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Cloudflare Changes IP Location? Solution for hosting in Finland, website in the US?
MTUser2012
Member
in Help
In signing up for shared hosting the WHT ad didn't list location, which I wrongly assumed was in the US. Instead it is in Hetzner's facility in Finland. In the past when I made these types of mistakes, I would just let the hosting go, not use it, and vow to ask better questions. But, I was wondering as I've been using Cloudflare, could I fix these purchasing mistakes with Cloudflare? Make the site appear to be in the US for Google purposes?
My intended audience is in the US, and to the extent that my site gets indexed and receives organic traffic from Google, I want that to come from the US.
Will Cloudflare fix my mistake? I've tried googling, but the answers seem unclear to me.
Comments
You are in vain
Content and website design (and performance to some extent) are far more important than the server location.
If using Cloudflare, no one really knows your server's location.
Here's my experience with server location impact on visitors & performance. That was with Cloudflare, didn't test without it for years, but hadn't noticed any problems even without it (though, haven't done any exact measuring either for that scenario).
Thanks a lot. This is great info, real word testing.
I spend a lot of time on optimizing my websites for speed and SEO purposes, so that will be the same for me. The only variable will be location and now, the use of Cloudflare. So it sounds encouraging to me. Hosting location mistakes can be fixed, perhaps not perfectly, but not a dead loss.
If this is one of comments in the style of "we are all doomed" it is fine, agreed. However, if it is a comment on my question, you appear to be mostly wrong. Checkout @bikegremlin's answer below, and his linked resource.
Google does not care about your server location at all. It cares about site loading speed to an extent, but hosting in the US or in FI will make no difference for your "SEO". It just does not matter.
Just a note, related to this reply:
For test results to be comparable (and provide new info/knowledge), it's best to change one thing at a time. With my testing, the websites had already been running with Cloudflare, so the only change was the physical server location.
If I had done that + moving to Cloudflare, I wouldn't be able to tell what had what kind of impact on the end result.