Hi all,
I know this has been brought up before, but I was hoping to get a clearer answer based on my situation.  I am working for a company that has offices in 5 separate countries and each of the offices has their own website that is tailored to that market with our home office in London.  My question is this:

Does it matter to google for ranking if I have an office in South Africa with website and domain name of "www.website.co.za" and the site hosted in South Africa or could I get the same regional ranking with google if the site was hosted in London at my office?

Thanks in advance

 

If you have a regional domain then it doesn't really matter where the site is hosted.

Presumably the regional sites have regional specific content or are they duplicates under different domains?  

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Thanks for the information.  We have different local content for the different regions.  So Local South African news for the co.za site.  I am just wondering as we are hosting our country specific websites in the actual country.  So our South Africa website is being hosted in South Africa and our Chinese website in China, ect.  This is becoming an administrative nightmare.  What I really want to do is to host it all out of one hosting facility with each website with its own IP address.

Thanks again

Melbert09,

I don't know if this will help. but Google Webmaster Tools has an option to set the geographic target of a site (go to Dashboard -> Tools -> Set Geographic Target). It's supposed to "associate a particular geographic location with this site if you are targeting users within that area."

However, I tried doing that with my .COM site (it was hosted in Canada but targeting the USA), and I didn't observe any difference in traffic.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My Visual FoxPro site: www.ml-consult.co.uk
 

If you have regional domains then you should be ok hosting them anywhere.

The problem will occur if you host outside the country with a non country-specific domain.

For instance. Hosting a UK focussed site under a .com domain in the UK will be fine and the site will appear for UK Google searches.
However, the same site, same domain hosted in the USA will not appear as prominently in UK searches.

The Google Webmaster tools thing is a good idea, but will only make a difference, if any, in the event of hosting non-regional domains outside the region.

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Tyres: Mine's a pint of the black stuff.
Mike: You can't drink a pint of Bovril.