I´m planning to launch a new website for a friend dedicated for the american region in the art sector. 2 Questions: 1) Being from Europe, the easiest way would be to take a .com domain from a german hoster, and write in English. Is there any difference for Google to a website hosted in US??? To my knowledge Google checks the IP to find out location, but I don´t know whether this really "stops" from being listed. We get even English sites listed when looking via the local Google domain. 2) Would an Amercan "freehoster" be an alternative??
I think a US hoster is the best. For google and for users, you will have better performance if the server is located in the US.
Why don't you host you site on a server located in America while the main public Google server is Google.com and when we want to target local Google servers like .co.uk we host our sites on a server located on the same country code, i guess it's much better to host it in a us server.
Well, I have to look for a decent cheap and reliable hoster for this small project, which simply takes my time. If there would be no difference ... much easier. But it is a good point regarding the comparison between UK and US. I just checked, and indeed search results are different between those countries despite same language. Yeah, seams logical from this.