Physical Location of Servers - any Impact ?

[GilbertH]

Hi All,

Great forum - really useful! I have a question which I would like to run past the experts here.

We have a customer based in the UK with a number of European offshoots. The plan is to build satellite sites for each country. I know that if you register a .de domain and have a site in German, then you will be found on google.de listed as a site coming from Germany.

The question I need an answer to is, would the search engine ranking improve for these sites if the server (and therefore the IP) was physically hosted in Germany and each of the respective countries? I can't see that would make any difference but need to be sure.

Any help is very much appreciated!

Thanks
Gilbert

[seobook]

some algorithms may give locally hosted sites a boost in relevancy.

[Mel]

Compare the results for search engine optimisation on google .com and on google.co.uk and you will see a few interesting things
1. The #1 ranking page on google.com drops to #3 in Google.co.uk
2. The #1 ranking site for search engine optimisation on google.com also has a .co.uk site which does not rank at all well on Google.com but comes up #4 on google.co.uk
3. It appears that both Googles are ranking pages which actually use the optimization term for the search engine optimisation term.

[GilbertH]

Hi All,

Many thanks for your replies. Mel, perhaps it's me being dense but I'm not sure i understand the point behind your observation - are you saying that physical location has an impact?

Cheers
Gilbert

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Yes, your server location DO have an impact - but it is limited to searches that are filtered for "search in this country" searches. For "Wsearch in this language" searches and global searches it should not affect you.

So look at the default settings for the engines in the countries ypou want to target. Some have global default, some have "search this language" default and some default to the location (this country). If you have many of the last type you should look for a local hosting.

[GilbertH]

Quick update on this, we went ahead and relocated hosting to servers in the relevant countries and yes, it does have a positive impact - client is very pleased! Thanks for all the help,
Gilbert