There has been a lot of talk recently on the importance of where your website is hosted in relation to your rankings in the search engines. It is well documented that having your website hosted in the country of the search engine you’re trying to get listed on works wonders. For example, hosting in the UK and targeting search positions on Google.co.uk. By having your website hosted in the specific country, you can increase your weighting by some 20%, some claim it’s even higher. One thing is for certain, if you’re competitors are hosting in a different country other than the one you’re targeting, it’s time to switch. Putting your website on a host or IP address that is located in the specific country will indeed give you the boost you desire.

There is also talk of whois contact information and the location of the nameservers being factored into the ranking fo your site, but at this time, there is no evidence to support this.

Looking at the google.co.uk for some highly competitive search terms, 9 out of the top 10 appear to be on .co.uk domain names and hosted in the UK. I guess having country specific domains and web hosting combined is the way to go for ranking in the search engine of your country or in your Google locality.