Ep22 – Does Hosting in Your Own Country Get You Better Rankings in Google?

Podcast – SEO Point

Transcription

John: Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Works Media Podcast, I’m your host John Romaine and joining me is…

Sean Kaye: Sean Kaye.

John: This is Episode Number 22 and in today’s Podcast we’re talking about hosting. How you going Sean?

Sean Kaye: I’m good, I’m Byron for the day.

John: You’re Byron… Byron in disguise. Yeah.

Sean Kaye: I’m a much less pretty version of Byron.

John: I wouldn’t say that. Have you seen Byron up close?

Sean Kaye: No.

John: This will be the last that I hear of him.

Sean Kaye: Yeah, pretty much.

John: He’s – well, for the listeners, Byron is currently in Japan and what had intended on being a nice time away, a bit of holiday, I think has ended up with him being in the hospital. He’s ended up in the hospital with gastro and food poisoning so, yeah, that quite – I don’t think that’s quite gone as planned.

Sean Kaye: Did he eat berries from China?

John: Berries from China?

Sean Kaye: Don’t you watch the news man?

John: No, no, no, that was – are they from China?

Sean Kaye: Yeah, Hep A.

John: I heard about it.

Sean Kaye: Yeah, Hep A from berries, frozen berries, from China and Chile.

John: Yeah, I didn’t actually see it on the news but my housemate, I was chatting my housemate today and she told me, you know those berries that I’ve been having in my smoothies every morning and I thought, oh no, where’s this going? She said, yeah, there was something on the news of some health scare and I felt terrible in the sense that she got sick by eating these berries but also relieved because, I’ll tell you what, I’m sick and damn tired of hearing that blender at 7:00 A.M. every morning.

Sean Kaye: That’s just – that’s what she gets for trying to be healthy.

John: See what happens when you try and be healthy!

Sean Kaye: That’s it man, I think you should just sit back, eat your pizza and be quite like the rest of us.

John: I always – I say it all of the time, you don’t make friends with salad.

Sean Kaye: That’s right. So what are we talking today about?

John: Well, I was involved in a discussion recently, I hope you don’t mind, I just popped a – I’m eating a chocolate here, Cadbury…

Sean Kaye: The listeners don’t mind at all. They know you’re rude.

John: Cadbury roses. I found them in the fridge, I’ll have a couple of those. Today – I figured – I was involved in an interesting conversation with Facebook just yesterday and someone was asking the question, if I change up my hosting, he’s based in Romania, if I change up my hosting and I host in the U.S. as opposed to locally, could that affect my rankings?

And my initial response was it’s going to make no difference at all because, I mean, from my experience I’ve always hosted in the U.S. mostly because- well, for a number of reasons but mostly because the majority of the hosting here in Australia has been rubbish. Having said that, it’s been about five years since I’ve looked around so things may have changed but my initial response was it doesn’t really matter. I’ve always ran with .com, .au domain names and hosted in the U.S. and the performance of my site within Google has been fine but it’s always an interesting – that question always seems to come up. Should I host here in Australia for better rankings or, you know, or perhaps let me rephrase that, should I host locally for better rankings or does it matter at all?

Sean Kaye: So you told this person you don’t think it really matters?

John: Based upon my experiences, yes.

Sean Kaye: Can I ask you a different question? Do you think that things like bounce rate factor into whether or not somebody’s site ranks well?

John: That’s a good question. Bounce rate, well that kind of falls back on user experience and I keep hearing about user experience more and more especially over the last say six months. I don’t know if that – my answer to that is I really don’t know. I don’t see how Google could look at bounce rate as a potential ranking factor.

Sean Kaye: Do you want to know how they could potentially do it? So basically they know when they send you traffic and they know when you come back so if you hit the back button you come back to that same query straightaway. So they will be able to track that you went, they sent you somewhere, they know where they sent you and then you’ve come back within a couple of seconds and you’re still potentially you’re going to go somewhere else.

John: Right, yeah. That makes sense. Oh, sorry I was thinking time on site.

Sean Kaye: Right, so they could track it right?

