One of my biggest rants with MSN Search has been their weighting for physical location of webserver. It is totally incredible and beyond any reasonable measures. Before you read any further, it is important you know some background information. My company, KK Mediat is from Finland. However, because of various issues our website is hosted in Norway. No big deal in modern days you might think. That's what I thought in year 2000 when starting my current business, but oh, how wrong I was...
The table below pretty much sums up the situation:
| Keyword | MSN.com | MSN.fi | MSN.no |
| Hakukoneoptimointi (finnish for seo) | #27 | #45 | #1 |
| hakukonemarkkinointi (finnish for sem) | #13 | #35 | #1 |
| Keyword tool | #205 | n/a | #16 |
Prosessional SEOs do know that getting good positions in MSN requires hosting in target country (and preferrably also national ltd), but the rest of website owners and business choose hosting location with other criterias like price of hosting or location of business units. This behaviour has huge impact on quality of results in national level MSN searches. Europe alone has nearly 40-50 countries, globally we are speaking of nearly 200 countries... And in every country there are thousands, most likely tens of thousands of small, medium and large business that lack visibility in MSN Search because of this behaviour.
If MSN wants to beat Google, this is something they need to fix. So If you happen to know/meet any MSN Search developers, give them a hint ;)
Yes, the similar options are available in most country specific google interfaces. The default is "Search the web" which is IMO a good choise.
At one point Google had an experiment that put "Search websites from..." option as default, and it was a real traffic killer. Luckily it lasted only for about a week, and things were reverted back.
2K, I totally get how frustrating this is for you. We have had similar problems with one of our clients but in our case the hosting is in Finland and the company is in the UK with a .com domain.
Now, at first I was told it would not affect my clients Google search positions. BUT, we found it really difficult to get this client on the first page of google.com or google.co.uk But it always popped up on the first page on googl.fi. So we moved the hosting to the uk and volla the client is now on the first page for their top keywords.
I would say it makes a difference in Google also. Depends on how you define the laguage in the search.
Our site is 4th on the search hakukoneoptimointi (finnish for seo, but if you search for pages in Finland (the search option) we are on 2nd place.
Since I'm from Norway I will give you an Norwegian example:
In Google.no you can search "the web", "documents in Norwegian" and "websites from Norway". If my website isn't on a webserver in Norway, and a user choose "websites from Norway" when he search, my website won't be found.
IMO it is an important issue. Google is IMO pretty openminded in terms of server location and tld. Yahoo! is somewhere in the middle of these two. But if you want maximum exposure and out of google's lease, then I'd choose my hosting wisely...
I think the problem is partly because your website is using a international top level domain (.com) With a international top level domain server locations quickly gets very important (it is the same with Google, but they are putting a different weight on this factor). It could be an idea for you to rent a server in Finland, it should help with your Google rankings also.
If a SEO truly want to target e.g. 50 countries then it would be a good idea to spend the needed money on hosting or domain names using national TLDs. Hosting and domain cost are normally not a very big expence.
Thanks Rand. Let me know if you get any feedback as I would love to write a happy ending to this.
As for international ltd, yes - it is part of the problem. However, national ltd's aren't always so easy to receive. For example finnish fi-domain was under very strict regulation untill this summer. Only registered corporations and communities in Finland were able to receive a domain binded to their official company name or registered trademark (so keywords and other fancy domain name were a big no-no, for example our company would have been koulutusjakonsultointipalvelukkmediat.fi). This summer the rules were opened a bit, but there are still serious limitations compared to international ltd's...
The price of national ltd's is also usually something totally different than in international ltd's. For exampe, a fi-domain has a minimum contract of 3 years. Simple official fees make a starting price of approx 100US$ per domain.
And the list could go on to topics like freedom of speach can be more limited in national options than international ones, taxation issues (prices are more expensive - hosting, domains, services etc) etc. So there are many issues... Combined the factors above make pretty sure that individuals or org's don't usually acquire a national-domain, but instead go for international options.
Another issue is with large international corporations that put everything under one large domain. They want hosting centralized to cut fees. The want single domain to avoid unnecessary costs and possible legal issues (trademarks are a hard topic, take gmail for example).
What is the situation with respect to the other engines? Is physical location an important issue? We plan to open an office in another country and we are trying to decide where to contract the hosting. By the way, we are in Spain and ".es" domains have the same bureacratic hurdles as you have in Finland.
I will make sure to drop my contacts a line on this. I would guess that it's seriously hurting their reputation internationally, and I'm sure they'll want to know.
Great post.