Hi, I was looking around the forum but couldn’t find a section for SEO.
Anyway, just wondering if hosting location has an affect on SEO. I live in Ireland and have a few sites hosted with an Irish company, but I am currently making a site for a friend in Madrid, and was just wondering if hosting in Ireland will be an issue, SEO wise.
Thanks.
Allan.
Hi I’ve heard google taking into account many things but never heard anything about the hosting. I am pretty sure that if this have any impact on the site rankings it will be very little. Then again I haven’t read anything about this so this is my Personal opinion 
For example i have someBblogger blogs that have US IP and do pretty good for all the other countries except in the US.
Hope it helps
Thanks for the reply, after posting here I did some research and most people seem to say, it has very little affect. I have also found out that you can set a geographic location to target for your website within Google’s Webmaster Tools.
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We’ve moved it to Internet Marketing, which is the place for SEO discussions.[/ot]
Anyway, just wondering if hosting location has an affect on SEO. I live in Ireland and have a few sites hosted with an Irish company, but I am currently making a site for a friend in Madrid, and was just wondering if hosting in Ireland will be an issue, SEO wise.
Hosting country is a factor, but it is one of over 200 factors, so it is unlikely to be ‘make or break’. In a nutshell, Google wants to know where your site relates to. If you have a .es domain, all the text is written in español, it mentions Spanish places or has Spanish contact addresses and phone numbers, most of the links to it are from Spanish websites (etc) then just because you’re hosting it in Ireland isn’t going to confuse Google into thinking it’s mostly relevant to people in Ireland – they are smart enough to know that you’re aiming it at people in Spain.
That’s where the location of hosting comes in … it isn’t that you get more ‘points’ for hosting it in the home country, it’s just about how well Google can pin down your target audience. If everything else all makes that clear, you shouldn’t need to worry about the hosting being in a different place.[/font]
Thanks for that Stevie, yea everything will be in Spanish, language, address etc, only thing that won’t be is the hosting. I didn’t want to have to go looking for a decent hosting company in Spain anyway 
Hosting location is certainly one of the factors that can affect your site ranking but i think it is lower on the weight comparing to other factors such as the extension of your domain and the language of the content of your site (a .es domain which uses Spanish in its content is powerful indication that your website would target the people who are living in Spain or use Google search Spanish).
Hi, There is no SEO difference, but SEO is not why people would choose hosting from the same country or the other country. One of the major reasons one would host here is that if you have primarily second country customers, you will get better performance using hosting provider of that country than a hosting provider of your location. Now, its up to you that what you choose.
Doug