What impact does server location have on rankings?

We have a question from Rob Lewicki from Toronto, Ontario. Rob asks “What impact does server location have on rankings?”

Well, way way, way back in the dawn of Google, it was funny because people would rank in different countries only on the TLD. So fr means you are French, so that’s all that they knew. So back in 2000, 2001 type time frame we started to look at where is the server located, its IP address, so to say it doesn’t end in .fr but it is located in France according to the IP address. So maybe this is really useful for French users. So that’s the primary way you have impact on Google’s rankings. You just stayed in United States, your site’s been in United States, and you’ve never been out of United States, you might never notice any of these factors. But where your server is located whether it’s in US or France or Germany or Britain or Canada or anywhere else can determine our rankings. So for example if you go to google.com and type in “bank” you get different results than you go to google.com.au and type in “bank” or google.co.uk and you type in “bank”. So we do absolutely try to return the most relevant results to each user in each country and server location in terms of IP address is a factor right now.

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