Interesting article written last week at Royal Pingdom — Google availability differs greatly between countries, where Pingdom, a server/web-site availability monitoring company based in Sweden, tried to measure the uptime of Google’s country-specific websites. The conclusion is —

Google Search users in the United States are 10 times more likely to encounter a problem than users in Brazil, according to this unique one-year survey from Pingdom.

From this Google Webmaster Central blog entry:

Does location of server matter? I use a .com domain but my content is for customers in the UK.

In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, “.co.uk ” domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server’s IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.

That pretty much sums up why you would want to host a website on a server inside the country where its primary audiences are, especially when obtaining an appropriate ccTLD is less than trivial.

(Note: I was going to post this as a reply to Matt’s blog post, but his Typo kept on giving me “500 Application Error”. Well, I am now posting it here.)

Stuart Brown wrote about switching to a dedicated server after getting digged, and had experienced (1) much better page rendering time, and (2) more referrals from Google. Thus he concluded speculated:

Perhaps the effects of a quick page response are more important than the rate of spidering — could Google be using this data (site response time) to build a profile of responsiveness across sites? Could this be yet another factor in ranking?

Perhaps — perhaps not. I don’t think page response time is a major factor in ranking quite yet, but with the introduction of this feature in the Webmaster Console, perhaps sites that take a long time to load will see a slow decline in Google traffic?

Matt Cutts of Google busted a myth regarding to dedicated IP address for websites. No, your website will not be penalised, nor rewarded, for being on a named-based virtual hosting, or on its own dedicated IP address.

Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses.

Funny that when you go and shop for dedicated servers or even VPS, you’ll find providers giving you “unlimited IP addresses” as long as you can justify it. What are other reasons people need more than one IP addresses for their web servers?