Server located in Canada but site is for local business in Pennsylvania
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My friend's website is for a local business in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania but the MOZbar shows that his server is located in Canada. Will this be detrimental to his SERP rankings? The site was just launched a week ago.
I saw various opinions in other forums and I could not find similar questions in this forum. Thanks in advance.
-Dan
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Although web hosting location is one factor that the search engines will look at for localisation, they will also look at domain registration contact info, published contact address on your website and other signals that may provide a clue of 'where' you do business. I had a Canadian client a while ago that intended to do business primarily in the US. Despite the fact that their site was hosted on a US machine, the site was suspiciously ranking low for some key phrases despite their good optimization efforts. After further review everything about their business (domain contact info, business address) would lead you to think that they do business in Canada, not the US (They showed up page 1 for Google.ca searches). It wasn't until we went into Google Webmaster Tools and set the geotargeting to the United States that we saw their key search phrases jump up into page 1 for Google.com searches.
My opinion... although server location is a factor, I've seen other factors have a bigger weight.
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what country you host in will rank better for that country
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If you want to rank in the USA your site should be hosted in the USA.
I would move ASAP.
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