[Video] Matt Cutts: Can the geographic location of a web server affect SEO?

• Yes it does. Google looks at IP address of the webserver.
• Google takes an IP from Germany, and will think it is more useful for a user from Germany searching.
• Google does still throw results from other locations as well.
• Google also looks at the tld.
• You can opt in from your Webmaster Tools that your website is for a certain country only.

I don't mean this as a crack but this is pretty old news... all this has been true for years, except for the addition of the Webmaster Central option which is relatively new.

Makes sense, but I purposely never picked a geographic target in my Google Webmaster Tools because I don't want to be limited to any one geographic area! I want as much traffic as possible!!

No, you're missing the point. Google is going to locate you geographically anyway, whether you like it or not. If you're hosted in the US with a .com domain, you are geotargeted for a US market. If you are hosted in Canada with a .ca domain, you're targeted for Canada, etc.

This is really only important information for people who have mixed geotargeting factors (hosting in one country; tld indicating another; or both tld and domain indicating one country but hoping to target another). Then you can use factors such as language of the website and Webmaster Central to let Google know your main target.

Oh I understand what you are saying

I wasnt exactly sure how that setting in Webmaster tools worked!

Does anyone know how this would affect your site if you were using a CDN to serve pages? I.e. example.com served through Akamai. Example.com would always resolve to the same IP, but that IP is routed differently depending on where your local Akamai server is.

Does this mean that a Google bot from the UK would see example.com as a UK site and Google bot from the US see it as a US site?

This is one thing I totally don't understand. Google is acting very weird on this point. Bandwidth is very expensive in Turkey. If I need a good server in Turkey I have to pay 3 - 4 times more compared to other countries. As Nick mentioned most people started to use Cloud hosting which should also be taken under consideration. That's why geo-targeting should not effect rankings at all.