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Nope, That Doesn't have a big impact on your rankings. But You Better Choose Better Offshore Hosting to provide value to your website. Better Load Time, Almost No Down Time.

As stated by Google, it is better to have an IP of the country you are targeting.

This can be solved with one of this two options:

1. Hosting your site in a local hosting company;
2. Buy a local IP and using proxy from an hosting company in your country

The second option is the ideal in these cases:

1. The hosting companies of your targeted country are not really advanced
2. You prefer to have all your sites hosted in a unique hosting platform
3. You are using a cloud based hosting

What is important to understand is that "where the server is located" is just one of the many factors of a good international SEO. That means that even if you have the site hosted in the targeted country, if you don't optimize factors like local link building, correct translation of the site in the country language (taking care also of the local slangs), localization signals (currency, address, phone numbers), that site could lost against a site hosted in a different country but targeting your same offshore market.

Said that, considering your specific issue, check out what sites like Bwin.com or Betfair.com do in your same situation.

Bwin.com, for instance, cannot use the .es ccTLD for legal issues, so it created a /es/ subcarpet in the .com site.

In that case remember what said above and start use the rel="alternate" hreflang tag.

Then ,again, your case is a little bit complicated, because you are targeting two countries (NL and BE). In this tricky situation I would create two subcarpets (or subdomains), addressing one to the NL Google and the other to BE one, use the rel="alternate" hreflang, but also add the rel="canonical", choosing one of the two as the canonical version of both.

For more infos, read these posts and the links in them:

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/a... << A post by Adam Audette, of which I suggest you read also the comments;

http://searchenginewatch.com/arti... << An interesting overview done in Search Engine Watch

I hope this helps you.

Once again that's incorrect information.  I read the same Google information you read and it states:

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

2. 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.

Did you notice that they say "try not to rely on the server location alone"?

They don't say that the server location is irrelevant!

It's clearly point 2 under geotargeting factors

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

Personally, I would always try and host the server in the country you are trying to target for a number of reasons - mainly performance (and chances are it's going to be cheaper for me, I live in the UK).

However the video "SEO Executive" posted above is from 2009, since then Google have released the following: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html stating that the server location is irrelevant if you own the ccTLD e.g .fr

Martijn you might also want to check out the following whiteboard Friday video about international SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Actually hosting in another country does affect your rankings.  If we look at a video that Matt Cutts of Google posted a while back, he clearly states that since 2001 they started looking at hosting IP addresses.  He goes on to say that "where your server is located can determine rankings".  Take a look for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXt23AXlJJU

The location of the server should not matter, obviously latency will be reduced if you host the site in the country your targeting.

You can assign the target country in Google web master tools also.