Does server location really matter?

twanda

Hi all,
I have a .com website, which is to promote a small Irish family business.
In my google webmaster account, I have set the target audience Ireland.
I have uploaded a sitemap and a robots.txt and have tweaked the site tags and content as much as I can, but I am not getting great results in Google.

I don't expect my site to be the best, but some of the sites which are beating me to it look like they have not been optimised for Google search at all. The one possible advantage that I can see though, is that they have .ie domains.

My questions are
- would it be worth my while investing in a .ie domain? Would this help my search results within Ireland?
- My site is hosted outside of Ireland. I have read that this could be an issue - is this true?

Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks

You're asking two different things here.

Server location and having a .ie domain are two different things.

Ideally, you should be on an Irish hosting provider.

Google always tries to find the most RELEVANT content for the user and uses geography as a parameter. If you're hosted in Dubai, and on a .com website, well then it doesn't make sense for Google to be showing your results to someone like me searching from Dublin.

If your target audience is Irish people, then host on irish provider using a .ie and learn about SEO. So much info online.

RedFly

I would suggest moving to an Irish host/IP. Having a .com should not be a negative effect if you have an Irish IP and you geo target in WMT to Ireland.

However, if you only service Ireland and don't plan to expand gloablly in the future, I would make the leap now and get the .ie domain too and redirect from your .com.

twanda

Hi,

thanks for the clarification.

Twanda