Robert B
Consultant in corporate communications, strategic planning and business development, turnarounds and start-ups.
SEO Geographic Algorithms
I have a .com website that is hosted in the US and the domain name is registered with a Canadian hosting company.
I am trying to determine what the major search engines use as geographic information when attempting to display geographic search results. An individual doing a search in the UK will generally get UK sites first. If the same keyword search is done in the US - US sites will generally be first and the same applies to Canada.
The question is if you are hosted in the US but registered by a Canadian Company what does the search engine use to determine geographic location - the address of the hosting company or the address of the registering company - there is no geographic identifier on the site itself.
Answers (6)
I wrote a blog post on this a few months ago. See link below.
To summarize, the 2 main criterias Google use to understand which country you are targeting is the TLD (.com for US, .co.uk for UK, .fr for France, etc). This clearly tells which country you are targeting.
The second criteria is the IP adress of your website. Google can define geographic location of any computers with the IP adress. The IP adress of your website is the IP adress of the server where your website is hosted. You check with Whois.domaintools.com. Check with your hosting company, as they can be an american company, but host your website in another country.
It does not matter if you are registered with a Canadian company.
Links:
I tried doing some reading on this. Google gives search results after considering over 100 factors. I could not find geographical location however it may be there in one of those 100. You may want to read this
http://www.googleguide.com/results_page.html
Stowe S
Owner, Intermarket Solutions LLC
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Chris has done well with some very geotargetted SEM campaigns for my business and others, so is likely able to help.
Tarun D
CTO, e2enetworks.com
Best Answers in: Web Development (2), Risk Management (1), Computers and Software (1), Software Development (1), Using LinkedIn (1)
Robert,
Google allows webmasters to claim ownership of a site using a verification process and allows them to define which geography their site is targeting. I doubt google looks at registration information or even hosting geographical location for a site to determine where the search results would be most relevant. I run sites with domains registered and hosted in the US and google is able to determine if its more relevant for India and it shows up better in search results from pages from India. It might be that google looks at users from which market exit out of search results to a site more often to determine search ranking for a site in that market.
Cheers!!
-Tarun
Links:
Hi Robert,
You can use a meta tag in your pages to force the search engine to use US distribution. As far as I know it uses the IP pool look up with something like ip2c http://firestats.cc/wiki/ip2c to get it's location.
Regards,
Martijn
