Hi,
my website is aimed at the European and UK market. I am considering hosting it with a US webhost, mainly for reasons of cost and quality of service. Will doing so harm my search engine rankings for people searching from the UK and Europe?
Thanks
No, it would only have a marginal influence. A lot more important are standard SEO practices, like title tags, headers, website copy, link building. If you're worried about it, you could do a search on some of the keywords you're interested in and see what hosting your competitors use. (you can use http://www.whoishostingthis.com ) or better yet check what is really important, and that is how many backlinks they have. (I recommend http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html for this)
P.S. Since you're from the UK http://www.hosttell.com/one are currently having a promotion in the UK. They are offering one year of a free hosting and a domain (You have to pay the £9.50 setup fee and that's it). They're a nice choice if you don't need more than 3GB of disk space.
Yes it can.
It takes it a month or two but you should see the ranking slowly start to change over to the .com searches.
References :
No, it would only have a marginal influence. A lot more important are standard SEO practices, like title tags, headers, website copy, link building. If you're worried about it, you could do a search on some of the keywords you're interested in and see what hosting your competitors use. (you can use http://www.whoishostingthis.com ) or better yet check what is really important, and that is how many backlinks they have. (I recommend http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html for this)
P.S. Since you're from the UK http://www.hosttell.com/one are currently having a promotion in the UK. They are offering one year of a free hosting and a domain (You have to pay the £9.50 setup fee and that's it). They're a nice choice if you don't need more than 3GB of disk space.
References :
Not really, I recommend buying a co.uk domain to try to keep it as local as possible.
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I’ve moved my UK websites to be hosted from the US a year ago and it didnt effect my ranking or visitors.
Keeping my domain names with the same company probably helped.
The only different is a slight slow down of page loading times as response times to get the data from the US will be longer. (eg. mine changed from 30ms to 130ms), making pages take 1 to 2sec longer to load.
References :
http://www.sebsworld.net/
No way, where the files are hosted isn't what matters at all. Your domain extension (i.e. .co.uk versus .com) might matter, but that's it. Personally, I would say getting a .com is the best choice anyways, as it is basically universally accepted.
If you need a high quality US host with awesome support and an owner that will personally help you with absolutely anything, including tips on search engine rankings, check out http://www.hostamina.com – they'll also make sure you end up on a fast reliable server (they don't overload servers like most companies).
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