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I think I've asked this question on every SEO forum I know before and everybody disagreed on this one and nobody was able to come up with any evidence. Now I just realized, I haven't asked here ;).
When it comes to rankings in a certain country (say google.de for g ermany or yahoo.fr for france) does the hosting location matter?
Has anybody ever hosted a site outside the targeted country and then moved it to a host inside the country - or the other way around?
If so were you able to see any signficant changes? Would one even be able to do such a test or would there be no point in doing so, because it would be incredibly hard to filter out the changes from the process of switching hosts?
I'm hoping this would only be a temporary factor, but that after some time one should at least be able to tell whether hosting inside the targeted country is an important factor or one that can be neglected.
Any experiences?
EDIT: Sorry, I was going to copy, post and paste this to the local search forum, but then forgot about it (bad short-term memory here..). If you feel like that might be the better place, please don't hesitate to move it there..and sorry!
[edited by: Makaveli2007 at 5:47 pm (utc) on July 26, 2008]
If I were trying to rank a site mainly in the US I would *not* host it in the UK.
That said, if I did host it in the UK, but the site had all U.S. backlinks and an "about us" page with a U.S. address, I'm not sure it that hosting the site in the UK would significantly hurt its U.S. rankings.
Dunno if that is of any help at all.
As with all things in SEO you can find examples where the opposite is true. However, best practices indicate hosting within the targeted country as the preferred tactic.
