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When Your Site Doesn’t Rank No Matter What

You’ve done everything right, your site is still not showing up in Google searches after several months, and you can’t figure out why.

It could be your IP location - specifically the country in which the server that hosts your web site is located.

The problem is some USA companies have servers in other countries, specifically Canada. In fact, GoDaddy just opened up a Canadian facility.

For that matter, with the global nature of the Internet, you may not even be aware of what country your host company itself is actually located in.

To find out your IP location, go to Domain Tools and type in your URL. Down toward the middle of the page you’ll see this section:

Server Data

Server Type: Apache/2.0.61 (Unix) PHP/4.4.7 mod_ssl/2.0.61 OpenSSL/0.9.7e mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 DAV/2 SVN/1.4.2

IP Address: 123.45.9.78

IP Location United States - California - South Lake Tahoe - New Dream Network Llc

Response Code: 200

Blacklist Status: Clear

Domain Status: Registered And Active Website

This tells me my server is located in the USA, California specifically. But if it was located in Canada my site would not show up in USA Google searches.

I did a little checking for an Active Rain reader whose dynamic real estate site just wasn’t ranking, and discovered his site was hosted in Canada. His site may have ranked well in in that country, but that sure wasn’t helping him with the local searches he needed!

Addendum: Let me clarify that you want your site hosted in the country you are targeting. So if your site is about real estate in the United States, that is where you want your server to be located. However, if you're selling condos in Japan, then your site should be hosted in Japan. When a search engine returns results one of the factors it checks to know what country's results to serve up is where the server is located

Syndicatd from SEO Diva - White Hat SEO Advice and Tips

Posted by Kay Frenzer-Zeeh ~ Real Estate SEO on 07/14/2008 07:28 PM

Comments (28)

ip location, server, web host, web hosting

Post is included in group: Blogging & SEO
Post is included in group: Rainmaking - Internet Marketing Strategies
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28 Comments on When Your Site Doesn’t Rank No Matter What

JUL

2008

Wow, Kay, I did not know that. Thank you; thank goodness I am in the good 'ol USA! I had no ideathat Google did not recognize other countries.

Kay - You learn something new everyday! Thank you very much for this information. I don't think I ever thought about that as an issue before, but makes sense!

Stan Barsch

While that is a factor, but there are many things you can still do to overcome that. My (Internet Marketing) company used to host several sites in Canada and they all ranked very well.

I'd say if you a site isn't ranking well, there are three general factors to look at:

1. Onsite coding. Primarly look at your title tags, if they aren't optimized, you won't likely rank well.

2. Inbound links. If you have no inbound link relevance, no one (not even Google) will know that you exist. You can build links in several manners, but for basics, I recommend getting a Yahoo listing if you don't have one.

3. Do you have a blog attached to your domain? Blogging is the quickest way to getting successful ranking in search engines. I have had blog posts rank in the top 10 of Google within 24 hours at time. Blogging is one key to getting good rankings, but make sure you are using a blog that resides on your domain and links to your primary website.

Just my $0.012

@David - Google does recognize other countries - see my addendum for clarification!

@Stan - just one more thing to check on.

@Consumers Advantage Mortgage - I'm not saying that's the main factor. If you read some of my other blog posts you'll understand that I've written extensively about how to rank. This is just one more thing to check on. And if your company hosted in Canada and you ranked well in the USA you were lucky.

I have one domain that was hosted from Australia. Customer servie is good Your blog is an excellent reason why I need to have it hosted in the US.

Kay - Thanks for the insight !!

Okay, Kay - help me! I've worked hard on my Point 2 site that does not rank well. I purchased the domain directly from Point 2 and sure enough, following your steps, it shows up as Alberta, Canada.

How do I fix this??

@Leolinda - Australia! Goes to show you never know.

@MaryAnn - you're welcome!

@Debbie - first of all, ask Point 2 if they have a server in the US. Often Canadian firms have servers located in the US. (I'm assuming you're not talking about UCMissouri.com, which has hosting in Atlanta.) The search engines also look at the text on the site, and where backlinks originate, to determine where to serve the results, but the IP location is the first indicator they look at.

JUL

2008

Kay, I will email Point2. (FindYourFreedomMissouri.com) The site you mention is my office site provided by my franchise. Thanks - I'll be back to let you know how this goes!

Kay that is interesting. I never realized their were firms that hosted outside the US. I just bought a domain from Go Daddy...hopefully not in Canada.

Location of hosting plays only a minor roll in Googles search engine algorithm. However, it does have a greater influence in Live Search. With that said I would not get too worried about it and start moving hosting.

Kay - Here is my response from Point 2:

"Thank you for your email. Unfortunately we are not able to change the site IP location for you. We are located in Canada and do all our hosting here. I apologize for not being able to do this for you but it is not technically possible for us to do for you at this time. Please let us know if you have any other questions."

Since Point 2 has such a huge following in the US, I'm rather surprised by their answer.

JUL

2008

This is very interesting. I also have a point2agent site, and it is hosted in Canada. I don't seem to be having any problems with google ranking my site. Maybe it would be even better if it was hosted in USA.

Debbie - I'm surprised too. I would imagine the bulk of their business is in the US. Problem is, who knows if it's the Candadian hosting or the fact that they offer dynamic sites. I won't even work on those types of sites, but I know there is someone here on AR that specializes in Point2 sites. You may want to contact her (sorry - I can't remember the name).

Bill - where you buy the domain won't matter. It's the location of the hosting server of your web site.

IMNJ - I agree, no need to panic. As the title of my blog post indicates, this should be a concern only if you can't rank after doing everything right, including proper site optimization, backlinks etc. Then it's something to consider.

This is from Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Does location of server matter? I use a .com domain but my content is for customers in the UK.

In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, ".co.uk " domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server's IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.

Above comment by me :)

Very informative post and comments. Never a shortage of learning in the rain.

I can't believe Point2 would not have known the affects of hosting the respective sites in a different country. I don't think it will hurt too too much though. I have websites in Canada and their hosted in the States (bluehost), they still get ranked well.

JUL

2008

I think there is no need for anybody to start changing their servers. IP location may ( if it does any) play very very minor part in search engine rankings

JUL

2008

Kay, thank you for the tip. I would never had know what all that stuff was.

Kay, I just checked out my site. Turns out that I have the same problem as Debbie. My site is in Canada as well.

Thanks for the info....very informative.

JUL

2008

@Trunda - that's for sure.

@Robert - it's only one factor, but something to keep in mind.

@Aniruddha - see the comment from Google - it does play a part, and in some cases can be a major factor. That's why I suggest if a site is not ranking well it needs to be looked at.

@Michelle - how is your site ranking?

@Allen - you're welcome.

Thanks for the info and providing the link to domain tools...

Geogia Real Estate Glossary

AUG

2008

Thanks I did not know we can check our domain this easy.

Thank you for the link and ifo to this very good site!

Great point I am about to get a server for our mls hosting and this made me think

DEC

2008

Kay,

Thank-you for this post. Sorry it took me so long to read it. I am ready to start thinking about SEO again. I got a couple of my sites up pretty high but they are down some now.

DEC

Good info for us to know!! Sure can be frustrating to keep working on a site and not have it start moving up the ranks.

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