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I have heard(read) SEO experts who claims that you server position will affect your SEO. In the latest example it was about an international site targeting the Russian market so:

  1. Does the server location affect how many visitor you will get from specific country.
  2. Does the TLD affects SEO outside that it is easy to type the TLD of your country

If the above have any effect what will be if you by TLD domain for the countries you are targeting and make them redirect to you international one, for example:

  • example.com - international
  • example.ru - redirects to example.com/ru/
  • example.de - redirects to example.com/de/
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  • If not physical location, perhaps logical location that dictates where that IP address is considered to be sourced, right? I know that when I use a proxy that appears to change my country I get shown different ads from AdSense. Dec 9, 2010 at 15:43

2 Answers 2

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Google: Working with multi-regional websites

Google generally uses the following elements to determine the geotargeting of a website (or a part of a website):

Use of a ccTLD is generally a strong signal for users since it explicitly specifies a single country in an unmistakable way.

or

Webmaster Tools' manual geotargeting for gTLDs (this can be on a domain, subdomain or subdirectory level); more information on this can be found in our blog post and in the Help Center. With region tags from geotargeting being shown in search results, this method is also very clear to users. Please keep in mind that it generally does not make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site target more than a single country (say, all German-speaking countries) — just write in that language and do not use the geotargeting setting (more on writing in other languages will follow soon!).

Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.

Other signals can give us hints. This could be from local addresses & phone numbers on the pages, use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google's Local Business Center (where available).

Note that we do not use locational meta tags (like "geo.position" or "distribution") or HTML attributes for geotargeting. While these may be useful in other regards, we've found that they are generally not reliable enough to use for geotargeting.

FYI, all of those redirects won't do anything for you SEO wise.

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I highly doubt the server location will make any SEO difference. The TLD however does, as far as I know. When users use their language-specific Google (i.e. Google.ru) they will more likely find yourdomain.ru in the top of their results than ru.yourdomain.com, purely based on the TLD.

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