does google (and yahoo) prefer sites hosted in the USA?

Is it worth moving my site from a Canadian host to a USA-based one?

[ptiemann]

I've got a few sites, all hosted near Chicago. A year ago I set up a site hosted by <snip> in Canada.

I notice now that the 'Canadian' site gets traffic from
- google.ca
- google.dk
- google.de
- google.fr
- google.ro
[..]
you name it .. from any of those I get traffic but rarely any from google.com

My sites hosted in the USA get large amount of google.com traffic and those international versions make a small percentage. Content of the sites is of similar nature.

Does it make sense to change web hosts and will Google change my ranking after it recognizes the change in IP numbers?

My site has a Google PR of 4, not too bad but it seems ignored by Google.com

Any input and sharing of existing experiences are welcome

-Peter

[edited by: Webwork at 7:24 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2005]
[edit reason] Please read the forum Charter [/edit]

[ptiemann]

Sorry for dropping the host's name in there. But nobody has an opinion on this topic?

[cws3di]

I may have a similar issue, but I do not believe that it has anything to do with the physical location of the servers.

My situation is that my sites all have varying topics, but all of the brick-n-mortar businesses are in a small foreign country where I am an expat.

All of my sites are hosted on US servers, but a large portion of my traffic comes from google.* rather than google.com

When I do searches for my keywords on the various googles, I find that my sites have better SERP positions. I am not sure if Google is weighting websites based on their "content" indicating the names of foreign countries, but there is a marked difference in the non-US google serps.

I suggest that you go to google.de and google.ca etc and do some keyword searches - if you are better positioned on those, that may answer the better traffic question.

Once again, IMO the issue is not the Hosting Server country.

[johan]

If you own a dot com its unfortunately everthing to do with the physical location of the server...

...even if you add lang="en-GB" and <meta name="Content-Language" content="en-GB" /> it has no effect on Google thinking you are a UK site and only list you in the global site and not "pages from the UK".

[Webwork]

Algorithms are (should be) based upon rational inferences (probabilities) arising from real world data (where available), trend analysis, etc.

Is this a rational inference or probability: "The geographic location of a host IP indicates a probability that the website's relevance is weighted in favor of that geographic location"?

Marry host IP info to "contact" info on a website and a few other factors and what do you get?

Yes, there is a consensus that host location is a factor. One of many.