Hosting UK websites elsewhere in the EU

[Williams Reus]

Currently we host our websites on a dedicated server in the UK.

We've recently discovered Liquidweb in the US who we're massively impressed with both from a cost and support point of view. They have recently opened a data centre in Amsterdam and we are considering moving our websites there.

I am hoping that server location is no longer a big issue for SEO when hosting websites. We have a bunch of .co.uk domains which Google should know are UK based sites, and any .com's we can set the audience location in Webmaster Tools.

Is this likely to still cause an issue from an SEO perspective? I'm inclined to think it's page speed that's the bigger problem when hosting a website outside of the target country. But in this instance the ping times to our dedicated sever in the UK are virtually the same as the ping times to Liquidweb in Amsterdam (ping times to Liquidweb in the USA are significantly slower though I should point out).

Thanks in advance.

 

[UWH-David]

Currently we host our websites on a dedicated server in the UK.

We've recently discovered Liquidweb in the US who we're massively impressed with both from a cost and support point of view. They have recently opened a data centre in Amsterdam and we are considering moving our websites there.

I am hoping that server location is no longer a big issue for SEO when hosting websites. We have a bunch of .co.uk domains which Google should know are UK based sites, and any .com's we can set the audience location in Webmaster Tools.

Is this likely to still cause an issue from an SEO perspective? I'm inclined to think it's page speed that's the bigger problem when hosting a website outside of the target country. But in this instance the ping times to our dedicated sever in the UK are virtually the same as the ping times to Liquidweb in Amsterdam (ping times to Liquidweb in the USA are significantly slower though I should point out).

Thanks in advance.

A couple of sources I have checked as of 2015 indicate that hosting a .co.uk in the US can negatively affect rankings compare to an IP rank in the UK.

Here is article from 2010 and Google themselves on multi-regional ranking websites.
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

 

[elcidofaguy]

I don't believe the location of the web server is a ranking factor at all... What matters is the performance of the server i.e. I would rather have a fast server located in the US than a slow one in the UK regardless of co.uk domains etc... Poor performing webstes put people off with having to wait too long and hence conversions are also impacted...