Does web hosting affect Search Engine Optimisation?

Apparently it does. 6 months ago, when I finally made the decision to return to the UK for good, I started actively targeting UK based website maintenance clients by writing content specifically targeted at google.co.uk.

To date the response from Google has been non-existant. If you were to do a Google.com search for ‘UK website maintenance’ you’d find thinkdave.com right up there in the top 5. Great. Except for the fact that the majority of people in my target market use the ‘pages from the UK’ feature on Google. Searching in this way doesn’t bring up thinkdave.com in the first 20 pages – hardly desirable.

It appears that Google looks at (a) your website’s domain name and (b) the location of your web host’s servers when deciding where to index a website geographically. So my .com site, hosted by Dreamhost in the US is hardly likely to inspire Google to list me under pages from the UK in their results.

How to fix the problem

Luckily there are a couple of ways to fix this problem, although neither of them is without a bit of manual labour.

Option 1 – Move hosts. This is the most obvious solution to the problem. By moving my .com website to a UK based web host (with UK based data centres), Google will assume that it’s quite likely that I am in fact based in the UK. And in a few weeks time I’ll start climbing up the search engine rankings for ‘website maintenance’ on google.co.uk.

Option 2 – 301 re-direct. For those of you who just went ‘Huh?’ don’t worry. A 301 re-direct simply tells visitors and search engines that a website has moved and re-directs them to the new site. In my case, I could re-direct thinkdave.com to thinkdave.co.uk and be done with it. Not particularly elegant, but it’ll work. Like the first option it will take Google a few weeks to twig on, but eventually they’ll have to admit that thinkdave.co.uk is most likely UK based.

My solution

Firstly, I’m going to move thinkdave.com to a UK based host. I’m getting a bit sick of moving hosts (this will be my second move this year), but I think it’s important. I’ll also benefit by not having to contact a US based company every time something breaks, although it remains to be seen whether I’ll get any support from a UK host…

Once the server move is done I may install the re-direct anyway, just to make sure. I’ll re-evaluate this problem in a few weeks and see how I’m doing on local search engines.

Why should you care?

If you’ve been having a problem getting ranked on google.co.uk, it may be due to your hosting setup, especially if you’re using any domain other than a .co.uk. Contact your hosting providers and ask them where their data centres are based. And if they’re not based in the UK, you might want to consider moving.

Needless to say, I’ll be moving server towards the end of the week, so expect some minor downtime issues while I’m making the switch.