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I'm attempting to find hosting in European countries, which will appear in a local search from google.
To the best of my knowledge the only way I can ensure this at the moment is by picking up in-country hosting from ISPs that are currently holding google-recognized ip blocks.
To do this I've been working backwards from .com's and .net's in googles country specific SERPS.
Italy is confusing me. There are only two options at the top of google.it's search page, one is obviously to search the web as a whole, but I can't tell if the other is an option for 'searching pages in italian' or 'search for pages in Italy'
which does it say?
only the latter would preclude locally hosted sites, and I get the feeling google isn't offering this option.
So my question is, is it neccessary at all to have local hosting to get into the 'local' italian google?
I was going to tack on the question: are they planning on adding a 'pages in italy' button in the near future.
But of course, nobody but googleguy could answer that.
So my question is, is it neccessary at all to have local hosting to get into the 'local' italian google?
The results are below:
Italian .com
Italy: 229129
Non-Italian hosted: 16909
Italian .net
Italy: 43970
Non-Italian: 3734
Italian .org
Italy: 26463
Non-Italian 2803
The biggest single non-Italian hosting country in these figures is the US.
The big problem for all search engines is in determining whether a site hosted in one country is actually relevant to that country rather than to another. The size of this problem has forced big search engines such as Google and the others to implement a 'filtered' index based on the country code (eg .it) and com/net/org websites hosted on IP ranges associated with that country. It is a very quick and nasty way of generating an index. The fastest way into one of these 'pages from $country' indexes would be to have a website with that country's cctld extension.
Regards...jmcc
Interestingly this is not neccessarily a surefire way either. We had the situation where sites with local domain but hosted in another country where not included in local AOL
results.
This could be a serious weakness for the local AOL search for .ie as approximately 55% of .ie websites are hosted outside of Ireland. Though AOL does not actually operate in Ireland as an ISP. AOL could be relying on the IP of the website to determine the relevance to the country. That is often an unreliable way of doing things especially for small countries like Ireland.
Regards...jmcc
Ya, I got carried away a bit from the original question. Status quo is italian language brings a site up under that option, regardless of TLD.
Basically what I'm doing now is a RIPE whois on the nameserver of another site that comes up in a 'within country' search at google, and trying to determine that sites ISP, then trying to determine another nameserver that the ISP uses, and seeing if there is consistency in the RIPE country fields for each IP. If there is, I can be fairly confident that most of the sites said ISP hosts will be recognized by google as local.
If the ISP lists a number of its hosted sites, I can simply search through the local google index for these sites, and if I see them, I could gain the same confidence. But neither of these methods are 100%, either available, or accurate (instances of RIPE showing one country, and google including it in another local index, have come up once or twice recently here at wwworld i believe)
Is there anything more I can do to ensure new sites going up in foreign countries will be seen as locally hosted by google? Any other tools besides RIPE's country field and some basic logic?
Of course the language on your site should be the most important factor imo - if a site is in Danish, it's probably important to a Danish audience. Still local TLD is important [webmasterworld.com] in the determination as well.
