Hosting not in the US- is that a problem?

I remember reading somewhere that the host location is important or is a factor in google's SERP or PR. Is that true? i'm thinking of moving my site to an host in the UK, for various reasons, but i don't want it to affect my site in anyway.

What do you say?

 

If you host in the UK you will have an IP address that the search engines will recognise as a UK address. With geo targetting that makes a difference.

However I have Irish clients hosted in the US and the UK and they all rank higher on google.ie than they do on google.co.uk and google.com. So I don't think the difference is that much.

The language set in your meta tags is far more influential. Saying that the language is en-ie rather than en-us my clients drop in google.com and rise in google.ie and vis-versa.

Also changing spellings from US English to British English can have a marked effect.

I think the search engines are bright enough to recognise that the physical location of the host is not a reliable indicator for geo targetting.

 

Thanks for the answer.
i think i will move them...