Im building a number of websites targeted at the UK market. Owning to being a on budget i have got a vps hosted in USA as they are generally much much cheaper than the UK hosts. The domains i have are all .com and .net. I understand that Google takes the domain extention and the server location into account when ranking your pages for a specific country but if i go into webmaster tools and set the target location for the domain as UK would that help Google know im targeting the UK even though i do not have a UK extention or a UK IP?
USA servers normally are cheaper then UK, and I always use them for my co.uk websites, and I never noticed being penalised by google for hosting in the USA. I believe server location does not really matter these days...
In this case, use your Google Webmasters Central account to geo-target your site to a specific country or region. It is my personal belief that this kind of issue is why Google made geo-targeting in webmasters central. 1. Login to Google Webmasters Central 2. Click on the website in "Dashboard" section. 3. Click "Tools" in the left side menu. 4. Click "Set Geographic Target" in the drop down menu. 5. Click "Associate a geographic location with this site" and hit "Save". 6. Follow on screen instructions.