Now, if you buy into the theory that bounce rate is actually some kind of a ranking signal, and I’m note really sure, I think then it plays into the discussion around does local hosting matter? Because I think it’s – depending, I mean, there’s obviously a lot of variables, but if you have reasonably good hosting in the country where you are then realistically, especially in a place like Australia, just this year, latency, right? You will have a faster end-user response if you’re here in Australia.

So – and that’s physics.

John: That’s a conditional sort of – that’s not always the case. I mean, you can – using my site as an example, I’m hosting in the U.S. and I’ve done a fair bit of work on my site as well as using a reputable host to get my load times down to 600 milliseconds.

Sean Kaye: But it’s the immutable laws of physics, right? It takes 150 milliseconds at the best of time for a roundtrip packet from Sydney to say Los Angeles. So if you can eliminate that by 100 milliseconds by having it in Sydney then you’d have to argue that potentially you’re going to get a faster turnaround time no matter what.

John: Well, you’re sort of touching on page speed there which is…

Sean Kaye: Well no, no… Let me come at this from a different angle.

John: Which is different again but I know what you’re saying, and yeah, I agree, it does make sense if you’re talking about -if you want to break it down to physics it should but you can host within Australia and use a really lousy host.

Sean Kaye: Yeah, I mean, there’s…

John: Use a really crappy host and the host might be at the end of the street but if the quality is rubbish then it defeats the purpose.

Sean Kaye: But you could make that argument and say that, you know, you could use GoDaddy in the U.S. and it be equally as crap or HostGator and it never be up.

John: Yeah, well you would never use GoDaddy anyway or HostGator for that matter.

Sean Kaye: A lot of people do though right so I think – I’m not making the argument I’m just sort of throwing out a counter position that if you believe in the idea that Google are somehow tracking user experience, if they’re tracking how long you stay on the page that they sent you to as a ranking variable then you also have to factor in that local performance has an impact.

John: Well we know that page speed is something that they look at and I mean, that makes sense and I agree with what you’re saying about – in terms of user experience, who knows what they’re looking at in the backend but it does make sense because Google cares about their users they want people coming back and using Google search as opposed to potentially going elsewhere because of poor user experience but…

Sean Kaye: So I think that that’s an argument that you could run to say that local hosting matters and I do think, I mean, I’ve seen in some of the clients that we work with in things like ecommerce and stuff that local hosting matters for user performance but there are ways around that so things like CDN’s and (Edge Points) and that kind of stuff can really cut down some of that stuff and then you start getting into how browsers work and you can kind of trick them and things like that. JavaScript now does a – Ajax and stuff does a lot of clever stuff so I think putting all of that aside, does hosting impact your rankings? In and of itself, probably not but it – you could run an argument, I think, on how it would.

John: I think to get any sort of definitive answer you would have to do some exhaustive testing across, you know, multiple domains and try and look for some patents. You know, the amount of testing involved, they would be quite substantial, I would think, but something that you touched on there about time on the site and not necessarily bounce rate, it’s closely related but this is something that came up in a Webinar that I was watching just recently and the person that was hosting the Webinar was suggesting that time on site is an indication of quality. And that’s just something that I don’t agree with because you and I both know that, for example sake, if you’re looking up a bus timetable or something you can potentially perform a search within Google, find the page, hit that search result and find that snidbit of information that you’re looking for with a matter of seconds and be out of there. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the site is of low quality. Do you know what I mean?

Sean Kaye: It could be – yeah, it could be very efficient, right, it could be…

John: Exactly.

Sean Kaye: …giving you the answer you want straightaway. I think time on site is one of those vanity metrics that people who talk a lot about how awesome their epic content is like to talk about. And I don’t think it’s a ranking factor in and of itself, that’s just my opinion. I think having people hover on your page for a long time may have some benefit to you for your site but I think bounce rate is a far more interesting number if you’re looking at it from the quality of the traffic that you’re getting, right, because there is a direct co-relation that you can see. You see it particularly when you’re tracking goals and stuff in analytics that if you lower your bounce rate almost inevitably your goal conversion goes up because it means that you’re getting better traffic.

