.com Domains and regional filtering

Many engines indentify regions differently. What is the best strategy?

[count_zer0]

I am coming up against problems with .com domains and achieving rankings in regional indices. The problem is that each index appears to calculate whether a .com site should rank in (say) the UK differently:

- Google seems to look at the allocation of the IP i.e. if the IP is allocated to a US ISP, even if the site is hosted physically in the UK, it considers the site to be US.
- AOL and Yahoo give primary consideration to UK TLDs.
- MSN (Inktomi) appears to use a geographical IP lookup to determine region, but often seems to get this wrong.

The identification methods seem to be crude at best. I used to think that IPs were allocated according to the physical location of the hosting server (e.g. RIPE in the UK), but I have recently come across cases where the server is located in the UK but an IP allocation lookup gives the owner as US.

What is the way to go here?

[IanTurner]

This thread covers how to get listed in UK Only results

[webmasterworld.com...]

[count_zer0]

Thanks Ian, that's a good thread. One issue that isn't covered in it - and my question wasn't very well phrased - is this issue of databases of IP addresses used to identify geographical location. How are these put together? Do they look up the owner of the IP (generally the hosting company) and extract the location from that?

What appeared to happen in our case is that the UK hosting company was bought out by a US company and the IP ownership changed hands. The databases have not caught up yet. Does anyone know how often these are updated? It must be quite frequent to stay accurate.

Show we just sit tight?

[engine]

The IP is the key for search services that use that process, eg Google.

The owner of the ISP is irrelevant as long as they don't change the location of their systems then it'll be fine.

As I mentioned in that thread that is referenced, there are other special cases which skew the mixed serps some people experience.

For sure, the best (safest) strategy to tarket a UK audience is still a .co.uk with a uk-hosted IP.