Local Hosting

 

Local hosting forms part of the geo-targeting story - but it also contributes to other factors related to search engine optimization. Search engines carry out a reverse IP look up IP addresses associated with sites and pages they have crawled. This gives them:

 

1. Information on where to locate a particular site geographically in the index.

2. Information which can be used to associate to a link giving it a different value depending on location.

 

Let's look at this from the search engines point of view. If you're trying to provide the most relevant results to a searcher in Austria, searching in German, you're going to give web sites also with an Austrian address a slight boost because that's more likely to generate higher click through rates from search engine results page - a metric which gives you confirmation about relevancy.

 

If, as the search engine, you're looking at pages for an American searcher and you have two sites where everything else is equal - but one has more links coming from other countries - which are you most likely to favor?

 

The site with international links is likely to be chosen purely because a number of international links would suggest the site has a better reputation than the competing site where all other factors are equal. Additionally, the internal links of a family of sites will be given more credence if the locally targeted pages are also hosted close to the target users.

 

So the point about local hosting is?  In addition to providing local users with pages a little faster, local hosting ensures that:

1. Sites hosted local are given a slight boost in the rankings - and especially in the ‘pages from..' type of searches.

2. Links from locally hosted sites will be treated as slightly more important than the same links featuring on a network which sits all on US servers.

 

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