Regional links - any proven advantage?

[glengara]

I often come across the suggestion that regional links will help a "foreign" page rank in a national G, it's a logical enough assumption but has anyone seen any actual proof of it?

On regional/national Gs the SERPs are a mix of "world" and "local" pages, but the order they appear in remains pretty much consistent, so no.1 in "Pages from Ireland" will normally be the first Irish result shown, same going for the "foreign" pages.

So IMO for the theory to hold water we'd need to see say a US hosted .com/net that ranks significantly better on a particular national G, a page that breaks the normal ranking pattern and is then found to have links from that particular region.

So anyone know of such a creature?

[lammert]

It is not so easy to test this, because there are more ranking parameters influencing the SERPs. The most important one is language. URLs in the local language will get a boost in local Google versions. To compare US SERPs with local SERPs, you have to compare them in a country where English is the primary language, and where there is a large enough local site base to point enough local links to the test site to see a significant difference. This will limit the test to sites for the UK, CA and AU market.

[glengara]

A while back I had a look at "web design" on the various English language Gs NOT including the US G.com.

Started off by looking at "search the web" results on the different Gnews sites, results were identical across the board ( uk/aus/nz/in/ie/za), there appeared to be no "regionalising" of results, it was as close to a "clean" DB as I could find.

Using that list I then did a normal search on the different Googles to see if any of those sites broke the pattern on any specific G, I found a few that did but unfortunately those few also had thousands of links so I was unable to verify their provenance.

IMO if regional links DO help foreign pages rank in national Gs it should be fairly obvious, particularly in G.in :-)