Do i need to host in my target country (For healthy SEO)

bigalk

i currently have .com .ie and .co.uk URL for the site im about to launch (and plan to acquire further European URLs as I grow), but when choosing a hosting company i keep reading "an irish IP will greatly enhance your SEO results..... etc etc" - referring to the case where ireland is my target market.

because i want to specifically target the UK market - my question is:
am i better hosting the .co.uk URL with a UK provider, and the .ie with an Irish provider (and a .de with a german provider in the future etc), or will it have much of an impact if i host all here in ireland?

if hosting in each target country is the way to go - does anyone know how i might manage such a set up?

I plan to use Magento, but am open to change.

BR,
alan

mneylon

This topic is always debated heavily ..

Some would argue that you need to be in the country you're targeting, while others would argue that Google is happy to see the domain extension as a clear indicator

blue4ever

OK

If you have a country specific TLD (.de for ex) - then that is a fairly decent clue to the search engines that Germany is your desired country target for that website. To hammer that home, and for any country specific site, Google would also look at location information on a site and links to that site.
Therefore, before you jump - try and have, if possible, some location information and definitely have some country based links.
If you're a generic TLD, they you can specify the country preference in Google webmaster tools, r you can leave it up to Google to figure that out - again the location info links and the IP addres.
But that's only if you have not specified a geo in WT.
So hosting will not really be taken into account unless you've made it difficuly to provide information to suggest where you want to target

If you think about it realistically it would be a nightmare for an international business to have a different hosting provider in every country they target.

{Google.ie is hosted in Mountainview, California!)

Ed: To finish

Get hosting somewhere convenient to you, language wise, set-up, billing etc

I'd run multiple TLD from that hosting.
Different WT for each site and specifying the geo location for the sites in WT
Work hard to get country specific links for each TLD if possible
Try, if possible, to have some local contact information even a re-routed telephone number.

C

bigalk

hi guys,

and thanks for the valued input. decision made - i will be hosting all my stuff here in Ireland - blacknight looks like you got the job - you were top of my list.

it was my intention to go this route, until i read all the bumpf from the hosting companies highlighting the SEO implications.

blacknight- your site was one of those. while i realise you are trying to 'encourage' Irish users to host in Ireland - you can also see that i looked at your statements from the reverse, and inferred that if Irish hosting is good for targeting Ireland, then it must not be good for targeting beyond Ireland.

maybe something for you to think about as if this point had been dealt with on your site, you would have had my money a few days ago. since then i have visited some of your (cheaper & more expensive) competitors, and almost changed my mind!

thanks again guys- it is much appreciated to get some impartial advice!

Al

mneylon

bigalk wrote: »

hi guys,

and thanks for the valued input. decision made - i will be hosting all my stuff here in Ireland - blacknight looks like you got the job - you were top of my list.

it was my intention to go this route, until i read all the bumpf from the hosting companies highlighting the SEO implications.

blacknight- your site was one of those. while i realise you are trying to 'encourage' Irish users to host in Ireland - you can also see that i looked at your statements from the reverse, and inferred that if Irish hosting is good for targeting Ireland, then it must not be good for targeting beyond Ireland.

maybe something for you to think about as if this point had been dealt with on your site, you would have had my money a few days ago. since then i have visited some of your (cheaper & more expensive) competitors, and almost changed my mind!

thanks again guys- it is much appreciated to get some impartial advice!

Al

Feedback is always appreciated - if you could email me directly with links to any pages where we talk about this it'd help (michele@blacknight.com gets me)

bigalk

Michelle - ive done a lot of reading over the last few days and im sure i saw this on your site, and thus started the thread on here. I may be wrong, but Ill look again and if i find it ill gladly pass on the relevant page!

Best,
Al

jmcc

What a lot of SEOs never see is that up to 25% of some ccTLDs (the non-repurposed ones) can be hosted outside their target country. For search engines, the ccTLD and the language can be more powerful indications of the target market than the IP of the webserver or the nationality of the webhoster. Some hosters would be considered as having significant shares of more than one country level market so search engines would not consider the IPs from that webhoster as being a definitive indication. Get the ccTLD and the language right and don't just frame one website for all the ccTLD websites.

Regards...jmcc

JJ10

What about having the country specifics off the .com?

Example - .com/en-ie/ .com/en-gb/

And following this method. Then set the geo-targeting in webmaster tools.

bigalk

JJ10 wrote: »

What about having the country specifics off the .com?

Example - .com/en-ie/ .com/en-gb/

And following this method. Then set the geo-targeting in webmaster tools.

this is the route i had planned, with .ie reverting to .com/en-ie/ etc, but as mentioned in the OP needed to assess SEO implications so i could make an informed choice.

thanks to all who have posted replys here, i am happy enough to keep my hosting in Ireland as it appears to be a bonus only if applicable, but not a lot to worry about if not easily applicable!

My best,
Al

jmcc

That com/en-ie approach would be counterproductive. The ccTLD is the preferred choice for most major markets (other than Global and the US). There is an element of trust with ccTLDs that is not found with .com websites. There are over 10M .uk domains and over 15M .de domains - if you were using .com in those markets, you might be at a disadvantage. The other aspect is that you would be making the url more complex to remember.

