I think that my hosting provider is DAMAGING my Google ranking!

Remember when I told you that I am ranked in the Top 5 on Yahoo, Bing and Altavista, but at the same time I am not even in the Top 1000 on Google?

I think I found the reason.
It's my hosting. Read on, it's kind of complicated.

We all know that Google treats your site and shows it in the results, according to your domain name's extension.
For example, if you have a site in English language, but your domain name ends in .fr, then Google treats it as a regional French site and doesn't care what language it is in.
If your site is well SEO optimized, it will rank in Top 10 on Google France but more likely than not, it will not rank well anywhere else.

But what happens if you have a .com, .org or .net domain?
How does Google find out what "nationality" your site is?
Easy - Google checks your server's IP address.
So, if you have a site that has a .com domain extension, but is hosted on a server in France, Google will still treat it as a regional French site.
And your global exposure or at least your exposure in the USA (which is the biggest market anyway) will suffer because of this.

Knowing all of this, I especially ordered hosting from GoDaddy.com - an American hosting provider.
HOWEVER, GoDaddy has noticed that I am European and has sold me "EU Region" hosting, meaning that my server is located somewhere in Europe!

This, I think, is the reason why I rank well on Yahoo, Bing & Altavista - I guess they don't filter their results by regions. Or at least not as aggressively as Google.
This is also the reason why I'm not present in the Global/American Google.com at all.

Conclusion: if you live in Europe and plan on starting a new site with a SEO campaign, then do a research before buying hosting and find out which American hosting providers will sell you hosting space on real American servers, that are physically located in the USA!