Does server location matter?

[Tman3]

Hi guys,

1. A friend's website is hosted in Germany (showing German IP in Flagfox) but it is a UK-based local business that only serves customers within a small radius covering 3 medium sized UK towns (they sell heavy construction materials for collection only). Should I advise him to change hosting location to the UK? Will this help him rank better for regional keyword searches & Google Places?

2. He has some 'followed' links from UK sites (over 6 months old) that are not being picked up by Majestic, OSE or Webmaster Tools - is this likely to be connected to the server location?

Thanks in advance for any help!

[firstconversion]

1. Not really a need to change location. Google is aware that sites are often hosted outside of their country, there are a lot of other stronger signals that he can easily give

I assume he has a .co.uk or a .com?

1. Set his location in webmaster tools to be UK
2. Make sure he has a UK address on the site - footers or contact us page etc
3. Set the lang in the html to en-gb
4. Make sure there is UK related content on the page

2. If those links are not showing up, they are likely from very weak domains that wouldn't help him even if they did show up. Go and get decent quality links!

[AlanMosley]

The main too signals google looks ta are tld and ip number, so hosting in anouther country is a problem, but as stephen has said you can use GWMT to indicate what country you want to rank in, unfortunatly this only helps with google

See matt cutts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXt23AXlJJU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keIzr3eWK8I