US sites on Canadian IP

I have some websites with US contents and US traffic; now I've moved them to a new server in Canada because of a good deal. Does the Canadian IP of my websites affects my ranking in google?

Yes, I'm sorry to say that it does.

This is well documented and from our own experience it makes a big difference.

I suggest that you move back to US based servers. Make sure that you have all of the US based location and contact info as text on all pages so that your site is associated with that region. Google webmaster tools also allows you to specify your target region.

This is a basic factor that has quite a big impact.

I'm going to have to call bull**** on this one. I've seen no evidence that this makes any difference at all, let alone a big difference.

It also makes absolutely no sense for Google to consider the physical location of your server in their rankings.

Hi Korzon.

Do you have any proof that they don't make any difference? I'm not against you or anything, I'm still learning and want to know more about this stuff.

What do you think that makes the difference on the search results on google.com; google.co.uk; google.es; say for a query "cinema" or "pizza delivery"? I would have thought it was the server location and/or the TLD.

Please share your theory.

Thank you.

Andryo

You are flat out wrong.

It's not a BIG difference, but physical server location is one of the contributing factors in local rankings. I can attest to this through experience and a simple google search would have yielded countless announcements from the horses mouth.

Can you rank in .com with a Canada IP? Yes.

BUt all things equal, a web site with a Canadian IP over a US one targeted to .com should be lower in the rankings.

No I don't. I also have no proof that the amount of smileys you have on a page make no difference when it comes to rankings.



I'm assuming you are referring to this post.

From the post:

In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server's IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.

So you read this statement and infer that "This is a basic factor that has quite a big impact"?

We have a client presently with a very competetive keyword.

They are UK based and had their site hosted in the US. They were ranking 99th. We moved their server to the UK with no other work, this was the first action. They ranked 21st 3 days later.

I would call that a fairly big difference.

There are many other factors that will make a difference with Geographic targetting but the location of the server is definately a significant factor.

I never said it had a 'big' impact. What I did say was it was a factor in overall ranking which you already proved for me.

Horses mouth:

If your site targets users in a particular geographic location, you can use our geographic target tool to provide us with information that will help us determine how your site appears in our search results, and also improve our search results for geographic queries. This data supplements our existing information, and setting a geographic target won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country.

You can only use this feature for sites with a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org. Sites with country-coded top-level domains (such as .ie) are already associated with a geographic region, in this case Ireland.

If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, we'll continue to make geographic associations largely based on the top-level domain (e.g. .co.uk or .ca) and the IP address of the webserver from which the context was served.

If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, we'll rely largely on the site's country domain (.ca, .de, etc.). If an international domain (.com, .org, .eu, etc) has been used, we'll rely on the IP address. If you change hosting provider for a country domain, there should be no impact. If you change the hosting provider of an international domain to a provider in another country, we recommend using Webmaster Tools to tell us which country your site should be associated with.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399

Well, the google webmastertool is okay for location... but if you run after Yahoo traffic (yeah right), then you'd need a Yahoowebmastertool and a bingwebmastertool ... zzz ... so it's a band aid solution for the overall web traffic as for local search.

Had a .org with tons of US traffic for my canadian city, and none from canada... duh... moved to a canadian host and it switched around... there were no webmastertool at the time.

It's not because your site is hosted in canada that it will not rake in traffic from US... I kick .fr sites with my .ca in france... so it's not just the location... it's also how france peeps link to my pages... for some, I rank better in europe than here in quebec.

So, basically any observation of a factor can be kicked off the chart just using links. When observing a mild factor, one link can render the results completely useless, cause a link is a strong one. But since I already did the test with my .org ... I'll stick to my observations even if they are not from last month...

horse's mouth here -- http://www.youtube.com/GoogleWebmasterHelp -- says "unh-unh"...

ymmv tho!

Jim