bill - 1:03 am on Aug 19, 2004 (gmt 0)

English SEO and Japanese SEO are a bit different. That's a given. As we can see the 'rules' for an English site don't necessarily all apply to a Japanese site...at least with this Google example.

The evidence I've seen shows that hosting in Japan is not really an issue so where the DNS is based hasn't been much of a factor. If it is a factor at all it's a minuscule portion of the algorithm only used to determine if the page belongs in the result set...it's not some magic SEO tactic that everyone has to follow in order to get high ranking. I doubt it has anything to do with ranking at all. Maybe in some other markets this is an issue, but not in Japan.