Yah I guess nothing like a good debate to get facts separated from the assumption, lol
I am competing in different markets and this is the first time I actually have to get an international site rank competitively for a specific country. The irony is that this site is ranking extremely well on Google.com but the traffic doesn't help me one bit as we actually need traffic from South Africa, so we are actually wasting allot of bandwidth on meaningless traffic, sigh...
Anyway I have analyzed several country specific results as I have several sites hosted in the UK ranking top10 there some with UK tld's some not... I also have a few SA hosted sites that are ranking extremely well locally but getting an international site to rank well for it's targeted SA visitors has proven Googles most difficult part of it's algo... I have seen a couple of sites ranking well in the UK and SA Google's rank well with .com tld's US hosting. After analyzing their backlinks I noticed that they have a large amount of Country specific backlinks, so I am pretty sure that it plays a role...
The irony is that if Google added advertising backlinks to their country specific SERP's they would without a doubt rank us well, as we have one of the biggest brands in the country.
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