Hosting - silly question

[clem]

Sorry, bit of a silly question!

Someone has just said to me that if I hold a domain with a specific country extension - say .co.fr, and my hosting is based in the UK, that my searches in Google France will be degraded because my hosting provider is in the UK and that I would get better search results if I based my hosting provider in France because then Google would see my site as 'French' rather than 'British'.

I've never really thought about it, but I'm sure that's not right?? Does Google (or any other search engine for that matter) *really* care where your hosting provider lives?

 

[LoneDomainer]

Ive heard that before,

however im in the UK and my .co.uk's are hosted in the US and some of them are in the top 5 for keywords

so i wouldn't take it as gospel, however other things are taken into account

 

[BFTUK]

With any country specific extension, you can use hosting anywhere in the world and it won't affect your ranking.

However try and use a .com, .info, .biz etc with US hosting and you'll not rank well in the uk google search etc.

 

[seanc]

funny that, i've never thought about this before, but a customer actualy
asked me the same question 2 days ago.

 

[Jeewhizz]

It is true Google will rate your domain based on a Geo-IP location, and this will affect your ranking in country-specific searches...

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=fo...yUK|countryGB&sourceid=Mozilla-search&start=0

Listed in the full google websearch, but not in the uk version as the IP is based in the USA

 

[charlie]

i've read plenty to suggest it does (i know someone will prove me wrong now). but if you look at how adsense works that uses the IP of the connection to affect the adverts it displays - if i change my proxy to a german one i get german ads (sedo pages are a good example of this sometimes)
Google obviously consider this geographic location important and must incorperate it in their search engines to bring more relevant results - if your in google uk and you type garage you dont want a german garage?

I think one of the algoritms used must balance up the content and incoming links against IP location - certainly well established site seem to run against this rule better than new ones.

 

[Nosmo King]

I too have .co.uk's hosted in the USA and some of them rank really well with Google.

I've also found if I search for UK only results, I got some No 1 positions.

 

[clem]

i've read plenty to suggest it does (i know someone will prove me wrong now). but if you look at how adsense works that uses the IP of the connection to affect the adverts it displays - if i change my proxy to a german one i get german ads (sedo pages are a good example of this sometimes)

.

Yes, I can see this as i used to work for a German company in the UK, and our internet used to go out through Germany so I always used to see German ads on parking pages, lol.

Google obviously consider this geographic location important and must incorperate it in their search engines to bring more relevant results - if your in google uk and you type garage you dont want a german garage?

But, if I go to www.google.co.uk, surely I'm going to know it's the UK Google I'm going to? In which case, even if I'm in Germany (say on a business trip or whatever), I'm going to Google UK because I want UK results, regardless of the fact I'm sitting in another country. Secondly, if I'm a company and I sell products in two places, say UK and Germany, but the site is essentially the same and I host it in the UK, does this mean my german site would be 'penalised' because I'm hosting it in the UK?

I can sort of see both sides and I'm going around in ever-decreasing circles getting myself more and more confused