Does Migrating Website Hosting Location Affect SEO?

Posted On : February 26th, 2022   By : Diptimayee Mohanty   To : Technical SEO

In the latest episode of AskGooglebot, John Mueller of Google has shared his thought on how the geographic location of a website server affects SEO.

A user on YouTube asked John about “does migrating a website hosting location affects SEO? E.g. an Australian website (and target audience) migrating its hosting location Australia to US”.

In its response, John said, when Google notices a hosting change, first it tends to make sure that it doesn’t create any problems by crawling the site frequently. And to avoid any problem, initially webmasters might see Google slowing down crawling a bit as a precaution.

And once Google finds out there won’t be any issue by crawling the site faster, then it will start to speed up the crawling process again.

John also informed that the above process is independent of the kind of hosting change webmasters make. So, whether you are moving to a different hosting provider or moving to another country, the crawling cautions will be taken definitely by Google.

Is there any practical effect of it?

The answer is YES! John has highlighted that larger geographic moves can affect how quickly a website loads for users.

It means, if users accessing your website are far away from where your website is hosted then it could definitely generate slower user experience as it can take longer to reach a server that is far away. And, it plays a major role in speed & the page experience ranking factor of your website.

How to deal with it?

So, to not get affected by the slow website loading speed, John advised webmasters to use servers in many different locations or to take the help of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks).

Also depending on the hosting platform you are using, your website may already be on multiple servers.

All these above mentioned solutions are fine for Google.

Is server location used for geotargeting?

No, your website server location is not used for geotargeting and will not impact SEO when it comes to geotargeting.

If you want your website to target users in a specific location, then you have two options. First option is either you use the country-code top level domain or use the appropriate setting in Google Search Console.