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trickobrien

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From a purely SEO perspective,would hosting a .IE domain in Ireland or America have any effect on search engines?

I have a site that is starting to get busy (around 3,000 uniques a day) which at the moment is hosted in Ireland

At least fifty percent of the traffic is from Ireland the rest is European and American

Most of the search engine referrals come from google.ie-which is significant

Getting too many problems with Irish hosting,would moving it to US hosting have an impact on the search engine traffic from Ireland?
 

link8r

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From a purely SEO perspective,would hosting a .IE domain in Ireland or America have any effect on search engines?

Hi Trick, I hope this is helpful: I think you have 2 issues - one is the choice of domain and the other is the hosting issue. So I'll split them into 2 and deal with them like that.

I'm not sure how, a .IE is geo targeted at Ireland and would not be seen as an American domain. From a latency perspective, to Googlebot, it might be slightly closer to Google....but an Irish site hosted in Ireland would probably suffer the least latency and therefore be better for Irish users. If you've bought a .IE to target people in France or the USA, then you may have made the problem a little more difficult for yourself but thats just my 2c....

Whatever your ranking is in Ireland, you should check it for each of the countries in Europe and the USA - they are definitely going to be different.

I have a site that is starting to get busy (around 3,000 uniques a day) which at the moment is hosted in Ireland. At least fifty percent of the traffic is from Ireland the rest is European and American

From a Google/SEO/Organics point of view, as it's a .IE, its going to rank better in Ireland than it is in the UK. The UK and the USA again, have a much larger population. So if you had 200,000 visits per month in Ireland (for arguments sake, numbers are made up) then that would represent 10% of the working population. It would represent a much lower % of the UK and a fraction of a tiny % of the US population. Therefore your penetration/reach/visibility is far greater in Ireland than elsewhere because it's a .IE

If you had a TLD (instead of a ccTLD = .IE, .FR) like a .COM, .ORG, .NET then you may be able to better Geo-Target the USA and build more traffic. That would still hold true regardless of the physical hosting.

Obviously a lot of companies choose their domain to match their company name and/or their brand names. Naturally, many Irish businesses opt for an Irish .IE domain and/or Ireland in the domain name. Lots of people also believe that domains are universally accessible.

My own vies, which I've held for some years:
  1. Yes, your domains should reflect your company names and your brands (if separate)
  2. Yes you should select a domain of the country you're operating in
  3. But you should also consider the users in other countries, their domains and how search engines present rankings
  4. And you should consider generic AND localised domains as part of a wider strategy

Most of the search engine referrals come from google.ie-which is significant

Because it's a .IE...

Getting too many problems with Irish hosting,would moving it to US hosting have an impact on the search engine traffic from Ireland?

I didn't Irish Hosting was mutually the same. I have the exact opposite experience. Clients who host in the US (because of their web developer) have a much longer wait for issue resolution than Irish companies. With the main Irish companies that we recommend/use, we rarely have to raise a ticket.

I'm not sure who you're hosting with but I think it's unfair to think that all hosting companies operate the same way.

I also wonder if you're on shared or dedicated or cloud hosting. With a large volume of traffic and if you're site is heavy (i.e. video/images/ajax - the more data - the more resources you'll need) - then its going to be about making sure you have adequate bandwidth, processing power and that you've configured it properly.

For what it's worth, we have two clients moving to Ireland this month from 2 separate US providers who have very bad bandwidth availability. In once case, the website (ASP) takes 15-20 seconds to load if it hasn't been accessed in an hour. (I didn't develop/configure it - I'm just worried about the load times)

If you move and think moving will solve the problem, you may be chasing a red herring. Find the underlaying issue and fix that. For the most part, Irish hosting companies in my experience (over 10 years) is very reliable and the bandwidth and resources dedicated are second to none.
 

Satanta

New Member
Great post there by link8r, covers nearly everything you mentioned and potentially raises a few new questions for you to think about.

Whatever your ranking is in Ireland, you should check it for each of the countries in Europe and the USA - they are definitely going to be different.
Handy little tool from the guys over at Red Fly Marketing to help with that one, google global. Well worth taking a look at.

From a Google/SEO/Organics point of view, as it's a .IE, its going to rank better in Ireland than it is in the UK. The UK and the USA again, have a much larger population. So if you had 200,000 visits per month in Ireland (for arguments sake, numbers are made up) then that would represent 10% of the working population. It would represent a much lower % of the UK and a fraction of a tiny % of the US population. Therefore your penetration/reach/visibility is far greater in Ireland than elsewhere because it's a .IE
This is really the important part imho.

You mention that the Irish visitors account for ~50% of the visitors. How do they stack up in terms of the actual conversions/purchases/etc?

If the non Irish visitors are converting well, you're probably better off looking at having a gTLD in terms of future growth/expansion (obviously it depends on your business, future goals, etc., of which we have no idea). In a perfect world, you'd look at having a .co.uk targeted exclusively at the UK market and a .com or other targeted at the US, but how you'd choose to go about doing it is very much a case by case decision, with pro's and con's to any method you choose.

If you had a TLD (instead of a ccTLD = .IE, .FR) like a .COM, .ORG, .NET then you may be able to better Geo-Target the USA and build more traffic. That would still hold true regardless of the physical hosting.
I'll throw in a slight caveat there. While it's perfectly true with SEs like google where you can designate your target location via webmaster tools, I'd suggest that hosting location (not the physical location of the host, but the IP location - e.g. Irish hosts have US IP blocks available if requested/needed) would be relevant to ensure you're catching the SEs that don't allow for this level of customisation and need to rely on the other signals (such as IP).

Taking an holistic view of it, if you have a site targeted at a specific country (even if it's already targeted via a ccTLD) it makes sense to keep the IP connected to the target country. It's not essential, you can do perfectly fine without it, but it's certainly something I'd consider. As this normally doesn't require a change of host or significant additional cost (if any), it carries (some potential and some tangible) benefits with relatively no negatives.

On the Irish hosting side of things, I think link8r covered it perfectly. My own experience would very much echo what he outlined, so unless there are some very specific technical issues you've encountered there isn't really a whole lot to add.
 

trickobrien

New Member
Great responses,and im glad its to the point on this issue

Firstly let me say-Irish hosting (at least the three i have used is good,really good in some cases) is ok, until your site gets busy (concurrent connections and monthly transfer limits, seems like VPS is the only option)

And of course you get unlimited packages from a hosting farm in Texas for way less

The site earns from adsense with a CTR of just under 2 percent-and the Irish clicks pay well

I dont want to **** it all up-my first site earning on autopilot lol- but at the moment 15 percent of my traffic is getting a 503 -Service temporarily unavailable -so thats costing me a bit (and thats with 400 gigs of monthly transfer and 200 concurrent connections)
 

link8r

New Member
Hi Trick,

It sounds like you may just need Cloud hosting where you can scale up as needed and avoid the 503's?
 
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