Cloud computing is increasingly becoming popular with businesses realizing its many advantages. The greatest advantage is of course that you don’t need physical infrastructure when you have moved to the cloud. Cloud computing is a hosting service where you can run applications and store data in servers connected through the cloud. You don’t need to install application software or store data in your physical hard drive and all your data can be accessed through servers placed in another location and connected to your computer. Your computer needs only interface software which is similar to a web browser; it doesn’t require hardware or software upgrades and all your work can be done through a network of computers that forms the cloud. The remote servers are owned by another company and they will run almost everything from e-mail, word processing to complex data analysis programs.
When your website is hosted in the cloud, the site’s web pages are served through servers that are nearer to the IP location of a user, and thus with cloud computing websites load faster.
When it comes to search engine optimization, country code top level domain (ccTLD) and hosting location are key aspects for targeting local visitors. For search engines Top level domain (TLD) signifies the origin of a website, as for e.g., co.uk for United Kingdom. Search engine bots also consider the IP address of the website to identify the location of the hosting server. Popular search engine Google permits webmasters to set the geo-location within Google’s Webmasters Tool to help them aim a specific country or market.
According to SEO experts, cloud computing has an impact on the location factor of hosting and this in turn has an impact on SEO. In cloud computing, your data is spread over various servers. Websites hosted in the cloud have separate versions for each country, such as US, AUS and UK. Often it happens that these sites start competing with each other and the one with the highest authority tends to prevail over sites with low authority. As a result, if the US version has maximum authority, it will easily outrank the UK version for the UK market. With the rising popularity of cloud computing, Google and other search engines will update their algorithms considering this factor. At the same time, in the wake of cloud computing that is fast becoming the business model, SEO companies have to come up with effective solutions for optimizing websites and ranking them in local search results.