Server location has much effect??

A bunch of my sites are hosted with a host located in Denmark. Most these sites target North American traffic. I see from the stats in some of these sites that about 70% of my traffic is from US, but in second place with 12% is Denmark.

Should I expect a noticible boost in US traffic if these sites were hosted on a server located in US. Will my SERP placement improve signifigantly, thus getting even more traffic?

 

Should I expect a noticible boost in US traffic = No
Will my SERP placement improve signifigantly = No

For more traffic or higher SERP you are gonna have to work a little bit harder then just moving servers.

 

Server location has a massive effect on your rankings. If you target the US you simply have to be hosted over there. Move hosts, today.

http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/2006/07/tips-for-non-us-sites.html

 

Utter bull there is nothing about SERP .. this has to do with Country Specific queries .. eg. For google.co.uk, to appear under results for "pages from the UK" your site either has to be hosted in the UK or be a .co.uk

 

Seconded.

Your server shouldn't make much difference at all. Plus having your servers in Denmark could have some legal benefits so you can host stuff that the US is really strict about.

 

You're bother wrong, server location is the single most important factor when it comes to which SERP results your site appears in. The addional factors are the TLD and the location of sites that link to yours.

 

Just to make the point,

Search Google.co.uk for DVDs brings up Play.com first
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=dvds&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

Search Google.com brings up Amazon,
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dvds&btnG=Google+Search

Where is Play.com hosted?
In the UK of course,
http://whois.domaintools.com/play.com

 

This is a blog post on the official google blog confirming exactly what I said.

Hosting location is more important than whether its a .com or .co.uk

There are so many major UK companies that are .com names that hosting plays a large part.

 

Yeah but if you have a .co.uk that holds more weight than if you had a .au domain hosted in England.

 

Well yes but what about all the .tv domains? They are not UK domains but if you host over here then you are classed as a UK site.

 

That is just google playing smart and giving you a UK related site .. do the exact same search on yahoo.com & yahoo.co.uk and you get to seperate results, and both sites are hosted in the US and are .com's

Personally I think that the .co.uk engines probably give more value to UK links which is why play is ranked higher on the .co.uk engine .. which kind of makes sense to me .. plenty of links from .co.uk sites would mean more interest from UK residents and thus a better site to serv up .. and this theory would also explain the two diffent sites showing up at the top of the rankings in the Yahoo engine.

use link: on google and linkdomain: on yahoo and you will see what I am talking about

 

I've a feeling of deja vu here.

Google.co.uk and MSN.co.uk are extremely sensitive to the domain and the hosting.

To appear in the UK only results you must either be hosted in the UK or have a .co.uk or .org.uk or ther .uk domain.

The one exception I've seen is a French hosted .com.

 

I'm not sure if its been pointed out, but you also get .com results on the .co.uk SERPs, I presume its the same with all the regional Google sites.

 

As far as I know its always been like this

 

The Google.co.uk results started to split from the .com results about 18 months ago. A .com will show up in the .co.uk "only" results as long as it is hosted in UK.

 

Does anyone have any thoughts about hosting a .co.uk site in the UK on an ADSL fixed IP. Would the fact that the IP address is associated with the ISP DSL range affect what happens to the site in SERPS.

 

No, it's because it's hosted in the UK. I've seen many .com sites hosted in the UK showing up on regional SERPS. Whenever we build a new site I always make sure it's hosted where the target market is.

Currently we have a problem with a client, they have a .com and are targeting the US listings but are using a UK server. For this reason it's really suffering in the .com SERPS and flying high in the UK results.

 

Server location isn't that important IMHO. If you do everything else right, you should be right. One has to ask the question, why aren't you using US web servers initially anyway, where is it cheaper?

 

It isn't cheaper, but our client is a UK company so use a local host.

 

I was actually directing the Question to axemedia's first post. He is targetting the US market, and US hosting is dirt cheap so it's a no brainer.