Does it make a difference in Search Engines if you host a website with a local web hosting provider?

This is part of a debate I'm having. I don't think it makes and difference if I host a site locally or with a company 3000 miles away, but thought I'd check with the masses. Any thoughts?
Does it make a difference in Search Engines if you host a website with a local web hosting provider?
Absolutely NO difference.





You can even host it at home IF your connection was fast enough to handle the traffic.





The only thing to look for in a hosting site is how fast a connection they have, and how much bandwidth per Month do they give you. What is there Up time. And of course Price and how reliable are they.
Does it make a difference in Search Engines if you host a website with a local web hosting provider?
It wouldn't make a difference because the world wide web (the Internet) is virtually everywhere at the same time. Location does not matter.





But it all depends on which search engines you submit your site to. If you submit it to US search engines than your site will mostly be listed in US engines. If you want world wide than take the time to submit to all major search engines in alll the countries they offer their services.





I would start with Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Reply:I do not think it makes too much difference unless you are talking about country specific searches, for example yahoo.uk, even then the domain extension is more likely to alter the results as opposed to the hosts actual location.
Reply:Google et al keep their ranking algorithms pretty close to their chests so its hard to say for sure but I would guess that in certain situations it may have an impact.





Geo targetting (mapping an IP address to a location) is used widely in web advertising and I imagine that Google and the likes may also use this technique in ranking location based searches, such as "Chicago restaurant".
Reply:I think the only things that search engines are slow to index are the free sites. Technically, the spiders that they use to gather info may not get everywhere as quickly, but its probably not worth worrying about.





There are ways to make the search engine see your site more quickly or have it come up with greater preference when people search on the topic of your site, and it involves throwing the key terms on your site, sometimes hundreds of times even if its not visible on the web page itself. Visit Google, yahoo and the other main search engines to see how to make your site more visible.
Reply:Nope.