Hosting in the Uk = Imporive SEO and SERPS ??

richardmawer

richardmawer

New member
Jan 16, 2009
45
0
0
I run a few wordpress blogs aimed at the UK market and have been doing the usual optimizing and back linking when i started to think about the hosting.

I host all my blogs in the US on Hostgator - does this effect it appearing in Google.co.uk search results ?

My main blog is a .net and I have an SEo plug in for Firefox which shows where the domain is hosted - I noticed a US flag next to my domain - is this effecting it's rank ?

I own some .net .org and .com domains aswell as .co.uk domains - should I host all these in the UK or are they ok hosted in the US ?

Just want this clearing up before I continue my SEO efforts .

Appreciate your time guys,

Rich
 


If you want to rank over this side of the water, a uk domain will help ALOT. Hosting does not matter much, at least in my experience. If you want a non uk domain to rank UK, its probably worth connecting it to a webmaster tools account and setting its target as UK.

The last is only speculation though, i always use uk domains when targeting my home market.
 
Along with these all practices, i recommend you to host in uk, get .co.uk domain name, if it is hard for you, get most of the links from .co.uk domains or websites hosted in UK along with the above practices like webmaster tools, plugins etc.

I think this will work but at a slow ratio. For better success hosted in UK and .co.uk domain name and links from UK will work best even better :P
 
Thanks

Thanks guys - I will set up webmaster tools - that is a good tip.

I see alot of .com .net and .orgs ranking in Uk for my market - but I agree that a .co.uk makes more sense for local market.

I will set up a .co.uk domain and see how much differance it makes - I will also host it here in the UK as suggested.

Thanks again,

Rich
 
l3msip said:
If you want to rank over this side of the water, a uk domain will help ALOT. Hosting does not matter much, at least in my experience. If you want a non uk domain to rank UK, its probably worth connecting it to a webmaster tools account and setting its target as UK.

The last is only speculation though, i always use uk domains when targeting my home market.
Click to expand...

You are spot on mate.

You can set up Webmaster tools for your domain and it does not matter what TLD your domain is or where the domain is hosted - provided you set the geo target under settings.

So to target a .com or .net domain to the Uk you simply change the settings in Webmaster tools to United Kingdom.

This works for Google but I can not see anywhere in the Bing Webmaster tools to change the geo target settings for the domain.

Rich
 
I had a similar situation with a few .coms I wanted to get ranked in Canada. Previously hosted in the US, I moved them to a Canadian host and up they went (ranks 8-10, to ranks 2-4 after the move). This was 2 years ago, but since then I've been hosting my local-specific sites in their targeted areas.
 
Moving to UK based server and getting some relevant UK domain links would certainly help. Make sure, to have some 'UK' words on your website..some where.
 
Dispel said:
as google now uses loading speed as a ranking factor hosting locally for people using google.co.uk would offer some marginal advantage. how much exactly, who knows.
Click to expand...


Agree with this, If you are really trying to improve it within the UK then hosting in the UK will boost the speed and as Dispel mentioned google do use that now to rank.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom