Hi Everybody,

I have a website ( .COM ext) and 65 % of my visitors are from the UK and 90 % of my business are from UK visitors. My site is hosted with 1&1 and the server is in Germany.

My target audience is global audience but i also want majority of my visitors to be from UK.

At this point my webiste ranks for several keywords when u do a google.com or google.co.uk search with ( search the web) option.

Now should I consider changing my server from Germany to UK or US? Will I see and increase in traffic and rankings if I change my server?

If it is better for me to change, which is better UK or US.


And also any recemondations on hosting.

Any input will be highly appreciated.

Change hosts as quickly as you can. Its not even a close call. I can type this next bit in my sleep now. All of the major search engines give a great deal of weight to geo-location even when the user does not select a country-specific search. If your audience is in the UK, then its vital for you to make sure that the search engines consider your site to be located within the UK. It sounds like you're already well aware of this, but just to be clear: The search engines use two common criteria in determining geo-location: (1) the presence of a Country Code Top Level Domain name ('CC TLD', as in 'somesite.co.uk'), and (2) the physical location of the server that hosts the site, based on its IP address. 1&1 keeps popping up on this issue because their servers are apparently not in the UK. But to continue, there is no <meta> tag or other on-page information that will convey your site's geo-location to the search engines. Google has said that they do sometimes look at the domain name registration information, but they are typically cryptic about when and how that information might be used, so it is unreliable for Google and ineffective for the others.

Its a very important issue that, for many reasons, doesn't get enough attention. Most webmasters don't realize that geo-location affects all searches, not just for those who press that "UK Only" button. And if a site happens to be competitive for its primary search terms despite a handicap for being imaccurately labeled as not being 'in-country', think of all of the secondary search traffic they might be missing and never know about.

As long as you have a .com domain name, you'll need to find a host that has their servers in the UK. Changing hosts isn't as traumatic as it sounds. You need only make sure that you leave the old hosting service up and running for 48-72 hours past when you update the DNS record for your domain name to point to the new host. This insures continuous service for both users and search engines. Of course, in some cases, it might be necessary to 'close shop' on the old host once the transition begins to avoid losing data/orders.

The only reasonable alternative to changing to a UK-based host is to change your domain name to a .uk. This is much more cumbersome and problematic because while you can set up 301 redirects to transfer your old domain's search engine history to the new domain, the transition is often marked by a drop in rankings that can be lengthy.

Thank You So much, thats so helpfull.

Do u have any Recommendations for a local Uk Host, there seems to be so many.

Sorry, but I'm in the US and don't have any information on UK hosting services. There are many websites dedicated to reviews of hosting services. They're best for finding which services are reasonably priced for the services your site requires rather than trying to judge the quality of the service overall. When I've faced this choice I've tried to pick a host that has been in business for several years (check www.archive.org or whois.org) and seems to have an above-average number of clients, which is my way of seeking the protection of the marketplace in an area where its almost impossible to find any objective information. Good luck!

Thank you i hade done a bit of research and found fasthosts to be a good provider. Now i will start to transfer my host and see what happens.