IP Address geolocation having effect on SERPs? Explain geolocation a bit more please?

[Bostoncab]

IP Address geolocation having effect on SERPs? Explain geolocation a bit more please?

So half of what everyone KNOWS about SEO is a best guess. One thing i read recently is the location of the pages in terms of SEO having an effect on SERP rankings for local keywords. Meaning if you are a houston doctor and your pages are on a server in houston you will rank a bit higher than a doctor who hosts his pages on a server in Canada.

Not sure if there is any truth to that or not..as usual.

Say it is true.. where does the info on IP address location come from? Is there a way to fake it? Like my ip for a site I own comes up Tulsa when you reverse it but as I recall the company uses a data center in Houston. It even says it on the company site.

So can I get an IP from one state and assign it to a server in another state? What am I not properly understand.

 

[ficfroc]

I really don't beleive that geolocation goes this deep. But this is only what I think. Never made any tests.

 

[gdsc1983]

whatever people might say or prophesise, i have tried and found that geolocation of your server does have an impact. You can geotarget through webmaster tools, but having your IP address in your targeted country works best. And on top of that, links from IP's also within your target geolocation will help with SERPS

 

[Bostoncab]

whatever people might say or prophesise, i have tried and found that geolocation of your server does have an impact. You can geotarget through webmaster tools, but having your IP address in your targeted country works best. And on top of that, links from IP's also within your target geolocation will help with SERPS

I am thinking it goes even further than that. If your page is hosted in a state that you want to rank in for local keyword searches it helps.

 

[Bostoncab]

So can someone start with explaining how google etc knows where your ip is? Is the ip assigned geographically in the ip system? Can you take an ip that was originally assigned to Massachusetts move it to a server in Houston and have it still show as being in Massachusetts?

 

[rasmusk]

So can someone start with explaining how google etc knows where your ip is? Is the ip assigned geographically in the ip system? Can you take an ip that was originally assigned to Massachusetts move it to a server in Houston and have it still show as being in Massachusetts?

Just set the GEOLOCATION in Google Webmaster Tools.. You wanna rank locally in Germany for example, then get a .DE domain.