3

I understand that the geolocation of a server impacts search engine rankings. But does server time affect SEO in any manner? For example, assume that my server is located in the US. If I set the timezone to a different country for administrative purposes (to help an offshore team working from that country) does it affect rankings in the US?

Kannan
  • 2,353
  • 12
  • 25

2 Answers2

5

Does server timezone affect SEO?

No.

I understand that the geolocation of a server impacts search engine rankings.

Only indirectly. Major search engines don't care where the files are coming from.

If I set the timezone to a different country for administrative purposes (to help an offshore team working from that country) does it affect rankings in the US?

I have seen zero evidence to suggest it would. It's far too easy to exploit.

Warren Halderman
  • 582
  • 3
  • 9
2

Unless your pages use PHP or another server side language to write the date into them, Google should have no idea what time zone your server is set to.

HTTP headers do have the date and time, but they should be in GMT, not in the server's local time zone. The syntax for the Date header is: Date: <day-name>, <day> <month> <year> <hour>:<minute>:<second> GMT. Other headers with the date such as Last-Modified are specified the same way.

Exclusively using GMT for HTTP headers is implemented correctly on all webservers I've tested. You can see it on this site:

$ curl -s --head https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/ | grep date
date: Wed, 02 Sep 2020 13:11:34 GMT

You don't need to worry about Google using the server time zone because it shouldn't have access to it for your site or most sites.

Stephen Ostermiller
  • 99,822
  • 18
  • 143
  • 364