How Important is Hosting in SEO? Do I need to host in UK?

[EndGame]

Hi guys.

I see loads of American hosted sites out there that out-perform UK-hosted sites in the search engines.

During an exchange with an online marketing company here in the UK, they said it was important our hosting was based in the UK if we wanted to rank well in the UK search engines.

Is it a BIG deal? Like I say, I know many US-hosted sites that dominate UK search results. Besides, I am loather to host any website with a UK company, as none seem to have the cpanel/fantastico features that our American cousins provide.

Cheers

Alex

[Craig Zimbrowski]

Hello Alex,
If the majority of all of your customers are located in the UK, then you should get hosting in the UK. If your webhosting servers are on the US, you can learn how to localize your domain in order to improve rankings on UK.

[EndGame]

Localizing my domain?

Thats not a term I have heard before. Shall look into it.

Really appreciate the insight.

[warrich]

it dosent matter where your website is hosted in which country, if you want to promote your website in UK , then you have to advertise your website in Local UK

[nettech]

Hi Alex,

I'm in the same predicament as you as I have some TLDs that I want to rank in the UK. HOwever like you said theres hardly any hostng companies that provide fantastico hosting.

You will need to host in the UK if want local traffic but if the domains are .uk then Google will automatically assign this to Google UK, otherwise you'll have to set this manually in Webmaster Tools.

An exmaple of one my XFactor sites was that I registered it with FastHosts and hosted it as a static holding page. It ranked in position 29 (UK). I then transferred it over to JustHost and set it up as a WordPress blog, even though I requested that it shoudl target the UK, it completely disappered off the radar and now cant find it anywhere even though its indexed.

Grrrrrrrrrrrr.....good luck mate

[Janet Sawyer]

There are Uk Hosts who have cpanel and fantastico and you can host your .co.uk sites with them quite easily, and get ranked in the engines too for the UK terms. I know I found one about 5 years ago! (well ones better than none) if you want to know who it's Free Virtual Servers
I am an affiliate - but that's a clean link, as more times than most, their affiliate program doesn't work anyway!

The bad news is they are twice the price of the US hosting plans. But then you have to ask yourself "what do you want?" and "what are you prepared to pay?".

[nettech]

Thanks for that Janet,

Am I right in assuming that you only get 1 MySQL database? Is there not a package where you can get these on an unlimited basis? If this is not the case then personally for my needs its pointless as I setup lots of Wordpress blogs, at that rate it'd cost me serious £££££s.

Anyway thanks for the link though, appreciate it.

Zaheer

Originally Posted by Janet Sawyer

There are Uk Hosts who have cpanel and fantastico and you can host your .co.uk sites with them quite easily, and get ranked in the engines too for the UK terms. I know I found one about 5 years ago! (well ones better than none) if you want to know who it's Free Virtual Servers
I am an affiliate - but that's a clean link, as more times than most, their affiliate program doesn't work anyway!

The bad news is they are twice the price of the US hosting plans. But then you have to ask yourself "what do you want?" and "what are you prepared to pay?".

[jazbo]

I use US servers and .coms and .nets usually but rank fine for the UK - because I ensure I also submit to UK directories and I display a UK limited company and address on my site. Another tactic is to submit to Google business listings.

[mikeey]

I use a US host as i found the UK based hosts over priced. Once i got my site up and running it then dawned on me that i would not show for my target market {UK}.After some searching in the WF someone pointed me to the big Gs webmasters tools and in there you can set your geo settings to UK , after a few days of changing this from USA to the UK my site popped up on page 2. Hope this helps.

[nettech]

Thats exactly what I've been doing but its generally quite slow indexing the pages, once they are, you're pretty much sorted.

With regards to adding a contact address etc thats an excellent way, plus you can register your busness with Google maps, however, when you run an AdSense, Affiliate company and dont disclose your address its a litte difficult. I dont think Google allow PO Box addresses either!

Originally Posted by mikeey

I use a US host as i found the UK based hosts over priced. Once i got my site up and running it then dawned on me that i would not show for my target market {UK}.After some searching in the WF someone pointed me to the big Gs webmasters tools and in there you can set your geo settings to UK , after a few days of changing this from USA to the UK my site popped up on page 2. Hope this helps.

[EndGame]

Hey gang.

Thanks for the contributions to this post and discussion.

It seems to me that whilst hosting in the UK is a factor in your SEO, it is not the most important and can be worked around with relative ease (which is good news).

For those of you that are interested, in my quest and search for information I have been posting in forums and the WF about this issue.

This thread has one or two good suggestions for hosts: Long Shot - UK Hosting Companies

I think the first couple are not good links, the others are worth a look at. If you want to see roughly where the hosts are based (i.e. are they really in the UK) do a who.is search and look at the information where they tell you where the site's servers/ip is based.

Theres a few good sites there that I am going to check out.

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by EndGame

It seems to me that whilst hosting in the UK is a factor in your SEO, it is not the most important and can be worked around with relative ease (which is good news).

In my experience, this is a correct assumption.

I have a HostNine reseller account that includes UK based hosting as well as US based (they're CPanel, BTW). I host some sites there just to spread things around. They started getting google.co.uk traffic rather quickly because they ranked on the first page there although they were several pages back on google.com.

[rondo]

I agree. I think a .uk domain with uk backlinks would be more important than having a uk server.

Andrew

[paulgl]

Hosting has nothing to do with it.
You see loads of American hosted sites because, in comparison, there
are loads of American hosted sites.

But here's the caution: Go with a local host that you can get support
from. You may have trouble getting help in a timely manner across
the pond. Plus, I always preach being on a first name basis with your
host. Find a local, solid host for these reasons. The cheap can become
expensive.

Paul

[EndGame]

I take your point paulgl.

I love the service hostgator offers, they have always been fast, and very good at what they do. However, I see what you are saying and have recently found a local host that I *think* can do the business.

[TomBond]

If you want to target the UK, it's preferable but not vital to host in the UK