Written by Fernando Maciá
The geolocation of a web server depends on the geographic assignment of its IP address. IP number ranges are geographically distributed and there are online functionalities that allow you to identify where a given IP address is geolocated.
Although we might think that if we have our domain hosted by a Spanish Web hosting company it would be logical that the domain points to a Spanish IP, sometimes it may happen that the hosting company uses servers in datacenters located in other countries, so it is a good idea to check the IP of your domain as well as the geolocation corresponding to that IP address.
The first thing we need to know to know the geolocation of our server is the IP number to which our domain is pointed. Tools such as Site Info from WMTips can tell us the IP number that corresponds to a given domain.
With that IP number, we can use other tools such as IP2Location, IP Tracker or IP Location Finder to know the geolocation of that IP value. That is, to which geographic area it corresponds.
SEO aspects related to server geolocation
From an SEO point of view, server geolocation influences the following aspects:
- A server closer to the majority of users will generally mean a lower latency time, so the server response will be faster.
- In generic domains, the geolocation of the server is one more piece of information that search engines take into account when identifying the geographic orientation of the domain and geographically adjusting the results in a given country, together with the geographic orientation settings that we have configured in the webmaster tools.
- In geographic top-level domains – ccTLDs – such as .es, .it or .fr, the influence of the domain is not so important because they themselves indicate a geographic orientation towards the corresponding country.
- In domains hosted on content server networks (Content Delivery Networks or CDN) such as Akamai, the geographic relevance of the server IP is lower because the server is actually replicated in multiple datacenters located in different countries in order to be able to respond more quickly to users in different geographic areas.
