Webmasters Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for webmasters. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Does it matter where I register my domain geographically when I'm planning to change nameset (nameservers) to a server in my target area?
Example
Target audience: USA
Server location: USA
Domain origin: bought from French registrator website
Question: When a user in the U.S. tries to access my web, will there be a delay, because he had to access the French registrator servers first or will he go directly to my U.S. server?
No, it doesn't matter.
Registrars are only bureaucratic entities that "give" you the name you requested, record your information and associate it with the domain name. Once you have the domain name, you have to host it somewhere, and that physical location is the one that may affect.
No, when a user requests a domain the first Domain Name Server queried will be local to them. Only if no record is found will the request be passed 'up the line' to the next Domain Name Server. It is possible that the request will get all the way to the registrar's DNS but it is unlikely and in any case it happens very quickly (YMMV!). It's not really worth worrying about.
However the location of the webserver that a site is hosted on may make a difference to your search engine visibility in different countries depending on the domain name itself.
This is not normally an issue where your domain matches that of the country you are hosting in but will unless you take some precautions/actions.
For instance. An .fr domain hosted in France will not be a a problem. An .fr domain hosted in the USA may not be indexed in the google.fr or will receive lower rankings than pages that are obviously related to French users.
You can overcome this by using, for example, Google's webmaster tools to indicate which geographic regions your site pertains to.
You should also be sure to make sure you declare the appropriate languages in you HTML.
