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We are in New Zealand but our site is hosted in the US. We rank on the first page for our products in Google for US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Japan and NZ. This is crucial for our business.

WE have been advised to use a NZ server instead of the US server. My question is - will changing countries like this cause any issues at all with our Google rankings. I read below that we need to keep it seamless as possible - which we would do. That is great advice - but apart from that - is there anything we need to be aware of? Thanks! Susan

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    What is the "below" that you're referring to? I get the impression that'll help give you a better answer. Also, how is your site structured: same content for all countries, or different? ccTLD or gTLD?
    – GDVS
    Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 8:36
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    On the anything else you need to be aware of section - Speed. Make sure you don't move from a fast server to a slower server. Additionally if your main target market is not NZ but globally distributed and you have enough traffic to justify it, a Content Distribution Network (CDN) might be worth looking into.
    – joesk
    Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 12:14

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This has been answered in Does changing web hosting server affect SEO page ranking?. As long as your domain name and hosting country stay the same, switching from one reliable host to another should have no SEO impact (go to point 4 of this SeoMoz article).

Although detailed reasons are not provided in the Google Webmasters video on this topic by Matt Cutts, it is mentioned that changing to a server only in the same country is ok.

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I would host the site in the county with most of the turnover, on a fast server. If most of your sales are in the US, leave it there. If most of your sales are in Canada, the US is okay as a server location. If you mostly sell in NZ it can be good to move.

Generally you want to decrease the average ping times for visitors that have the potential to covert into buyers.

Also check out the possibility of using a CDN if your sales are geographically widely distributed.

UPDATE: I wasn't a fan of Cloudflare for a while but started using it more seriously for a couple of sites and it can be a quick and cheap solution to get a CDN-like setup. They have servers in Sydney which should be good enough for NZ.

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