Also, when looking for hosting make sure that the provider’s servers are located in the geographical location where you want to rank high on the search engines. For example 1and1 (The UK’s biggest hosting provider) has servers located in Germany. If your TLD is a .com rather than .co.uk your site will be interpreted as being German based and you might do ok on Google.de but shit on Google.co.uk.

But I definitely have to disagree with him.

First it really does not matter where you purchase your domain. It is more important to ensure the domain is registered in your name NOT in the name of your web host.

Many people who fall for the “Free Domain” marketing used by a number of hosts find their free domain is actually registered in the name of the web host.

If they ever plan to switch hosts it can be expensive to have control of the domain transferred. Some of these hosts charge double or triple the typical registration cost of $10 – $15 per year to transfer the registrant information to your name.

As to geographical information that is nothing but crap. Speaking from a web hosts perspective it really does not matter where your hosts servers are located. One of the hosting company inform me that they have thousands of clients from around the world, and their servers are located in datacenters in Canada and the United States.

Many of their international clients do extremely well in their home countries despite the fact their site is hosted in the US. They have american clients hosted in their Canadian data center that dominate google’s US serps for some extremely competitive search terms.

Then, my friend dispute back that the first point he make about domain and hosting is that if your relationship breaks down with the hosting company for whatever reason they can take down your site and you can’t access your control panel – He ask me to trust him as this has happened to him when they tried to take a re-occurring fee from his credit card but his card had expired. He was unable to get a support ticket or Support ID code located in the control panel. He was also unable to change the nameservers to point to his new hosting company. It took about three wekks to sort out and he lost money during the down time.

I start to ask around and with more and more information collected, I knew my friend is right instead.

The other concern regarding geo targeting

My friend then told me that he would love to hear other peoples views on the location of servers – this information was highlighted in David Viney ‘The SEO Expert’ author of ‘Get to the top on Google’. He could be wrong of course.

Being suspicious, I went through some research on this and it confirms that server location is very important if using .com in a non us country.

There is however a workaround provided by google.

“Over the last few years, website owners have been facing issues while specifying targeted geo location of their website. They have been previously relying on I.P address of web hosting or using country specific domains. This feature will help website owners to specify their target geographical location for their website, or sub-domains.

Suppose, your business is based in Netherlands, but your website is hosted in US. This could result in seo ranking issues, since your website will score higher rankings within Google.com (US), rather than Google.nl (Netherlands).”

From google:

“If your site targets users in a particular location, you can provide us with information that will help determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improve our search results for geographic queries. You can only use this feature for sites with a neutral top-level domain, such as .com or .org. Country-specific domains, such as .ie or .fr, are already associated with a country or region.”

Finally, everything is clear out from the thin air.

Domain & Hosting Packages – Some Important info to aware of is a post from: HintPoint

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