Will shifting servers from US to Canada affect Google US rankings?

[technousa]

Currently we are running our websites on a web hosting in USA and it’s a shared ASP.NET server. We do want to continue for few more months on this shared server as migration may take time and due to our commitments.

We also have taken a VPS server which is based out in Canada. Currently our websites does not have good SEO SERP Ranking but we are starting the campaign next week (Monday).

Our target audience is all countries across the globe but especially USA, UK and Australia.

Now my questions are:

1) Should we shift immediately or can we wait for 2-3 months to this Canada VPS so that our rankings of the campaign wont be affected? Do shifting from USA to Canada does affect rankings as well? Our domain is '.com'. If rankings will be affected, then we will shift immediately and then start campaign.

2) If websites is hosted on Canada VPS , does it mean it will be tough to get on google.com than google.ca.
We want to be on the top of google.com (google.ca is irrelevant to us as of today).

3) some of of other .com domains might have good ranks though not in top 30 positions. But will they go further down if we shift from this USA server to Canada Server.

I wasn’t knowing this otherwise I would have taken USA based VPS.

Thanks
Amit.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:46 pm (utc) on Mar 31, 2012]
[edit reason] fixed formatting [/edit]

[tedster]

If you currently do not have good US rankings, then moving to a Canadian server may be a detriment. Server location is only one of many signals - others include location of backlinks, location of your actual traffic, on-page clues (business addresses, units of currency, language variations, etc.)

If you were already doing well on a US server, then a move to a Canadian server would probably cause no disruption. However, in your case, I'd be very wary. If you cannot back out of the deal practically (and I think I would) then at least try delaying the launch until strong US signals are in place.

In fact, if you ONLY care about US traffic, then you could indicate that targeting in your Webmaster Tools account.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Workaround: sign up to a CDN service. The server locations will then become global and you should notice little rank change. A Change in TLD however is another story so keep the .com.

Warning: Google seems to be able to bypass some CDNs and go straight to the source server, perhaps because the CDN does not redirect search crawlers.

[goodroi]

I have had to move a few sites from US hosting to Canadian hosting for legal reasons and have not had any issues with the USA rankings. Remember that every situation is different and just because my move was smooth does not mean your will be.

Moving your hosting out of the USA is not going to help your USA rankings. I would focus on boosting SEO rankings before dealing with hosting issues (assuming your hosting issues aren't dramatically impacting SEO).