Firetop

For seasoned SEO experts like myself this article won’t blow you away, however, I recently came across a few forum comments from people still in the dark on the subject of SEO and server IP addresses… In order to decide which search results index a website will be listed in i.e. google.com, google.co.uk or google.de, the country code top level domain (or ccTLD) comes into play. For example, if your website is hosted on a .co.uk domain, Google should assume that your content is relevant to the UK. However, what happens if you’re the UK owner of a .com TLD which by rights should me matched to the US, along with any .net or .org domains?

If your content is German or Spanish this may help Google in associating your .com website to the correct country index (but not always). If on the other hand you have English content - just like Americans would, then Google turns to your IP address record. IP addresses are allocated in blocks to server hosts and associated with specific countries; if you are hosting your website in the UK with a UK IP address, then you have nothing to worry about. However, if you are hosting a .com, .net or .org TLD from the US, you may have a problem. It is always worth checking with your web host to see if their IP addresses are UK registered before you hop into bed with them.

I came across this IP problem many years ago for a client hosting with German web hosts ‘1and1′, the British website ranked very well indeed in Google.de, but came up nowhere in the UK index - which meant that the rightful audience was missing and organically sourced sales were minimal. In this particular instance we switched the customer to the Firetop UK server and the problem was resolved.

With server rental costs as good as they are in the UK now, and the strength of the pound over the dollar, it’s well worth having separate country-tied IP addresses and servers in both the UK and the US. This means that if applicable to the market, you can create two country targeted websites and take advantage of separate search indices (although NEVER duplicate content exactly). It is also worth considering the value of inbound links from third party websites; links from websites in relevant IP blocks will help sway Google’s decision towards country allocation too.

Technorati Tags: ip addresses, SEO, search engines, server hosting, web hosting, country index, search results

Bookmark to: