Are you American?This makes a huge difference for sites hosted outside of their own country due to bandwidth expense. It is quite important and was never really announced by Google, there is little to no information about this in official channels for webmasters from Google however it affects localised page rank quite significantly.
This same post by moonwell.. in not so painful English, with some other corrections.The poster believes Google has performed this way since its inception... The poster belevies it can really suck because when you search something, google.com redirects you to your home countries Google page i.e. google.nl, and usually you want to get the results that google.com would give you. The poster would really appreciate if Google changed their alorithm to more fairly localise sites.As the poster noticed, if you use tabbed Google page using different Google.com TLD you get the English results first. He makes note that another solution is to use a proxy from the USA, or just get used to it.. unfortunalty. :(
FTFA: CONCLUSION "Location of your website's server can make or break your search engine traffic. Especially if you're depending on local traffic."Not true. You can buy a .nl or .be TLD etc and come top of the results for that country if you host in the US (or anywhere).
I think the results could be flawed. One other thing to keep in mind is that google tries to customize the results according to the user's search history. I mean if most of your searches have to do with lets say Belgian contents, why shoud you get search results for an Asian webite. What do you poeple think?
Who didn't know this? Searching "beer" at google.de gives you a different result than when searching for "beer" at google.com. Google wants to provide end users with the most relevant results. And if you're German, you're probably much happier at www.beir.de (a nice portal site), than the useless www.beer.com, which is intended for Americans. Likewise, if you're American, beer.com is still better than beir.de, since you probably don't speak German.
We should be able to control these things in the settings. Do we want local or global results? Do we want our search history to effect the results? Will commercial results be included? The search engine should not be deciding this--the user should.
From the link that the google employee posted:"If you feel that we're incorrectly detecting the location of your site, please send us your site's IP address and the physical location at which it's hosted."
well, duh. of course.It's primarily for business searching. if you type in "computer store", the probability of finding one in your area based on your ip is higher than others. this seems logical..it just becomes a problem when you're searching something where location is redundant.ps. why is the topic apple...?
I very much agree with this post. I previously worked for a contractor for Google for a year and we rated websites on their relevancy, and believe it or not, the location really matters. If a certain keyword will be shown and a list of websites with their landing pages will be shown to us and one of the criteria to rate these sites is its relevancy to the citizen of that country that will be browsing on that specific landing page. Even if you have a very good landing page that is trustworthy, it can be rated as equals to or might be lesser in value than the other website that might be under the local language of the country that you are rating for...sounds confusing? it is really simple. SEO specialists thought that all are crawled and automatically rated but it is not. Mostly real people are the ones who rate websites that you see in SERP.
tibeSep 24, 2006
Are you American?This makes a huge difference for sites hosted outside of their own country due to bandwidth expense. It is quite important and was never really announced by Google, there is little to no information about this in official channels for webmasters from Google however it affects localised page rank quite significantly.
tibeSep 24, 2006
What if you don't want your site to be about the unique 'flying squirrel monkeys' ? i.e. Something that is worth something.
tibeSep 24, 2006
This same post by moonwell.. in not so painful English, with some other corrections.The poster believes Google has performed this way since its inception... The poster belevies it can really suck because when you search something, google.com redirects you to your home countries Google page i.e. google.nl, and usually you want to get the results that google.com would give you. The poster would really appreciate if Google changed their alorithm to more fairly localise sites.As the poster noticed, if you use tabbed Google page using different Google.com TLD you get the English results first. He makes note that another solution is to use a proxy from the USA, or just get used to it.. unfortunalty. :(
cormsterSep 24, 2006
FTFA: CONCLUSION "Location of your website's server can make or break your search engine traffic. Especially if you're depending on local traffic."Not true. You can buy a .nl or .be TLD etc and come top of the results for that country if you host in the US (or anywhere).
nima82Sep 24, 2006
I think the results could be flawed. One other thing to keep in mind is that google tries to customize the results according to the user's search history. I mean if most of your searches have to do with lets say Belgian contents, why shoud you get search results for an Asian webite. What do you poeple think?
rnelsoneeSep 24, 2006
Who didn't know this? Searching "beer" at google.de gives you a different result than when searching for "beer" at google.com. Google wants to provide end users with the most relevant results. And if you're German, you're probably much happier at www.beir.de (a nice portal site), than the useless www.beer.com, which is intended for Americans. Likewise, if you're American, beer.com is still better than beir.de, since you probably don't speak German.
osakawilsonSep 24, 2006
We should be able to control these things in the settings. Do we want local or global results? Do we want our search history to effect the results? Will commercial results be included? The search engine should not be deciding this--the user should.
johneffortSep 25, 2006
From the link that the google employee posted:"If you feel that we're incorrectly detecting the location of your site, please send us your site's IP address and the physical location at which it's hosted."
jacks0nSep 27, 2006
well, duh. of course.It's primarily for business searching. if you type in "computer store", the probability of finding one in your area based on your ip is higher than others. this seems logical..it just becomes a problem when you're searching something where location is redundant.ps. why is the topic apple...?
wedgemartinNov 14, 2007
Word.
barangaybrandoOct 29, 2010
I very much agree with this post. I previously worked for a contractor for Google for a year and we rated websites on their relevancy, and believe it or not, the location really matters. If a certain keyword will be shown and a list of websites with their landing pages will be shown to us and one of the criteria to rate these sites is its relevancy to the citizen of that country that will be browsing on that specific landing page. Even if you have a very good landing page that is trustworthy, it can be rated as equals to or might be lesser in value than the other website that might be under the local language of the country that you are rating for...sounds confusing? it is really simple. SEO specialists thought that all are crawled and automatically rated but it is not. Mostly real people are the ones who rate websites that you see in SERP.