I am currently working as a dev in an SEO-Agency (in Austria), and we never believed this hypothesis - so we tested this once with a bunch of our sites:
When moving sites with a German speaking audience to a VPS in America, your rankings at google.de/google.at will decrease (slightly - the effect is not that big) - the other way around your rankings will improve (slightly).
However - even if your rankings would improve when moving to America I would recommend keeping your sites hosted in Europe: The increase in rankings will not offset the decrease in user satisfaction and therefore the decline in your conversion rates.
A bit off-topic, but out of curiosity, have you run any other interesting experiments like this? I would love to read a blog post about them.
We regularly test different things, but few are as extensive as this "server location test".
This one was quite easy to do - and to revert - even when doing it for a lot of sites: just duplicate your sites on another continent and change your dns-settings.
Sadly we do not blog about this stuff. As our customers are not particularly fond of sharing their data - and blog posts without precise data are not useful at all...
Additionally, most of our assumptions and hypotheses were wrong. So most of our blogsposts would sound like:
"We thought google would work like this, but sadly we were wrong"
SEOs might like these posts - but potential customers probably not so much :D
And here is the article on budget https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/01/what-crawl-budget-...
Checking some of my sites I see:
- values ranging vom 320 - 410 for a bunch of German speaking sites hosted in Europe
- and values of 221 and 240 for my two English speaking sites hosted in America (via firebase - on googles own infrastructure)
So if you are concerned with your crawl budget, I think you better focus on things like:
- On-site duplicate content
- Soft error pages
- and Low quality and spam content
Plus you could also get some high quality backlinks.
And please be aware that the crawl frequency does not directly influence your rankings. So, as long as your do not really have a big problem regarding your crawl budget, you may spend your time wiser if you focus on other metrics.
PS: You may already know the tools, but others could be interested:
If you want to optimize you sites performance in respect to SEO use the following tools:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=d...
The most important aspect is "Reduce server response time" - you have to pass this!
Choose a server near you and aim for a Speed-Index of maximum 3000 - I personally target 1000, but depending on your influence regarding the website's frontend you will not be able to achieve this.
For some comparison results: Uncached, with my own CMS indexing and analyzing a 6GB database of crashdumps and providing an overview with graphs over that, I get a score of 623. (This running on a 9€/mo dedicated server).
Although doesn't help for all types of requests, it has its uses.
I would also assume that Google is smart enough to take the physical location of your server into account when calculating how much penalty to apply in which searches. Sites that load fast in Germany should have higher ranks in searches from Germany.
Is this the initial handshake which understandably introduces latency?
After that, times should be similar. What could be killing users far away is requiring multiple handshakes because multiple things requiring handshakes are being introduced at the same time.
For reference, I'm physically located in China so requests have to go through a bunch of filtering-oriented routers, and get 150-180ms from US, 200ms Japan and 180ms Singapore (yay geography) and around 200-250ms from Europe - this is SSL requests and not from a connections hub like Shanghai or Shenzhen close to domestic exit-points. Double to triple these times for first handshake.