IP addresses and Google UK 24 Aug 07

Following on from John’s post earlier this week about the low latency benefit of our UK based servers (over US based competitors) for customers/websites with a European audience, there is another factor to consider. Google.

As Google’s Webmaster Help Centre explains:

While all sites in our index return for searches restricted to “the web,” we draw on a relevant subset of sites for each country restrict. Our crawlers identify the country that corresponds to a site by factors such as the physical location at which the site is hosted, the site’s IP address, and its domain restrict.

That said, your site’s domain doesn’t need to match the country domain for which you’d like it to return…

Now, I can’t really see how Big G can work out the first “factor” (physical location) without the second (IP address), using some sort of IP geolocation data. So as far as I can see, if you want to appear in the “pages from the UK” set of results in Google UK, having a UK IP address is an important factor.