dertyfern - 2:32 pm on Apr 26, 2010 (gmt 0)

If one is trying to rank in a regional Google, do we really know how much links from within that region/country matter?

They matter. I've got a .com that's hosted on a Florida server but 90% of it's links are from UK. It ranks very well in Google UK but not quite so good on Google US.

In fact, doing a search on Google UK while clicking the "pages from UK" radio button still brings up my .com, even though it's hosted on a US IP.