I'm in Canada and I need to upgrade my hosting services. I've found a provider that I want to go with. ( reyox - increadible prices for .NET hosting ) One of my sites has "Canadian" content and I don't want to loose the hits from people who enter "Cash Flow" and click on the "pages from Canada" button (for those who were unaware of this feature you can go here to see it www.google.ca) Is there a way to tell google that your site is Canadian even though it is hosted in the US? Thanks, Jon
From my experience they classify sites regionally based on the tld (e.g. .ca) and the geographic position of the IP. So moving to a non canadian host may affect your rankings slightly, but I think the TLD is the main factor.
Agree with nullbit, TLD is the main factor. You have to be careful when checking where your host is located. Over here in the UK many claim to be based in the UK, but are just reselling US server space. I think Google realises that the location of the server isn't always an accurate way of telling where the site is targeted.