Ask HN: How does server location and latency effect Google rankings?

2 pointsretube3 comments

Hi All,

As far as I understand, if you have a ccTLD (e.g .co.uk or .com.au) Google will use this to determine your websites locale, and where your site is physically located is irrelevant. Is this right?

HOWEVER - hosting location will affect latency. How much of an impact might this have on rankings?

Thoughts, experiences much appreciated.

View on HN

90% of your search rank is determined by the number of high-quality sites linking to you. The other 10% is titles, metas, keyword density, on page markup, interlinking between your pages, and finally page load time (in roughly that order). Page load time only becomes a factor after evaluating all of the other factors first. If you're going to spend time doing anything, focus on the 90%, not the last 1%.

I've moved my servers all over the place, from Canada to the US and to Europe, never seen any effect on the rankings.

Yes, hosting location affects latency, but if you host in places where the latency differences are so large that you will see a change in rankings I would suggest that you find a better provider. Unless of course there are no alternatives.

ok great, thanks for the feedback

Reply on news.ycombinator.com