rainborick - 1:59 pm on Sep 29, 2007 (gmt 0)

I'm not sure what people mean by "local" links or what influence they might have on rankings. All I can say is that I've seen no evidence that links have any effect on geo-location. Links naturally do have an impact on rankings for search terms that include a location name, whether via anchor text or through Google's lexical analysis of the originating document. It only makes sense. Geo-location is an absolute attribute. Each site or domain has a single geo-location. That is, there's no scale of relevance score for geo-location that might be increased through links.

I'm not well-informed where "local" issues are concerned, so I apologize if I'm off on a tangent here. The search engines are doing so much with local search that I haven't been able to keep up with them all. My impression is that "local" issues primarily involve cities or localities, but not county of origin unless through the factors I mentioned before.