John: Yeah, yeah. That was something that was brought up in that Webinar also and just out of interest I had a look at my own site because I’m pointing a lot of older videos that I shot back in 2011, 2012, where the topic isn’t exactly related to my target audience now. I’m doing something a little bit different and interestingly a lot of those visitations are up in the 75%, 80% sort of range but there was one thing that – and I’ll probably end up pulling all of those so that I can look at lowering my bounce rate, I’ve gone a little bit off topic but one thing that I did notice was that I’ve got one article that performs very well that has a bounce rate of 93% but the time on page for that particular article is almost 12 minutes.

So the metrics there are quite skewed. The people that are sticking around they’re really taking in the information that’s on that page.

Sean Kaye: Yeah, I can give you some interesting metrics on that one as well. So I have a client that I’ve worked with in the past who sells stuff, right, they have an ecommerce store and they switched their shopping cart, their backend system, yeah. And they had a bounce rate and time on page that didn’t really change between changing of their backend system and when they went from their previous system to their current system with the same design, the same bounce rate, the same time on page their conversions went from about 1.7% to 3.1% and so you sit there and you say, well, hold on, if all of those other numbers are the same why is the conversion better? Well, because the conversion of the new shopping cart is more efficient and so the same number of people are taking the same number of actions and they’re converting into goals or in this case, dollars.

John: What did they do, they changed content management system or something did they?

Sean Kaye: They changed shopping carts so they went from…

John: There’s so many variables there to consider that, you know, it could have been anything, it could have been design, could have been trust factor, could have been cost or…

Sean Kaye: Well that’s the interesting thing right, with this particular case that they – the design stayed exactly the same and so the only thing that they did was literally just changing their backend system but what happened was that they went to – they went to a one-page checkout and so their conversions went from 1.7 through to about 3.4, 3.2.

John: Yeah, it sounds like they simplified the checkout process and totally, you know, eliminated a bit of – you know, reduced the number of hops and eliminated some friction.

Sean Kaye: That’s right they made it easier. So that’s where – that’s a case where bounce rate and time on page really didn’t matter at all and the design didn’t matter it was just – you know, they made it easier for the person to do something. So we’re slightly off of topic but it is interesting that a lot of the metrics that people look at often it’s something totally unrelated that’s causing the friction, we’ll use your word.

John: Yeah, yeah.

Sean Kaye: So what was the upshot of this discussion? Like, so…

John: Well, I just – I thought it was an interesting discussion and one that I definitely wanted to talk about in this Podcast with you because, like I said, it’s a question that always seems to come up whether it be in an Internet marketing forum or in flying solo or just in general discussions with people and clients especially like should I be hosting in Australia, will it affect my rankings in Google? There’s so many ways around it. There’s so many different ways to answer that question. I’d like to know if all things being equal, if you were using a country-coded top-level domain, you’re hosting locally within your own country using a local IP address, you had the (ref length) set and you had Webmaster tools set to specifying geographical targeting set as well, like all of those things combined would that make a difference? Would it have a significant impact as opposed to just using a generic top-level domain hosting or whatever and perhaps just setting geographical targeting within Webmaster tools?

Sean Kaye: Yeah, I mean, I personally don’t think so. I mean, I haven’t seen any single case study ever suggesting that, you know, if you host in your own country you get some kind of a boost like that Google is looking at your IP address and if it’s in the – you know, if it’s an (AU) kind of IP address or whatever then you get a bonus because you’re in Australia. I’ve never seen anything like that and that’s kind of where it would have to fall and I just don’t think so. Now, I think you make an interesting point though right because you keep saying, which I think is valuable, would you see a considerable bump, would you see a considerable boost and one of the things that you see a lot with people, right, is that they spend a lot of their time doing things that aren’t going to give them a significant boost so their return on investment is just not there.

