Lies about hosting and search engine rankings

Published on May 16, 2012 Lies about hosting and search engine rankings

For whatever reason, not everyone tells the truth about their products and services. Why do they do it? It’s not always because they’re sinister, their marketing staff may just be ignorant about how things work. It’s disappointing when small competitors try these types of approaches to make a little inroad into the market, but when lies and ignorance come from larger sized competitors who you expect to do their research and tell the truth, you have to ask yourself what else they would do for a buck?

Where have you heard this: “if you host in Australia you’ll get better search engine rankings in search engines for ‘pages from Australia’ searches”? As plausible as it may sound, this is not a true statement and well known amongst search engine marketing professionals as not to be true. Search engines are not naive enough to be fooled by the physical location of a customer’s website as to who operates the site. This would be the equivalent of saying that a jacket is not Australian if it is made in Hong Kong.

What matters to the search engines is:

• Who is the target audience for a website? (You can define this in Webmaster Tools if there’s any ambiguity)
• Where the registered office for the business is located (You can register the business with Google places if there’s any doubt)
• The contact details of the company operating the website (as published on the website).
• The domain name and the country it represents (A .com.au domain for example cannot be registered unless you have an Australian business number, Australian Trademark or Australian State Business Number)
• The content of your website – who is it targeted at? Is the content relevant to the search?
• The popularity of your website – how many quality, relevant, businesses and websites link to your site, recommend your website or brand or list your site in business directories. The more authoritative the link back to your site, the more heavily the search engine weights that link.
• Other cues like performance – an exceptionally slow website or one full of errors will impact more negatively on search results than where a site is physically located.

Search engines use a number of cues to determine what pages show up in a “pages from Australia” search and in what order. If you base your decision on only where your website is hosted based only on where a site is physically located, then you’re being taken for a ride. We suggest you look at where the company is based who is hosting your website, where your support is located, the quality of the data centre, the security of the website and functionality of the site you are operating.

Does it have search engine friendly urls for example? Do you get any search engine marketing reports with your package? Don’t forget about your brand either – design is important and should never be over looked because when people click through on a link, if the site is unprofessional chances are they’ll leave.