Orion,
Thanks for the insight. Our IP is definitely Canada and has been for 5+ years. We noticed a huge
PR drop (out of G for a few months, too) and loss of sales (50%) when Big Daddy came to fruition early last year. We also changed our ecommerce software at that time so I don't know what was the culprit - probably both. We slowly recovered, almost. Still not to where we should be or were at.
Here is what our host said about the foreign host.
"From what I've read, and I have looked into it; the domain name extension is what is used for consideration. Not the geographic location of the servers. We have several UK clients that I know of who switched from the .com to .co.uk version of their domains (forwarding the .com version to the .co.uk) and saw an immediate increase in ranking from several search engines. Those clients are still hosted with us in Canada.
Good hosting is more about having your domain available all the time to be indexed by the engines. No doubt one day the search engines will start favoring one hosting company over others, but that will probably be the day when Google buys out the world....
Seriously, several hosting companies block search engine spiders - especially googlebot. A good deep googlebot crawl can eat up a LOT of resources server side (1000's of page requests per second) and can last for days. If the server can't handle it then the customer gets no rankings and is removed from the index. Several big hosts in the USA do this but I don't feel free to toss out names like a mean spirited cousin.
Just like the silly dedicated IP per domain myth. A virtually hosted domain on a shared IP can get a very high ranking. The only time people seem to be penalised is when they irrelevantly over-link their domains on the same shared IP in an attempt to falsely garner higher rankings.
Many search engine's look specifically for this and penalise sites for it.
We have some clients with
PR 6 and higher on shared hosting that I can think of off the top of my head. Which is based on Google.com, not .ca.
Heck, the vast majority of our customers are either US based or targeting US customers. We also have a dozen or so UK webmasters who are a tight group of friends doing a lot of
SEO works on blogs and such who are doing quite well from my understanding. Also a few
SEO guys from Brazil, Germany and Australia that I can think of...
Honestly, most of our clients seem to be the
SEO type. Small sites consuming small amount of bandwidth on fast stable servers. People wanting large, cheap virtual hosting seem to go elsewhere and that's fine by us.
If you have any thoughts, feel free to share. We had a datacenter in the USA but closed it. We could always open a new one down there if there was enough demand. As it is, Vancouver and Montreal seem to be enough to satisfy most."