Google is addressing whether changing your website hosting provider to one in a new location can affect your search engine optimization and search rankings.
This topic is covered in the latest installment of the Ask Googlebot YouTube video series.
The following question was sent to John Mueller, Google search attorney:
“Does migrating a website hosting site affect SEO? For example, an Australian website (and target audience) migrates its hosting site from Australia to the US.”
In response, Mueller says there will initially be some changes to how Google handles the site after the hosting change.
Does this include anything that affects search rankings? See his full answer in the next section.
What happens in Google after changing the website hosting site
Google will slow down crawling (at first)
Mueller says the biggest change you’ll likely notice after changing website hosts is a slowdown in crawling.
This is done to ensure that Google will not cause any problems by crawling the site too frequently.
It will resume crawling as soon as Google knows there will be no problems doing so
Mueller adds that this will happen no matter what hosting change you make. Whether you are moving to a hosting provider on the same site, or to a new site, Google will be careful about how much it crawls the site.
“When it comes to moving hosting, you might see our systems initially slow to a crawl a little bit. Anytime we become aware of a change in hosting, we want to make sure we don’t cause any problems. And so we tend to slow the crawl automatically as a precaution.
Over time, once our systems tell us that going faster doesn’t cause any problems, we’ll speed up again. This is independent of the type of hosting change you’re making. It doesn’t matter if you move to another provider in the future, or move to another country.
Website loading time may be affected
Moving website hosting to a new location may affect the loading speed of the website for users.
If the majority of your visitors live far from where the website is hosted, this can result in a significantly slower user experience.
In turn, this may affect speed factors and page experience.
Mueller continues:
“One practical effect you might notice is that larger geographic movements can affect how quickly a website loads for users. Due to physics and computer networking, it can take longer for egress to reach a remote server. Depending on how strong that appears, this can play a role in Speed and page experience ranking factor for a website.
Possible solution: host your website in multiple locations
To avoid the possibility of your website loading time being negatively affected, you can consider hosting your website on servers in multiple locations.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) often do this, and depending on the hosting platform you use, your site may be on multiple servers already.
Mueller explains:
“To be as close as possible to users, some websites use servers in many different locations. A content delivery network often does this. If you’re on a hosting platform, they probably already do it for you, too. This configuration is fine for Google.”
The website server location is not used for geotargeting
Your website host’s location is not used for geotargeting.
So search results in a particular geographic area will not be affected as a result of changing website hosts.
Mueller concludes his response:
“In terms of SEO, server location is not used for geotargeting. If you want your website to target users in a specific location, you will need to use either the country code top level domain or the appropriate setting in Google Search Console.”
In short, changing your website host location will have a temporary effect on crawling, and can negatively affect load time.
This kind of change will not affect your SEO when it comes to geotargeting.
Source:
Featured image: Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral
