Hi All,

I could argue all day about this stuff, but if you host your website in another country and your user base is in Australia you are going to run into problems because it is going to load slower some times 2 or 3 times slower, load time has a effect on organic rankings.

Watch this video form Matt Cutts he even states this stuff -

http://searchengineland.com/site-spe...g-factor-29793

A live example of this where two .com.au domains with AU user bases -



But any one is welcome to test their own theories.

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I think that is a definite issue but then you need to balance that against the reliability of the Australian host and the increased cost of hosting here. I guess people can do their own speed test on their current hosts.

Regarding Google's opinion of site speed, is google even doing speed tests from australian servers, or are they using US based servers to do those tests? If the tests are being done from the US it might work against you to host here - everything else being equal.

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Personally, I've always found locally hosted sites ranking better than those housed OS. By simply moving a site from OS to local, some sites moved from being ranked nowhere to first page.

It should also be mentioned that Google isn't the only search engine remember Whilst G definitely has the market share, SEO goes across multiple engines so without a discussion on the ranking algorithms of the other major search engines is not really complete.

Now that really would throw the cat amongst the pigeons!

Just one other thing when comparing site speed, you need to look at the size of the page too. In the above example, the virgin blue homepage is much bigger than Jetstar. Jetstar does load quicker but not by much:

#
Domain name Size Load Time Average Speed per KB

1 jetstar.com.au 46.39 KB 2.18 seconds 0.05 seconds

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2 virginblue.com.au 64.25 KB 4 seconds 0.06 seconds


** from http://www.iwebtool.com

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All this "Aussie vs US " hosting discussion assumes all your traffic is coming from AUSTRALIA.

Most of my .com.au and .net.au sites (Indeed all my sites) get BULK of their traffic from USA/Asia hence US hosting.

Stop being so parochial and remember that the INTERNET is GLOBAL.

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It has nothing to do with being patriarchal, most people with .com.au sites would have almost all of their traffic coming from Australia.

If most of your .com.au sites get traffic from outside of Australia how does it make sense to using .com.au anyway? Surely this is going to cause confusion, issues with search engines and generally work against you? I don't quite get it unless they are travel related or something where the people are looking for sites relating to Australia.

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Yeah but where do they rank?

For the keyword Airlines;

In Google.com.sg

Virgin Blue 72
Jetstar 39

In Google.com.au

Virgin Blue 1
Jetstar 3

What might be significantly more relevant is the nationality of the traffic (the people Google are actually trying to service). Which would explain the rankings because Jetstar flies out of Singapore but Virgin Blue doesn't. Bottom line being hosted overseas doesn't stop you being number 1. C'mon do you really think Google can't figure this simple issue out.

95% of traffic to my .au sites is Australian. Naturally wouldn't say no to some O/S traffic but I don't really rank for it (except images).

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I get more O/S traffic in certain verticals.. USA is a bit volatile but traffic from India keeps on coming

Although I must admit, for some of these sites a fair porton of the international traffic comes from google searches looking for the undeveloped/parked exampledomain.com equivalents

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