Google’s Matt Cutts discussed how the search engine handles sites that that are “in the cloud” with regards to how listings are affected. Matt’s explanation was a response to the following user-submitted question:
Can moving my website to “the cloud” harm my listings? Say my server’s in Germany and I move the website to Google’s App Engine or Amazon S3. Does this harm my listings for German results – or is it enough to set the “geographic target” in GWT to Germany?
Matt broke the question down into separate parts to answer them. First, he took on the part about moving a site to “the cloud” harming the users’ listings. His answer for this is basically that Google doesn’t even know if your site is in the cloud, so it can’t use that information to affect listings.
“We don’t know what is happening on the side of your web server. Your web server could be running Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby on Rails,” said Cutts. “All we know is what the web server returns. So your web server could be running code that would go talk to Amazon’s cloud or Appspot or anywhere else in the cloud, but we wouldn’t even know that. We don’t even know whether a page is dynamically created or statically created. All we know is what the web server sends back.”
He says if your site is talking to the cloud behind the scenes, there is now way for any search engine or bot to know about that. Watch the video above to hear Matt’s explanation for the second part of the user’s question.
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