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Calling all SEO experts!

The web company that I work for is going to begin systematically launching a bunch of small 1-5 page, content focused, websites for the purpose of driving traffic to the web shop.

The websites will look, and work, identical to an affiliate website that feeds products. All product images and such are feed from XML and text files only.

We have been trying to decide how to host the smaller sites. Our resident SEO "expert" claims that we ought to a) host the websites externally and b) that we ought to host in every country that we have a web shop in. So our co.uk domains ought to have hosting in the UK and our .de domains ought to have hosting in Germany.

This is creating an ENORMOUS logistics problem for administration.

The question I have is: is it really necessary to host these small content sites externally and do we need to spread them all over God's green Europe?

Thanks!

/Brian

P.S. No, I don't trust the competence of our resident SEO "expert"....

brian-welch
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From my experience, the country that a domain is hosted in as compared to the TLD makes no difference. The exception to this might be page load times for your users which are a factor in Google rankings, but having it "nearby" should suffice - it wouldn't need to actually be in a particular country as long as the round trip between your users and server is acceptable. If your customers are in Germany it might not make sense to host in the USA, but the UK would likely be fine (assuming it is a good host with a good interent connection, etc).

What matters far more in terms of SEO is having a good, clean site with relevant information that loads quickly and is linked to by other good, clean sites with relevant information.

doublesharp
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  • Hi doublesharp! Thanks for your comments. Can I infer then, that even if we centralize the web-hosting, we still ought to host the site externally and not on inhouse servers? – brian-welch Sep 21 '12 at 13:00
  • From an SEO perspective I don't think it would matter, but I know very few companies that choose to host internally these days given the infrastructure that is available from dedicated providers at a relatively low. Hosting companies often provide you a faster route to scale your hardware (up or down depending on needs), multi-homed internet connections, support, etc that all costs more internally since you don't have the same economies of scale. – doublesharp Sep 21 '12 at 15:26