Does host location matter?

Hi
I have a question as a newbie

e.g: my website is in X country and my web hosting is located in Y country

Does this effect my SERP in my country?

No it doesn't matter, site quality, content, quality, and other factors will affect your ranking.

Also domain can affect it too, if you target some specific area like UK use .co.uk domain for better ranking.

If you're targeting local users, a local host is usually best for optimal load times and such. The location won't make any difference on your ranking though.

Conor said:

If you're targeting local users, a local host is usually best for optimal load times and such. The location won't make any difference on your ranking though.

Click to expand...

what about loading time of web site? hosting a web site in a different country absolutely make the web site slower right?

My experience is with 3 different websites:

One site rank No1 in local version of g00gl3 although servers are far-far away...
Of course this site has quite good blacklinks profile and good on-site seo. No special content since it is a e-commerce site. Yes there is some text for each product apart form images and pries but nothing special.

Another site without any backlinks, no on-site optimization and almost no text content ranking on positions 3 to 1 on the local version of g00gle. The only possible explanation: server on the country we focus.

Third site, with server in the country we focus (different company though for the above example) with good on-site optimization and some good backlinks, fair content for a e-commerce site, not anywhere on first 100 positions on the local version of g00gl3.

So.. maybe local server can help but maybe depend also from the company.


P.S. All the above examples on medium difficulty keywords