John: Yeah, and this is – that’s essentially what I said in that conversation was, you know, look it’s something that you could certainly take into consideration but it’s nothing that keeps me awake at night. You know, I host my own site, Works Media, I host it in the U.S. I use a .com.au domain and I set geographical targeting to Australia within Webmaster Tools and I’ve worked hard to get my response times and my latency down and worked hard towards increasing site speed or working towards making sure that my site speed is good and I’m certainly not struggling in the search results in terms of performance. So I don’t know.

You know, it’s interesting because during that discussion I jumped on and had a look. There’s a video shot by Matt Cutts and he talks about how Google looks at IP addresses to better determine where the site is hosted and who – and how the SERPS should be influenced by certain queries and where that – and where that site should show up based upon where those queries are performed. So, I don’t know. I think if you were using a generic top-level domain like a .com or a .org or something like that and you didn’t have Webmaster Tools set then chances are you’re going to just show up wherever, U.S. or wherever, but I guess the only way around that for Google, if they don’t have – if they’re not receiving any sort of signals they would have to look at the IP address perhaps as a last resort.

Sean Kaye: Yeah, I would imagine that, you know – that would be an interesting test in and of itself if you didn’t set it, anything in Webmaster Tools, to tell Google where you were and you had a generic top-level domain and you hosted in Australia, would you turn up in the .com.au rankings higher than in the U.S. rankings?

John: Yeah, certainly would – it would make for an interesting test and it’s one that I would like to take a look at, time being the only constraint, because you’d have to – I think to do it properly I mean, you’d have to throw a few domains at it and see what happens.

Sean Kaye: You’d have to – or the other alternative that you could do is you could take a site that is, you know, currently there and then shift the hosting and see what happens. I don’t know, I guess it comes back again to it’s a pretty esoteric idea and I just couldn’t imagine that after all of the years that people have been putting into particularly local search, all of the effort that’s gone into local search that if there was some, you know, significant magic bullet of local hosting that it would have been missed or it wouldn’t be, you know, widely discussed. That to me is pretty odd.

John: Yeah, no, I’ve never seen any evidence of that suggests that hosting within a – well, I’m using Australia as an example because that’s where I’m at, but I see no evidence that suggests that hosting within your own country has a significantly positive impact on the performance of your Web site within the search results.

I mean, you know, in fact, I’ve had clients that have come to me with horrible rankings. Admittedly we’ve made some changes on site and we’ve pushed a few links at it but I’ve shifted some of those clients from Australian-based hosting to the U.S. and seen their rankings improve. So…

Sean Kaye: I think it’s an interesting one. If you asked me about it in a vacuum I’d say that it stinks of the general level of desperation that people feel towards SEO now because SEO is hard now, it’s not easy to do and so everybody’s’ looking for some kind of advantage.

John: That’s right.

Sean Kaye: And so they’re looking – because that’s a quick win right? That’s a shortcut that you can take. You can – if you could move your host and get a 10% bump in the rankings, woo-ho, it beats having to do good content and promote that content to people and build up an audience, right? That’s hard. So let me just move my hosting and get a huge bump. And that’s – I think that’s what that smells like if you asked me that in a bubble.

John: Yeah, and it’s definitely a common question, it’s a frequently asked question, I get that question a lot by small business owners in particular. You know, I’ve got this shopping cart like I’m currently hosted with Bluehost or something which I think is in America, should I shift my hosting to Australia, will that help me in Google? Yeah…

Sean Kaye: You wonder who perpetuates that stuff?

John: Ah, look, I think there’s a lot of superstitious myths sort of kicking around; there’s plenty of them especially in the SEO space but, yeah, it certainly made for an interesting discussion and, you know, there were a few that were jumping up and down saying that it really does matter and you should host in your own country. Personally I stand by what I said in that discussion and that is, hey, if you’re using a country-coded top-level domain and you set Webmaster Tools, geographical targeting within Webmaster Tools you shouldn’t have any worries. I mean, I don’t and I have plenty of clients that I’ve got that don’t so…

Sean Kaye: Yeah, I think it’s – they’re just – again, it sounds like something that some local SEO guy who has some kind of backhander affiliate agreement with a hosting company in his local town runs around and tells small business owners, that’s what it sounds like to me.

