Hosting your web site in the US – can it affect your google ranking?
Posted October 29th, 2007 by peterIn the Saturday edition of The Nelson Mail (27 Oct), there was an interesting feature article about 3 local people who are making their mark on the world wide web, gaining new business from around the world.
One statement caught our attention. Doug and Bev Stephens have a website nzfishing.com, and they have achieved getting their site found in Google on the first page with a very competitive phrase "New Zealand fishing".
The Stephens said "Their website used to be difficult to find, not appearing in the top 50,000 in Google searches for ‘‘New Zealand fishing’’ because the site was hosted on a server in the United States. Since switching to a server with New Zealand company Actrix, their website pops up in second place on a Google search for ‘‘New Zealand fishing’’ and attracts about 500 individual viewers every day."
Sorry Doug and Bev. We dispute your statement and further more, it is very easy to prove that the above is not the case.
We @ web one have been responsible for 10′s of .com domain name websites that are hosted in the US, that appear on the first page of google for their selected search term. And we mean popular search terms, not insignificant obscure phrases that searchers are not generally going to find services or products they are looking for.
We have since talked with Bev, explained why her statement was incorrect, and she now concedes that the information she received from a "search engine expert" was wrong. Bev also now understands the likely reasons that a change of hosting their site resulted in better rankings in google. Other things Bev was told of course were correct, and by following the advice given has helped their website rankings.
We congratulate Bev and Doug on their achievements, and it clearly demonstrates that while in this particular instance a change of hosting provider did have a major impact for the Stephens, doing your own research and avoiding the many incorrect myths of search engine optimisation, tweaking and testing, that you too can do it yourself.
We are talking with Bev next week with the view of helping her achieve even better results by undertaking additional search engine optimisation work for their site that most NZ search “experts” are not even aware that can be done to improve rankings.
If you have time, go for it – if you don’t have the time, find someone who has the real knowledge and experience to help you.
2 Responses to “Hosting your web site in the US – can it affect your google ranking?”
October 29th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Hi Peter,
I’ve looked into this further since talking to you today and established that in fact a .com does need to be hosted in NZ in order to have a New Zealand bias as shown on Google.co.nz.
So a .com site may be top of a Google.com search. but if the tick box is ticked to limited the search to New Zealand then it is unlikely to be ranked highly. Out problem was that we wanted to be high in both types of search as our audience is both overseas visitors and New Zealand anglers.
November 4th, 2007 at 8:18 am
Bev, after your above post we did some testing. In the case of websites we have set up, a .com domain makes no difference in google.co.nz – clicking on “pages from New Zealand”. But we did experiment using other .com sites that rank highly on google.com and google.co.nz (without clicking pages from NZ) and found that some did not appear when using the pages from New Zealand button.
So Bev, pat your self on the back for figuring it out that in your particular case you may need to host your site in NZ. However, as we did discuss, in the cases of websites that we have set up, that is NOT the case. Maybe it is because that our clients sites are hosted on our own servers and not “shared” with 100′s of websites that could have content that does not appeal to google or other search engines.
I will however make further inquiries and post the results here in due course. But for our clients it is not a problem, so we will not be treating it as urgent.
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