Is server location important for website local rankings?
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Does server location affect website rankings?

Does server location affect website rankings? - answered by Matt Cutts

Summary:

Server’s location is a factor that has an impact in Google’s rankings as far as localization is concerned. It used to be the case that Google would only consider the TLD for that purpose, but now, another way to influence search rankings is via server’s IP address.

 

Matt's answer:

Today we are going to talk about the impact of server location on Google rankings

 

Way, way back in the dawn of Google, you know it was funny because people would rank in different countries based only on the tld. So, .fr meant that you were French but that’s all that they knew. Back in 2000-2001 time frame, we started to look at where is the server located, it’s IP-address, to say “well, it doesn’t end in .fr but it is located in France, according to it. So maybe this is really useful for French users”. That’s the primary way you have an impact on Google’s rankings.

 

If you’re just in the US, your site is in the US and you have never been outside the US, you might never notice any of these factors. But where your server is located, whether it’s in the US or France, Germany or Britain or Canada or anywhere else can determine our rankings. For example if you go to google.com and you type in “bank” you get different results than if you go to google.com.au and you type in “bank” or google.co.uk and you type in “bank”.

 

We try to return the most relevant results to each user in each country

 

And server-location in terms of IP-address is a factor in that.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: