Is SEO affected by server location

Does it make any difference if a web site from EU country is hosted on a server in US, rather on a server in the same country?

Hello Zagis,

No, there is no impact unless you are targeting regional users (Geotargeting - Webmasters/Site owners Help).

I made the same switch from a shared hosting in my country (PT/Europe) to a VPS in NJ, USA.

I can say that I notice a grow since then, maybe this was related to my IP is only shared with 2 sites, beside my forum.
Maybe google gives more relevance to a less populated IP.

If you are targeting people in a specific region then I would imagine that you would want a server in that region as it should be a little faster for those users accessing.

Inside Google Sitemaps: Tips for Non-U.S. Sites Your source for product news and developments
7/07/2006
by Vanessa Fox

If you want your site to show up for country-restricted searches, make sure it uses a country-specific domain (such as www.example.com.br). If you use a domain that isn't country specific (such as .com), make sure that the IP address of the site is located in that country.

If you want to know what visitors from different countries are searching for, take a look at the query stats in Sitemaps. This lets you see the difference in searches for each location, as well as what languages visitors use to type in their queries.

Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts
by Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur, Google Search Quality Team
Thursday, August 02, 2007

Does location of server matter? I use a .com domain but my content is for customers in the UK.
In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, ".co.uk " domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server's IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.

Google Information for Webmasters

. I would like my site to return for pages from a specific country.

While all sites in our index return for searches restricted to "the web," we draw on a relevant subset of sites for each country restrict. Our crawlers may identify the country for a site by factors such as the physical location at which the site is hosted, the site's IP address, the WHOIS information for a domain, and its top-level domain.

That said, your site's top-level domain does not need to match the country domain for which you would like it to return. It is also important to keep in mind that our crawlers do not index duplicate content, so creating identical sites at several domains will probably not result in their returning for many country restricts. If you do create duplicate domains, we suggest using a robots.txt file to block our crawler from accessing all but your preferred one.

Thank you all...

Well, there are a few very interesting comments at this page Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts I think the main reasons that most of non US sites are hosted in US, are these:

Originally Posted by Darren Rowse

I find the server location thing a little odd. Many non US sites are now hosted in the US due to the affordability of hosting there (and the performance) in comparison to local server options. Seems a pity that to take advantage of this we need to move onto more expensive and worse performing options.

and

Originally Posted by Spanish speaker

In Spain for example, the hosting companies are not very good so that important webs that must be up and running all of the time, it is recommended to host them in the USA to provide stability and proper customer service. If you contract a hosting service in USA and on top of that you have a .com domain, it makes it much more difficult to position the page in a local version of Google. There are two ways to fix this problem:

-Change the domain .com to a local domain and redirect all of the content (not that this would be very advisable)

-Change the hosting to one in your country, but this would imply a slower web page, a decline in customer service , problems with servers going down....

I'm targeting to regional users. I use a country specific domain but having also my site hosted in my country, I think is going to give me lots of oder disadvantages. So, I don't really know if it worth to move on to a local server, regarding SEO