John: Yeah, who knows. I mean, I don’t know, it’s not just here in Australia, I mean, that question was asked in a global forum actually within Internet Marketing Super Friends so…

Sean Kaye: That’s not a very super question.

John: Well, perhaps not…

Sean Kaye: It generates interesting discussion.

John: It does, it does.

Sean Kaye: It generates an interesting discussion and it brings out other topics like we sort of ventured off into bounce rate and time on site and page quality and all of that sort of gear but in an of itself it’s one of those ones where you sort of look at it and you go, well, if you just wrote better content or you just figured out how to promote your content better you’d be so much further ahead it wouldn’t matter anyway.

John: Yeah, well that’s right, I mean, like I said, you can use a host within your own country and it could be a horrible service provider and your site might be going down every five minutes or taking forever and a day to load or – I mean, you could be using a fantastic host and your site could be a dogs breakfast. So there’s lots to consider but my answer to business owners that are listening to this Podcast is to, yeah, I wouldn’t be losing any sleep over it. I think so long as you set geographical targeting within Webmaster Tools, I mean, we’ve got that option now within Webmaster Tools, so may as well take advantage of it.

Sean Kaye: I think small business owners should focus on conversion. Make the most of the traffic that you get.

John: That’s right but that’s probably for another Podcast.

Sean Kaye: Yeah, it’s a whole other episode.

John: Well, I’m disappointed Sean, I thought you would have gone off on a tangent. I didn’t get a chance to use my buzzer.

Sean Kaye: See there you go. It’s one of those ones where we’re in violent agreement.

John: We are, this can’t be right.

Sean Kaye: We haven’t talked in a few weeks so maybe there’s…

John: We’re being overly nice and just to let the listeners now, Sean and I – we’ve known each other for quite some time now and, yeah, we had some interesting discussions about various topics a lot of them being SEO related because I guess we’re both – I’m invested in this space and Sean is passionate about the subject and quite knowledgeable so I’ll mail you an envelop full of chocolates.

Sean Kaye: Can I have an Ask Pat T-shirt?

John: A what?

Sean Kaye: An Ask Pat T-shirt?

John: Hang on, you know that deserves a buzzer.

Sean Kaye: Isn’t it – I thought that’s why I turned up. I was promised an Ask Pat T-shirt.

John: I wasn’t quite sure what you said there and I thought you might have – I thought you swore.

Sean Kaye: No, no, we have to keep it clean because otherwise you won’t get in iTunes.

John: That’s right, I have to change my rating on iTunes.

Sean Kaye: I didn’t even use the word poo and that’s hard for me.

John: That’s borderline!

Sean Kaye: Yeah.

John: Anything else Sean you want to share with us, your brains and other wisdom?

Sean Kaye: No man, I’m all good.

John: All right, cool. Just one more time. All right dude, I appreciate you jumping in on the call today.

Sean Kaye: And being the new Byron.

John: Yeah, being the new Byron. We’ll see if – you’re welcome back at any time. We’ll see how it goes, I’m sure he’ll listen to this Podcast and if you are listening Byron get well mate, it doesn’t sound good.

Sean Kaye: I think he’s just ducking you dude.

John: Well, maybe but…

Sean Kaye: I was sick last week to get away from you too so there you go.

John: You were too, yeah. What did you have?

Sean Kaye: I just had the flu, everybody in my house had it. No I had swine flu when I was in England one time but that’s a whole different story.

John: Swine flu, actually I shouldn’t laugh, I think I’ve heard that story.

Sean Kaye: Yeah, that’s a story for another day.

John: Yeah, and it was 40 degrees and you were wearing a wool suit?

Sean Kaye: Yeah, yeah in Germany running up and down a 13-story building.

John: Yeah, that’s lovely. All right dude, let’s get out of here. Thanks Sean.

Sean Kaye: See you later.

John: See you mate, bye.

Here are the videos we spoke of during the podcast.

What impact does server location have on rankings?

Can the geographic location of a web server affect SEO?

The post Ep22 – Does Hosting in Your Own Country Get You Better Rankings in Google? appeared first on SEO Point.