Regards...jmcc

The Apprentice

Interesting topic jmcc

I would have to ultimely research it again and will but i thought it was...

www.bluewidgets.com/de/category/bluewidget jumper
www.bluewidgets.com/.ie/category/bluewidget jumper
www.bluewidgets.com/uk/category/bluewidget jumper


Helps both with cannolization no matter how many markets your bluewidget jumper is displayed in..
Which is ^ duplicate content.

The url is slighty different with the geo zone and can always display different languages etc but all host the same image on server or many servers dependant on size of website (Amazon) ??
Im not 100% but i,ll still look it up again, seomoz had a mint article a while back on it !!

jmcc

The Apprentice wrote: »

Interesting topic jmcc

I would have to ultimely research it again and will but i thought it was...

It is. Generally the country code of the target market is used with the .com but using a .com for all markets is a messy approach and doesn't really inspire confidence in users where the local ccTLD is the dominant TLD. That's why you see Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Google.ie etc.

You've got to be careful when reading some SEO articles about this because they are often by people with no expertise in ccTLD markets and they assume that .com is used the same way in all countries.

The most important thing is to make it easy for the user to remember the URL and with ccTLDs the user doesn't have to remember the ccTLD. (One of my theories about how people remember URLs.) Basically they identify with their ccTLD in a way that they don't identify with .com TLD. Thus branding is very important in ccTLDs (moreso than generic domain names). There's also a danger of leaking traffic with a example.com/ie/ url as people might actually type example.ie by mistake.

Regards...jmcc

The Apprentice

this kind of explains both the country divide that doesnt ruin your main site with
A. Duplicate sites which will devalue the main site
B. divided resources between 10 odd euro countries for the same blue widget


http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/...b+%232+2.26.13

Although whether its right or wrong i cant comment, im even more confused now :P gotta love online marketing

dozy doctor

Have you tried www.123-reg.co.uk for hosting.... They are quite reasonable, or so I am led to believe.....

jmcc

The Apprentice wrote: »

this kind of explains both the country divide that doesnt ruin your main site with
A. Duplicate sites which will devalue the main site
B. divided resources between 10 odd euro countries for the same blue widget


http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/...b+%232+2.26.13

Although whether its right or wrong i cant comment, im even more confused now :P gotta love online marketing

The URL seems broken.

It would also be possible to use the ccTLD domains as gateways to directories on one server/site. Connectivity has improved over the last few years and unless there is seriously heavy video/traffic requirements, any EU country could be used. And even if there is heavy traffic, a simple content delivery network (CDN) could be used.

Regards...jmcc

Trojan

For the original question, one of the biggest issues I'd consider in 2013 is performance: can the host serve the site quickly to end users in the target geo. If it can, then the targeting can be handled elsewhere (GWT, ccTLD). On a practical level, I've found that hosting on the same continent as the target market is sufficient if other performance issues are correctly taken care of (CDN, etc). Large operations will have different needs beyond the scope of this discussion.

I think the gTLD vs ccTLD is a complex issue - and about which the likes of jmcc & blacknight above know more about than I.

Carefully manage your resources when creating multiple sites targeting different demographics. Take note of the Amazon example - they still haven't build out Amazon.ie - it's a redirect.

JJ10

Bigalk, Have a look a this section "Server location (through the IP address of the server)" from this page http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192

Hope it helps

jmcc

Just to put the whole redirect issue into some kind of context, the following percentages are the classified redirects for Irish websites in April 2013.

Redirected to external TLD website: 3.92%
Redirected to exact match external TLD website: 2.92.%
Redirected to other site in TLD: 5.85%
Redirected to internal page on same site: 6.94%
Clone website: 2.41%

Most of the classifications are self-explantory but the Clone website is a bit more complex. This is basically where a site is a clone of an primary website using a different domain name and no 301 redirect. They are often hard for some search engines to detect because they have slightly different data to the primary website. Some could get flagged for duplicate content by the large search engines.

Regards...jmcc

Trojan

Interesting that Amazon don't even acknowledge that the user came from the .ie type-in, I wonder what their stats are like from that.

jmcc

Trojan wrote: »

Interesting that Amazon don't even acknowledge that the user came from the .ie type-in, I wonder what their stats are like from that.

The amazon.ie is a 302 redirect and exact match. I think that most people would go directly to Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com. The default setting for Kindle in Ireland is the .com website (which is far deeper in terms of content as Amazon bought out the UK books site in the 1990s). It doesn't really brand the .ie as much due to the fact that linguistically Ireland and the UK are very close in marketing terms - the same TV adverts will be seen by Irish viewers as by UK viewers.

In linguistic terms, there's also a Holland/Belgium, France/Belgium, Germany/Austria overlap and the Adjacent Market effect is very apparent with domain name hosting.

Regards...jmcc

Speculator

This topic still seems to be in a very grey area.

• Does anyone have a .com or .co.uk website hosted in Ireland exclusively targeting the UK audience and how is it preforming?

• Does anyone have a .com or .co.uk website hosted in the UK exclusively targeting the UK audience and how is it preforming?