Well, way, way, way back in the dawn of Google, you know it was funny because people would rank in different countries based only on the TLD. So, FR meant that you’re French. But, that’s all that they knew.
Back in 2000/2001 type time frame, we started to look at where the servers were located, its IP address. To say ‘Oh, well, it doesn’t end in .fr, but it is located in France according to its IP address’, so maybe this is really useful for French users. That’s the primary way that you have an impact on Google’s rankings.
You know, if you’re just in the United States, your site is in the United States, you’ve never been outside of the United States, you might never notice any of these factors.
But, where your server is located, whether it is in the US, or France or Germany or Britain, or Canada or anywhere else, can determine our rankings. For example, if you go to Google.Com, and type in ‘bank’, you’ll get different results than if you go to Google.Com.Au and you type in ‘bank’, or Google.Com.UK.
We do absolutely try to return the most relevant results to each user in each country. And server location, in terms of IP address, is a factor in that.
Related posts:
- What is the best way to serve different content according to user country IP (legal reasons)?
- Hi Matt, could you confirm whether the geographic location of the web host has any significant ranking factors for organic SEO?
- What impact does “page bloat” have on Google rankings? Most of the winners in SEO seem to have very simple pages (very few images, HTML-only design), sometimes to the detriment to the user in a poorly designed page.
- When will Google create software similar to Web Position so that SEOs, spam fighters and regular webmasters can check rankings etc. without violating the guidelines? Why not make a better product instead of going to war against these products?
- Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on “brands” in search engine rankings? If the answer is “yes” – what’s Google’s definition of a brand? Inspired by Aaron Wall’s post www.seobook.com/google-branding
