During a hangout, one SEO professional was concerned about their server’s location. Their main question was: does it really matter what server type you have and where it is located?
Say, for example, this professional has a client and their target audience for everything is in India, but the location of the server is in the U.S.
Does it matter if Google is sending more traffic to the website from the U.S.? Rather than from India?
John explained that there’s nothing in Google’s algorithms that takes into account geo-targeting with the location of the server.
From this perspective, it doesn’t matter as much.
Sometimes, there could be a speed difference that you may want to examine, or test where you can host the server closer to where you users may reside.
This can translate into a faster connection.
If you use a CDN (Content Delivery Network), it’s possible for the CDN to have nodes in different countries.
This principle is the same as if you were to host your server in more than one location.
From an SEO perspective, and a geo-targeting point of view, it’s a non-issue.
If it is, however, a critical speed issue that impacts Core Web Vitals, then this could affect ranking as a result.
This happens at approximately the 0:37 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 1 0:37
I just have two follow up questions on my last—the previous—before the outage when, you know, the server outage which I have asked already. So this is like, does it really matter what type of server you have, and in which country it is located?
Like, let’s say I have a client whose target audience for everything has been in India, but the server is in the U.S.
So does it matter that Google will start sending more of the traffic from the U.S.? Or is it like showing more of the pages in the US rather than in India. Is it something like that?
John 1:09
There’s nothing around geo-targeting with the server location. So from that point of view, it doesn’t matter so much. Sometimes there is a bit of a speed difference that you might want to look at, or at least test where if you can host your server closer to where most of your users are, then it tends to be a bit of a faster connection.
Sometimes it plays a bigger role, sometimes it plays a smaller role. It’s, I don’t know, sometimes worth trying out. Also, if you use a content delivery network, then oftentimes the content delivery network will have nodes in different countries anyway. And it’ll be essentially the same as if you had your server in multiple locations.
So it’s from an SEO point of view, from a geo-targeting point of view, it’s a non issue. From a speed point of view, maybe. You can usually test that as well. If it’s a critical speed issue that affects the Core Web Vitals and the page experience ranking factor on your side, then that could have been a ranking effect.
But it’s not so much that it’s because you have your server in a different location. It’s just because your website is perceived as being slow by your users.
