Geographical location of both the user and the website come into the equation when ranking on search engines. In addition which Google is used has an effect. Try searching for the same terms in google.com, google.co.nz, google.co.uk for the same terms from the same IP address and you will see variations in the results.Results will differ even more dramtically if you search from different IP addresses. This is as it should be as localized results are generally more relevant to users. By checking results using different IP addresses in different countries you will notice even bigger fluctuations in results. As a webmaster, if your business is located in New Zealand for example and you are trying to attract New Zealand customers, you may want to consider having a NZ host to reinforce that fact to Google. This aspect will have a bigger impact depending on the competitiveness of the keyword or phrases targeted. From our experiments we know that for a moderately competitive keyword the location of where your site is hosted generally has an impact of around 3-7 positions. To explain more clearly, if your site is hosted in the US and you are searching from a US IP address, then your SERP will be around 4 or 5 positions higher than if you search the same keywords from an Asian or European IP address for example, even if it is an asian URL. The fluctuations are much larger for highly competitive keywords where the host location is the only variable. We have noticed as much as 4 pages difference in results for medium to highly competitive keywords and expect even more of a contrast with extremely high competitive terms. What does this mean for your business? Obviously you need to consider where you are expecting most of your customers to come from and choose your host accordingly. Wondering if anyone else has any thoughts on this?
Hi, Thanks for your nice information. Personally, I think if page loading speed would be not be a problem, it might be no impact of hosting your sites in which countries. regards,
I haven't noticed any impact on having our sites hosted in the US. We have top rankings when searching for pages from Australia. All our domains are .com.au and we buy hosting services from Australian companies. But they all just rent their servers from US hosts. I doubt Google will penalise sites for not having them hosted locally, as its no secret that the rest of the world is light years behind the US when it comes to hosting. Maybe it would have been a different story if our domains were .com or .net and not .au