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Originally Posted by peterpullar
I have peterpullar.com and peterpullar.com.au hosted by Telstra who I believe hosts in Australia, and both sites appear in Google pages from Australia.
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Jeez PP that's a big call given that Telstra is moving jobs and infrastructure offshore.
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Originally Posted by peterpullar
Also I was not aware of any .au domain names being invisible on international searches on search engines because of the .au Maybe it does happen, but I have never heard of it. Sure many international people may not want to have to remember the .au bit at the end, and it makes the domain name a bit longer which may be small disadvantages.
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Well the parallel registration of domains in both .au and gTLD probably has more to about brand protection and risk management than ensuring listing on international search engines. But note how Alta Vista now has a "Search US" button on its international search and without any shred of evidence other than a few test searches I would say that even if your widgets are world exclusive a .au domain just might not be enough to get you a top 40 listing (the only ones that matter) for any given search. Also Overture seems to be moving to a country specific model - but that's not for discussion here.
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Originally Posted by peterpullar
I don't know why it matters or how it happens, but it just does seem to have a significant effect. Apart from .au websites, it is my experience on all my own and my friends websites that the ones hosted in Australia come up on pages from Australia and those hosted elsewhere do not.
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I could bore you with 100s of our sites hosted on non Australian servers which do pretty well on generic "pages from Australia" searches on google.com.au but one non-client example should suffice to convince you otherwise. Search for the word "demesne" (pardon the pun) on a "pages from Australia" search on google.com.au The top result an Australian owned gTLD domain (above an Australian government site even) is hosted on a box located in San Diego or thereabouts.
You have to ask yousrself why, despite some anecdotal evidence to the contrary, Google would want to start giving heavy weighting to the location of the server. People change delegations all the time and hosting companies especially the larger ones move the location of the boxes all the time. Why would they penalise when they know as well anyone that the domain owner really has no control over the location of a server.
Added to that there is the huge difficulty of actually figuring out where a server is. Sure they can tell who issued the IPs and more or less to whom but after that they would be making educated guesses about the server's actual location.
As for the usage of google.com.au - does any one have any stats on the usage of this by Australians as compared to google.com?