How big is the effect of having your site hosted in the country you're targeting?
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Other than having a ccTLD domain and assigning your target country in Google Webmaster Tools' "geotargeting" feature, how big is the effect of having your site hosted in the country you're targeting? Is it really necessary? or it is just a small signal?
Thanks in advance!
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It is definitely a ranking criteria BUT if you do your homework right by focussing on other ranking factors, you do not need to consider it. To make it perfect: if you can, always use the right ccTLD.
Concentrate on keyword domains, with the right ccTLD but if you can`t use keyword domains despite their CC
Take a look at the actual list of ranking factors here
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My understanding is that it's a factor but not a big one if you're already using a ccTLD and/or geotargeting.
I had an experience where we moved a site hosted in the UK to Amazon Web Services' data centre located in Ireland. The site was on a .com domain but used geotargeting for the UK. As far as we could tell, the server move did not have any effect on rankings on google.co.uk or google.ie.
I had another experience with a .co.uk domain - which was moved to 1&1 in Germany. This site did not use geotargeting. Again, we didn't notice any significant changes in UK rankings as a result of the move.
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