[Video] Matt Cutts: What impact does server location have on rankings?

I'm quite certain Google knows which terms are geographically specific. It's easy for them to build a frequency index based on server location for country/continent.

If the user is located in a particular country, searching for terms that have a higher incidence on sites located in that country, then they are more likely to be provided with results from sites of domestic/local origin.

If your forum's topic is a genre shared in multiple English speaking countries, with a normalized frequency from country to country (not of higher frequency in a particular region), then it should be able to be competitive.

Key hypothesis: If the topic is something of general interest internationally, a site should be equipped to rank well while hosted in any country. If the topic is regionally focused, then sites hosted in that country/region stand to have an advantage in ranking for geographically significant keywords.

Well, for me I do not know how ip location comes into it.

Im irish, site is hosted in germany and my best ranking is on Google UK. I know this probably happened because under webmaster tools i selected to target United Kingdom and I am perfectly happy targeting that area.

However it has been international for the past couple of months and other search engines such as Google Ireland are not yet ranking the site.

Pierce