Can the geographic location of a web server affect SEO?

Lee from the UK asks:

"Hi Matt, could you confirm whether the geographic location of the web host has any significant ranking factors for organic SEO?"

Recorded on April 23, 2009.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[macscr]

GoogleWebmasterHelp: Do you work for Google? Are these official statements from google? Im assuming you do since your saying "we", but just wanted to verify.

[GoogleWebmasterHelp]

Hi macscr, Yes, this is an official Google channel. You can find a link to us from Google Webmaster Central.

[InnovicoSolutions]

well amazon.de is hosted in dublin along with .uk and fr

So are they doing it wrong then? ditto for anybody using amazon ec2 elastic cloud.

[Verbotten]

This answer will not really help you make educated decision for TLD owners. It needs narrowing down since incredibly important piece of leveraging information is missing. TLD type.

Question is how does google SEO move around and weigh COM, NET vs country specific domains (DE, CA etc.) in >>> RELATION to SERVER LOCATION<<<

That's the real question.

[Videoorchard]

So does that mean,chaning your ip address(say U.S) when you upload youtube videos,is more likely to pull traffic from U.S?

[AngelLestat2]

I have my page hosting in Argentina, but I want to change to another hosting who has servers in USA.

The Domain is .com.ar

If I use Google tools or some HTML meta tags to help in location, I will still loose ranking in Argentina? I want the best ranking in Argentina, but the actual server is not good enough.

[futureboy00]

floating head

[DAGATHire]

so how do we find out where the server is? ip tracking or what?

[Xuan Nguyen]

Here is our company address:

Is it affected by google during SEO ?

[sderzhant pow-letter gaffe]

momomomomom popugaj!!! you vgg iuvgeavog oliag vavya v;iuav vyvg lygrfla rvyugfrlv avvlrvyugl vg vvga rv layvglv lig kjf vgrv av

a vyug!!!

[agapitoflores001]

This goes to show that Google reaches out to people.