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The Impact Of Cloud Computing On SEO

By David Veibl on 31 August 2012 @ 4:27 PM.

Cloud computing has affected the SEO world and has the potential to revolutionise local SEO. However, before discussing the impact of cloud computing, let’s just first give you a rundown of what cloud computing is all about.

Cloud Computing- A Brief Introduction

Cloud Computing is the up and coming internet service that is proving to be of great help for businesses all over the world. It has quickly taken over from traditional method of running business applications that required a lot of hardware and technical prowess. Cloud computing is generally referred to as an internet service that can provide users access to a virtualized computing environment when they have need of it. This internet service provides people the chance to utilise infrastructural, platform and software support for running business applications. The best thing about cloud computing is that it eliminates the need of dedicated hardware and software specialists for maintenance as this task is handled by the cloud services provider. One just has to pay for the services that he is utilising and need not to worry about the technical aspects related to the maintenance and smooth running of the applications.

SEO and The Role of Cloud Computing

SEO helps websites gain authority and since Google and other search engines calculate the rankings for queries based on the authority of each website with the most authority getting the top rankings, SEO is a must for every online business.

With people only taking a look at the top 4 or 5 results on Google and other search engines for their queries, getting a higher ranking on the SERP can be a great source of traffic.

So, what role does cloud computing play in SEO? The actual role in SEO overall is limited. However, it is important as far as local SEO is concerned while with Google’s Caffeine update, cloud computing has helped websites rank well on Google too.

Targeting Local Audience with SEO

Most websites target a specific location or country with SEO so that they can get dedicated traffic from areas where their business is established and potential customers may exist. It is for this reason that websites look to rank highly on Google in specific areas and use country TLDs (Top Level Domains) for this purpose. For instance, a website that wants to do well in the UK uses a .co. uk domain to target the United Kingdom audience.

However, the country where the website’s server is present plays an important role in local SEO as well as Google and other search-engines analyze the IP address of the site to know the geo location of it. After knowing the geo location of the host, search-engines actually give it precedence in its search results for queries coming in from those locations. For instance, if a website’s IP address is Australian then Google looks to give it precedence over a US based site for queries coming in from Google.com.au.

So, how does cloud computing come into the fray? It is all about the new cloud hosting which has brought it into the limelight as far as SEO is concerned. As cloud computing has no physical location, SEs are actually not able to determine the geo location of the website.

Therefore, if a website owner has three websites, one each for the audience in Australia, UK and Canada and all three are hosted in the cloud then Google will not give any website precedence over the other in their specific regions and will actually start ranking them against each other. This is in turn going to hurt the website’s ranking in their local regions and hurt their prospects too.

However, it does not mean that cloud computing is regressive for SEO as more people will switch to the environment friendly cloud hosting, the search-engines will also update their algorithms. Google’s SEO guru, Matt Cutts and his encouragement for cloud hosting also gives an idea that cloud hosted website are preferred by Google.

Entry of Google Caffeine

Until a few years ago, the problem with targeting local audiences with cloud hosting deterred people from adopting it until the time that SEs brought an update to solve it. However, with the release of Google Caffeine in 2010, hosting became a highly debated issue. Google gave priority to fast loading websites with the update and since cloud hosted websites load faster than server-hosted websites, cloud backed websites started to rank well.

So, to conclude, cloud computing and cloud hosting is great for SEO as it helps websites load quicker. Moreover, with SEs also encouraging its use, it is only a matter of time before cloud hosting is the only way to make websites go live.

This content was published by an author that has no affiliation with Clubnet Search Marketing, we will sometimes publish content from guest bloggers and the views, opinions expressed within these guest posts are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent those of Clubnet Search Marketing.