One of the most overlooked points of having your own website is considering where your servers are. It does not seem so important but where in the world your servers are located does have a fair impact on the smooth running of your site.

One of the areas that this has an impact on is how your site ranks in country specific results. For example if you are based in the UK with a country identified domain name such as co.uk, Google will assume that you are UK based and display your page in local listings. But what if your domain is not country specific like a .com? Well then Google turns to where your server is based to up listings. You could be based in the UK but if your servers are not then that eliminates you from local searches.

The distance of your servers can also have an effect on the load speed of your site. If your server is on the other side of the planet that could dramatically slow down the loading time of the pages. Web hosts have been known to swap their servers for ‘cheaper’ ones abroad but soon find that their server can be constantly busy and their websites ceasing to operate all together. At the present moment, Google does not rank its pages on loading time but insiders have claimed that could soon change. Google is aiming to be as fast as possible, so there is no doubt that in the future they will begin ranking their pages based on website loading times. Ranking is something that can be easily influenced so being pulled down for simply having a server abroad is easily avoidable.

No related posts.