Hosting and positions in Google search results
A customer pointed out today that a switch to our hosting platform (we host European customers in Germany) may negatively affect their position in Google.co.uk search results. At the moment Google generates a lot of business and obviously they would not want to loose it.
Our understanding of how it works is since the web site is a .co.uk domain name, and doesn’t operate .com, it will be performing in Google same good after the move to our hosting platform as before it.
The customer also worried about some users enabling the “pages from the UK” filter. Would a .co.uk web site hosted in Germany appear or not appear in the search results if such a filter was applied?
But if it was the case, then, for example, many of our Australian customers with their web sites hosted in USA would suffer from the same issue with their .com.au domains -but they do not!
Also, it’s quite easy to run an experiment on one of our own web sites - by searching for, for example, “osCommerce services” in google.co.uk with and without that filter.
We can see our Holbi web site on the first position in both cases, even though it’s hosted in Germany as well.
Would be interested in hearing opinions of osCommerce Developers and SEO experts on this.
February 18th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
I used to host my website at a hosting company in Germany (1+1) for around six months and had issues having my pages discovered in the uk search engines. Almost immediately after moving to a UK company suddenly all of my pages were indexed, and i confirmed this since Googles page cache was at a state when I made some changes around the same day I moved host.
February 19th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Thanks for your comment. Very interesting.
Can I ask if that web site of yours was actually 6 months old by the time you switched to a UK hosting?
May 17th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
I can confirm that this is a definite issue for UK companies on overseas hosting. Most notably it was an issue for my wife’s site that was hosted on a US server for a couple of years. During that time, despite being top of page 1 for google.com on a variety of keyphrases, the site was non-existent in the google.co.uk results.
I recently moved the site to a new dedicated UK-based box and within a few weeks of doing this we are getting the same good placement with google.co.uk.
May 21st, 2007 at 2:31 am
Hello Mark,
Thanks for your comment! Can I ask if it was a .com or .co.uk web site?
Best regards,
Vadym Gurevych
August 30th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Hi
Sorry for the late reply, the issue with indexing was with www.peachesandplums.co.uk domain, we do no own the .com unfortunately. As soon as I changed hosts to a UK based host 3Spires the site was indexed almost immediately in google. I would recommend webmasters host there sites in the country where the website is applicable (see Ripe.net/Arin.net) since IP addresses are split into geographic domains and google tracks this ie Google Analytics demographics.
Tracey