What's people's opinions on how much impact the location of the server which you host your website on has to do with how well it will rank. For example, would the following be true. Sites hosted opn a UK server would perform better in google.co.uk than sites hosted say USA/Canada etc? Given this would the same be true that if the user was searching from say California that sites on a California based server would rank higher in Google for them? thanks for any opinions, it will help with my decision about future hosting.
Certainly from the point of view of Google, the location of the server has an impact on the search results. For my 'blog, I certainly do better on the .com as opposed to the .co.uk because my server is out somewhere in Texas, US. Much of my organic search traffic comes in from the US, specifically California, with New York second. This does have a much more profound impact on websites that are in languages other than English. A client of mine offer their website in French, German, Spanish and Portuguese, and the organic search traffic is generally lower when compared to websites hosted in those countries — which we've been able to verify with suppliers and satellite company websites. I've since added my company address to my contact details on my 'blog, which may aid the search engines to figure out where the 'blog belongs on the world. Hope that helps...