There seems to be so much confusion whether hosting and/or a cctld matter. I've probably heard every possible opinion on this by now. The only thing I'm wondering about, though is whether it'll be important to get a local host here in Germany (Ill get a cctld anyways and plan on getting links from local sites, of course so whether they matter or not doesnt matter to me if I get them right anyway).

Has anyone on this forum moved a site from a non-local host to a local host before(or the other way around)?

If so how did the SERPs "react"?

Okay, so now I know people who say cctld doesn't matter, but hosting matters A LOT. They point out that they haven't seen any evidence of cctld mattering before. However they can't come up with any evidence that hosting matters a lot, either.

On this forum the common opinion seems to be that a cctld matters more than hosting does (and if I had to decide between those two opinions I'd take the one from you guys on here as you've way more experience with this).

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but unless the effect of the hosting location is a very strong one (which it doesnt seem to be if everybody has a different opinion on this),

how would anybody know if hosting with a local hosting provider does matter, unless they have tried moving a site from a non-local to a local host before? (I know in SEO it's all about trying to spot things and not about fool-proof evidence, but I'm wondering if hosting only has a slight effect how anybody would be able to judge if its really the hosting that has the effect with so many other variables involved - unless of course theyve moved a site from a non-regional to a regional host before :-)).

What do you mean by that? If you're website is for the Pakistani market than hosting it on a server in Pakistan should be a good idea - if it's a reliable hosting company (which I can't tell, but you probably can).

When it comes to hosting in the targeted country or not hosting in the targeted country nobody says that hosting in it can be bad.

The only thing about which there seems to be some confusion is whether it does help or not.

Maybe one of the other moderators knows something about this? Maybe Pakistan is a country where a lot of spam sites are hosted or something like that? In that case, it might not be a good idea to host there even though it could give a local benefit?!

unfortunately, you've been talking to advertisers , and at least 1 bot

Hosting definately works - we provide it to clients and they've seen everything from small to large increases in traffic and rankings by doing it.

This applies to both actual hosting on a server in the target country , and proxy hosting where we forward traffic from a server in the country back to the original server.

Hosting will certainly work to determine geographical location but it is certainly not the main factor Google will take into account in order to assess geographical relevance.

How do I know it? Apart from personal experience in working with several multilingual projects in the past because Google admits it too. See Vanessa Fox blog post about how Google determine geolocation Making Geotargeted Content Findable For the Right Searchers - Nine By Blue. As you might know Vanessa Fox was the Google Engineer in charge of the Google Webmaster Tools project and introduced the geotargeting tool on a folder basis as a result of some sites not being able to use ccTLD but they admit that is the best way to go.

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Interesting - thanks for the replies to my threads Oskar :-)