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.

[Puaro]

How about CDNs? When they cache/accelerate your site the i.p address is changed, even with google pagespeed the i.p changes, so how Google knows the real i.p of the server? how that affects SEO ?

[afmedwards]

Such a subtle, yet vital consideration -- thanks for the clear info!

[pskj]

Hi,
If I have a server that serves round-robin DNS from a variety of geo-locations (different country or same country) for the purpose of clustering, what would be the effect on google search results?

[Nanook]

It's not outdated by cloud computing. First understand what cloud computing is, it is someone else's computer. So using somone else's computer doesn't change the equation at all. Second, farther away you are the more latency there is in the connection, that's going to make for slower response times. Depending upon what you are searching for, local results may be more relevant. So in short, even in the days of cloud computing, it still matters.

[ResaBarillas]

What about servers within a country? If my client wants to target South Florida and my company's server is in California, will that make a difference as well?

[NoodlesNZ]

How will this affect a site served up through a CDN like Akamai? The IP address would remain the same, but it would look like it's being hosted in every country. Would a Google bot from the UK see the site as a UK site and a Google bot from the US see it as a US site?

[DAGATHire]

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

[latestboutiquedesignes]

My site is .pk but ranking in Saudi Arabia why??? Please reply me

[SalvatoreMcDonagh]

From this can we conclude that the IP address is measured, and the distance between searcher and possible result are included in the search algorithm, but the weighting relative to other factors is dynamic, and impossible for you to generalise about, hence the non committal non-answer? All else being equal (which never happens) it matters, but in reality, other factors outweigh this significantly in the vast majority of cases. Relevant content wins over everything else, as it should be.

[vivinvarghese]

For clod computing it affects the hosts

[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?

[ilifter]

thank you for conclusively answering the question that i have been trying to answer for the last day or two, directly from the horses mouth, thankyou.

[SeoantwerpenBe]

I don't think Ali. These days I think the location is still relevant for SEO. It's not outdated.

I think it's outdated info or it will be. Google, like Amazon has its own cloud services and offers it worldwide. They would hurt themselves. By other hand i have had very bad experiences with Located IP (failover) so definitely it is not the solution. I think time will tell but we are increasingly focused on cloud and cloud knows no frontiers or countries.

[netandful]

lol!, of course they are, please knee