based in mainland Europe... If you're talking major corporations that are hosted in other countries, yes you will pull their listing near the top too. i.e. Dell's .co.uk site is hosted with eveything else on their servers in Texas.

I think the Google's world search maybe somewhat dependant on your location / IP address, although I've no way of testing this theory in depth yet... If you're based in Germany I think you would get a higher return on .de sites, just as if you're based in the UK you're going to get more .co.uk sites returned.

If you're doing a search on a category which isn't overloaded... I don't think it will be a major issue, it wasn't when I looked but when you've got 100 websites all selling the same type of products I would guess the rules get harder.

If anyone's interested, I found that Fasthosts got great rankings for UK based websites. Their anonymous nameservers - livedns came up loads of times in searches (No I'm not connected to them, and I would be weary of signing up with them due to the amount of conflicting things I've heard about their service).

If anyone has any similar experiences, please share it... If you think I'm talking a load of cobblers, fair enough :D It just seems to be more than coincidental... Infact I've heard from a guy who works for a submission service... He says knows someone who works for Google and he says it's true what I'm saying?...

So... my next question now is, can anyone recommend a good UK based resellers package :D

Comments welcome

Mikeyboy

Mikeyboy, a more reasonable reasoning (i am guessing) is that Goggle.co.uk is assumed to be used by British, and therefore sites with content more relevant to them will be ranked higher (assumed to be hosted in UK) How this is done I don't think I will speculate.... but interesting feedback =) .Thanks for the post.

Question, when you moved the accounts to the US, did you maintain the same URL, yoursite.co.uk or did you change them to yoursite.com?

@ captainccs

Nope the URL's stayed exactly the same, all I did was change the nameservers... I have since registered the .co.uk and pointed it to the .com in hope of getting listed, but Google's a bit more cleverer than that.

@ silversurfer

Yeah, I'm almost certain from all of this that if you are doing a search within 'your country', be it the UK, Germany, France etc. your listings will be dependant on a variety of things - where your site is physically hosted is one of them.

I also wonder one other thing... that if you do host a .co.uk, .de, .fr, .co.jp - whatever... If you host that domain extension on US servers would that make a difference?... I do think that Google does look at domain extensions when indexing. Having said that I think that if it was hosted in your native country you would instantly stand a better chance of being listed higher.

<edited - misread the question>

Welcome to the forums :)