Do regional links really help in regional SERPs?

[glengara]

It's often suggested regional links will help "foreign" pages rank in regional results, I'm not sure this isn't just wishful thinking on our part and was wondering how we might determine if they do.

Sticking to the English language Gs and using a generic search term we should see the same "foreign" pages appear in the various regional results more or less in the same order.

If one of those "foreign" page breaks the order and ranks substantially better in one particular regional G and it turns out they have a number of links from that specific region it would be a pretty good indication that regional links do help.

Any other ways to determine if regional links make a difference?

[tedster]

I can't really come up with another idea for a test that would be nearly as good. The thing is, you are trying to test for a secondary - really third level - factor. So the evidence could well be swamped out by IP address location and ccTLD in many cases.

The information about this factor comes from Google engineers, and in this case I can see no reason for them to want to obscure or spin anything. Even without a direct test, I do trust this particular input.

[Crush]

Yes it DOES make a difference to have links from various IPS and also the hosting.

There is a case of a UK host who had data centres in Germany and all the customers were complaining.

Factors to consider:

Tld
IP of host
Location of backlinks to your site

[glengara]

"So the evidence could well be swamped out by IP address location and ccTLD in many cases."

Not really, as the test would involve only "foreign" pages, IP/ccTLDs wouldn't be a factor.

The regional "web search" results came broadly from two lists, the "Pages from #*$!X" results and a non-regionalised list based on allinanchor results.

G then intermingles them based on the strength of the regional competition, but their order of appearance remains based on the original lists so the first regional result would be no.1 in "Pages from #*$!X" the first "foreign" result no.1 in the other list.

It's looking for anomalies in the order of appearance of the "foreign" list in the various Gs that may help determine if regional links help "foreign" pages....

[Errioxa]

-Ip local
-domain local .es .de etc
-Links of local domain

This should not be of this one way. For a little time we have seen like to these factors they are very important and I think that this isn’t better way.
The ip should not have any importance, since the companies of hosting here are very disappointing and we contract the hosting in USA.
And this one must not be a determinant factor. The same thing with the domains .es or .de or .it

There will be some solution to these problems?

Google WebMasters Tools option?

[Marcia]

Check back on some of the old "Florida Update" threads in the Google forum archive for some interesting insights on "local" listings.

[glengara]

IIRC, don't the "local" listings more or less ignore IP/TLD when determining "local"?