Is SEO affected by geographical location of hosting server?

The location of hosting server affects the SEO results drastically?

[filho]

I have heard that geographical based hosting affects the SEO results drastically, is that true?

I have a web site with the .com domain name and I have heard from someone that if my site is hosted on a web server located in USA then it would be very advantageous for my site to rank high on www.google.com and www.yahoo.com search engines.

[Bentley007]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

In my experience, physical server location has a significant impact on your ability to rank in the regional search engines. Our main target market is the US, our servers are in Canada, and we consistently rank higher in Google.ca than we do in Google.com.

Bentley007

[fishfinger]

Yes this is what I've seen too. If you want to feature in the regional index of a regional Google, you need to be hosted in that country.