SEO benefits of US vs UK based server for UK traffic?

[ProspectLab]

I currently host all my domains through US west coast based hosting company Dreamhost.com. They are great and offer good value and flexible hosting on an unlimited hosting plan. For the moment my websites are mainly simple redirects and one-page landing pages.

So what is my concern? Well - all my websites are UK related and should target UK traffic (= good organic listings on Google.co.uk etc).

As I now am looking to develop several websites targeted to a UK audience, my question is: In terms of SEO and ranking on UK serach engines- how much do I stand to benefit from switching to a UK (London-based) server?

Many thanks,
Toby

[damion]

Google for example does gives some extra weight to sites that are hosted in the United Kingdom if the search is related to the United Kingdom.
It would also help if your domain extension is co.uk.

If you're targetting the U.K. market i would go for a co.uk extension and a U.K. server location.

[dcristo]

You probably get a slight edge having local hosting, but if your not targetting ultra competitive terms just a .co.uk should be sufficient.

[ProspectLab]

Thank you both, I'm giving this some thought, do not yet know how much of challange there will be moving some of my databases etc... ... but for the long term it might make sense to make the move.

[nikniknik]

depends on the SE:
MSN - a very localized SE which server location and domain would really help.
Yahoo - less localized , but due to the fact they are a content generator the content location (server) has a lot of power rather domain.
Google - Google does not provide good results for localized web sites. it measures language , so in the tradeoff between servers I don't think it would really matter.

hope it helped.

[cloudfuyun]

local hosting may important

my Chinese website which hosted in US, was even not indexed in google