.ie hosted out side of Ireland?

[splitpea]

My site is currently hosted with Blacknight and sits at no1 on google Ireland for many important keywords. Page rank 4. I'm very happy.

But I'm looking at moving to a saas based ecommerce cart but unfortunately Blacknight or anyone else in Ireland doesn't offer any.

So if my .ie was hosted outside of Ireland is my google rankings going to drop big time?

 

[alastair_scs]

Hi Splitpea

The short answer is that it might do. I haven't looked into or tested this for a while but when I did, country specific versions of Google seemed to rank sites better when both the local domain extension and hosting in the country were in place. If anything, the host location was probably more important. Since then I have always tried to host in my target country so it's actually been a while since I tested this.

I should say that many people, probably even most, believe that it makes no difference. That is, that the .ie on its own is enough. That suggests that in most cases it makes little or no noticable difference.

If I was in your position and I had to move the host outside Ireland, I would probably expect to get away with little or no change. I would have my fingers crossed and I wouldn't be making any guarantees to my boss but I'd be hoping for no change.

 

[Mushroom]

.ie hosted outside Ireland

Hi there

I wasn't aware hosting a .ie outside Ireland would make a difference to SEO is this the case? I'm with a US company and I'm very happy with them, they're quick to reply to any questions and always helpful. I waited 3 days for a reply from one Irish company so I would be reluctant to move but if it does effect SEO am I going to have to move my site?

 

[achieve]

I can't state this categorically, but my opinion is that hosting your ie outside of Ireland shouldn't make a difference. I base this on the fact that I have many ie's hosted on my dedicated server which is located in UK, and most perform very well from an SEO point of view. The ones that are not performing as well as I would like, are not performing well for other reasons!

 

[limericklad]

Would it be the same for .com`s hosted outside Ireland?

 

[achieve]

Although I do have dot coms performing just fine, hosted on servers outside of Ireland, I think if you have the option that perhaps hosting in Ireland may be better. Having said that, with Google Webmaster Tools, you can now tell Google what country you are targetting, and as such the location of your server should not have the same importance as it may have had previously.

 

[limericklad]

Great stuff thank you for that.

 

[MOH]

Although I do have dot coms performing just fine, hosted on servers outside of Ireland, I think if you have the option that perhaps hosting in Ireland may be better. Having said that, with Google Webmaster Tools, you can now tell Google what country you are targetting, and as such the location of your server should not have the same importance as it may have had previously.

Bear in mind though that while a large majority of people use Google, you still risk losing out on Bing and Yahoo traffic if your only targetting is through GWT