My intended audience is primarily UK customers, however the server which the site is hosted on is located in Germany. Will this have a detrimental effect?
im not sure but its the reason why I advised all my clients to host in the country they want to be found in. I do take it in mind. however, moving is surely affecting results, so if you are already stable in search engines and stable on this server, keep it.
I believe that it does have an impact if users select the UK sites option on Google then foreign servers seem to be excluded or at least moved down the rankings. I think that the domain suffix is also a factor as .co.uk seem to be higher in the search results that .net etc.... I must admit that it would be difficult to actually test without diplicate content kicking in. Interesting thing test is with Amazon. If you search for DVD on google.co.uk then amazon.co.uk comes high up but if you search for dvd on google.com then amazon.com comes high. amazon.com is hosted in the US I cant seem to find out where amazon.co.uk is hosted but at a guess its UK. I would say to give you the best position in the results have a .co.uk and hosting in UK if its a UK market.
I see, well it's a .co.uk domain which is a consellation i guess but i WILL consider changing hosts now.
The effect of hosting location in ranking in regional ranking is very small. So no detrimental effect...if you want to rank high on .uk SEs, then try to acquire more .uk backlinks. This will give you the power of the local market. Good Luck !
Depends of hosting if you have few links. If you get many backlinks depends from where come your backlinks. For UK you need to get many backlinks from uk sites. Also another factor is your domain .com,.it,co.uk; is better to have .co.uk
yes it will effect little like if u hosted on USA and later if u change to some other country like indian it will effect als in local serps your TLDs and Ips matter
The server can have impact, but as long as you have a .*.uk domain the problem is solved. By the domain you already tell the SE's that that's the market you are targeting. Tho, to be more sure and sleep better at night (avoid superstitions), you can always move in a UK based server.
it's affect but not that much though. the extension has a bit more affect for your site ranking due to geopraphic search.
I don't think that the location should matter. I think the extension ( .com, .net, etc ) holds more ground then where your sever is located.
i doubt that location of sever should be matter. you should have traffic more in your country then any other. beacuse most of the time, you adversite to your friends then word to mouth!!!!!
If you whant to rank for UK customers buy hosting IN UK that definitly help (but not very mutch) olso you must get links from UK sites and in general links
well done research! ;-) Dont you think that Amazon.co.uk has way more British backlinks, so that that might be the reason? instead of the server location? There are way too many other factors that are going on here to claim that quote. Sorry. Still I do think server location is a minor factor. If you are starting, take it in mind. If you are already stable, then moving might even be a bad factor, because stability is SURELY a factor.
server ip location is important for google to decide your place.They use tld (regional tlds have value) , backlink locations and your sites language to decide where to rank you better locally.Imo moving will surely help.
All of the major search engines give a great deal of weight to geo-location, even when the user does not request a country-specific search. All it takes to see this effect is to do the same search in the various incarnations of Google and Yahoo! The major search engines use two common criteria in determining geo-location: (1) the presence of a Country Code Top Level Domain name ('CC TLD' as in "somesite.co.uk"), or (2) the physical location of the server based on its IP address. Google says that they will 'sometimes' also rely on the domain name registration data, but they don't specify when they do so, and since the others don't use it, you can't really rely on it. So it is very important for all webmasters to have their sites recognized as being located within their target country. If you don't have an appropriate CC TLD, then you must get hosted on a server that is located in the target country.
mmm I remember someone asked this to Mr. Matt cutts and his reply was relaxing . He says it wont affect. But here again SEO-Mumbai is also not wrong. If you are changing IP then it may affect your ranking for various reason