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:
- Yes, your domains should reflect your company names and your brands (if separate)
- Yes you should select a domain of the country you're operating in
- But you should also consider the users in other countries, their domains and how search engines present rankings
- 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.