Site isn't returning when I search results from a particular country

[playlife]

Hello

I have a portuguese site, indexed on Googlebot for almost 1 year.
The site is hosted at a portuguese company but has an american IP.
The domain is .com and it appears on Google's search results, but only
on 2 of the 3 search options that we have on Portugal's Google page:

search in web
search in portuguese language (includes various countries with
portuguese language)
search in Portugal's pages

The most important for my site is the last one and itīs the one where
it doesn't appear.
I already read the topic on Webmaster Help Center about this issue but
I still have 1 doubt:

Is it possible to solve this? Some manual correction from Google?
Some html to make it crawl right?

TY
(sorry for my english)

[edited by: tedster at 4:14 am (utc) on May 3, 2007]

[wheelie34]

Playlife

To appear for portugal searches you will need to host your .com IN or ON a portugal IP address

Welcome to webmaster world

[tedster]

Links from other sites hosted in Portugal can also help.

[WebWalla]

Tedster - isn't this a little misleading?

You appear to be saying that links from other Portuguese sites will help this particular one appear in the local google.pt results when the "Pages from Portugal" option is selected.

Both my own experience, and everything I've ever read, indicates that either a .pt domain or a Portuguese IP is required to appear in those results.

Are you saying that links alone can do it?

[tedster]

Are you saying that links alone can do it?

No, just that it can help. I didn't make that up - it came from either Adam or Matt C (can't remember which one) responding to someone with a similar problem. In some situations, even with a country tld and ip address, the absence of regional backlinks can apparently still confuse the issue.

[playlife]

Ty all for your answers and for the welcome.
I'm seeing that the best solution is to change to a more expensive (portuguese) host. :)

[rainborick]

All three of the major search engines use two criteria for determining the geo-location of a site: (1) the presence of a Country Code Top Level Domain name (as in ".com.pt" or ".co.uk") or (2) the physical location of the server that hosts the site based on the IP address. Google also says they may use information from the domain name registration data, but they are typically cryptic about when or how they do it, and I've never seen any concrete evidence of it.

But other that that, only the two primary factors listed above are used. No amount of linking, <meta> tags, or incantations will affect how the search engines treat your site. And since all three of the major search engines give a great deal of weight to geo-location, even when the user DOES NOT select a country-specific search, no website owner can afford to ignore it.