A person asked Google’s John Mueller a Question about the right way to Target a specific country with a website. The person asked if a country code top level domain specific to the country & the hosting location was important.
Recommendation:
Here is the question asked related to web hosting & domain registration
Suppose I want to launch a site in Germany… is it required that I get a dot DE domain registered in Germany and website hosted in Germany for SEO?”
Google’s John Mueller did not hesitate to answer the question. He said there are two ways to geo target a specific country:
He Said:
“No, it’s not required.
In general, if you want to use geotargeting there, there are two ways to do that.
One is to use the country level top-level domain, which would dot DE for Germany in that case.
The other is to use a generic top-level domain and to use a geotargeting setting in search console.
So that could be, for example, a dot Com website or dot Net or dot Info or dot EU or whatever.
Any of those would also work and then you just set geotargeting for Germany.”
John Mueller next discussed about hosting requirements:
He said:
“The hosting location is also not required.
That’s something that way in the early days before we had the setting in Search Console, we used the hosting location as a way to guess which country the website might be targeting.
But nowadays… I don’t think that’s used at all.
And with a content delivery network if you have kind of a fancy international website, then the hosting location doesn’t matter anyway because you always have some local presence automatically.”
Check answer by Mueller at 1:08 Time in the video:
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