As digital marketers and business people, we both understand the value of geotargeting search results to get better results for our website and business through search engines. With an experience of more than a decade in the industry and as SEO company and outsource SEO partner, we have always been advising our clients to use a server at the location where they want their website to rank best. We have also suggested them many a times to either book a domain with a TLD of the particular country where they want to rank (if the domain is not yet booked) or to change the preference of location in the Google Webmaster tools (which is now known as Google Search Console).
However, recently Google has revealed how it currently geotargets search rankings to searchers in different locations around the globe. The current Google algorithm now focuses only on the ccTLD and the search console settings to geotarget results.
As stated by John Mueller, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst:
“For geotargeting we use mostly the ccTLD or search console setting, so place the server where it works best for you.”
we can now be pretty sure and clear about what it needs to be done to make our websites ready for correct geotargeting. This statement also makes it very clear that the server location is now irrelevant. Google will no longer look at the location of a server when determining where to best rank a site (which it used to do in past years).
According to Mueller’s statement, ccTLDs, which stand for country code top-level domains, are still relevant. A ccTLD is a domain extension such as .co.uk or .com.au.
