Does location of your servers affect search rankings

[tekkie]

Greetings,

I have a question about the location of your servers as it relates (or does not) to search engine rankings with Google. We operate 3 websites (US, UK, CA) that are almost identical and if I search for our main keyword on Google.com it gives me a lesser organic ranking for our site than if I search on Google.ca for the exact same keyword. Our servers are all located in Canada. Does this make any difference?

[bill]

A bit. Google reps have told us that in order for Google to determine the target market of a site they look at where you're physically hosting or the ccTLD. If you're using a .com domain for any of these sites they would probably do better if you got local hosting in their respective markets.

[tedster]

This question has been frequently discussed in our Google Search forum - here are some recent threads:

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

There are further links within each thread. But the answer is that IP location is one of the factors Google uses and a US server will usually help a .com rank on the US Google results.