Hosting question....

[aranell]

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.

I've never really thought about it, but I'm sure that's not right?? Does Google *really* care where your hosting provider lives?

[philthy]

Wouldn't have thought so

[zumbruk]

If you think about how DNS works, this is obvious nonsense. The search engine neither knows now cares where you are physically located. Indeed, in many cases (the .cx domain springs to mind), not one bit of the hardware in that domain is physically located there.

[roadsweeper]

I'm not an expert at this, but I know it is perfectly possible to tell where a server is geographically located. For example, if we look at the PH IP address (195.225.218.139) we can tell that the hosting servers are located in the UK, despite it being .com using a simple geolocation service.

Further, we can then Google for 'pistonheads' restricting the results to UK and pistonheads.com is returned:
www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=pistonheads&btnG=Google+Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB

So, although I don't know how a .fr search engine might work, I can say for certain that it is technically possible for a .fr domain to be filtered out if the user requests results only in France based upon the geolocation of the hosting server's IP address.

HTH

roadie.

PS: Pistonheads is breaking the Google URL. Just go to Google's UK website and search for 'pistonheads' but results for UK only.

[m12_nathan]

zumbruk said:

If you think about how DNS works, this is obvious nonsense. The search engine neither knows now cares where you are physically located. Indeed, in many cases (the .cx domain springs to mind), not one bit of the hardware in that domain is physically located there.

Google does know and care, none of the others seem to though.

Good place for SEO stuff is the forums at highrankings.com.

www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6585 talks about physical location, albeit for Canada but any other location will be the same.