WebWalla - 6:37 am on Mar 15, 2006 (gmt 0)

Would redirecting from a local domain to a .com based in another country be considered as local by search engines?

There are many possibilities to do this, so there isn't one answer, but I suspect that in most cases the answer is no, because the search engines will base their results on the final .com page.

I can give you a specific example I know of. It is a local widget.es Spanish domain which is redirected to widget.com/es with a 301 redirect. Widget.com isn't hosted in Spain. When searching for widget in google.es with the "Pages from Spain" option, widget.es doesn't appear at all. Searching for widget.es does give the widget.com/es URL, but this very specific search is the only time anything to do with this domain appears in the local SERPs.