Listing changing

[steveo]

Hi, my site is www.reiki-seichim-masters-australia.com. I would like to know why, in both yahoo and google, when I search for "reiki Australia" I get a high listing, but when Isearch for the same thing in australia only search mode I am no where to be seen ?
Can anyone help me with this.

Steve

[minstrel]

There may be two reasons for this:

(1) Google seems to update google.com first and then but by bit the latest changes propagate to the regional Googles, so they may just be lagging a bit

(2) it seems that listing or ranking well in a regional Google may require that you either have a regional domain name (e.g., .com.uk, .ca, whatever the Australian equivalent is, etc.) OR that you be hosted in the country represented by the regional Google. I have been trying to determine whether there might be some other ways to encourage regional listing, such as an identified address and/or phone number appropriate to that region prominantly placed on the site, but as yet can't find anything which supports that.

[cbp]

You don't show up in Yahoo pages from Australia as you do not have a .au in the domain name (Yahoo uses the country extension).

You do not show up in Google for pages from Australia as your site is hosted in Glendale, Arizona (Google uses the location of the host server).

CBP

[minstrel]

Originally Posted by cbp

You do not show up in Google for pages from Australia as your site is hosted in Glendale, Arizona (Google uses the location of the host server).

As far as I can tell, Google will use either the country extension OR the location of the host. I have a .ca site which is hosted in the US and it ranks well in both google.com and google.ca.

I am associated with another site which has a .com extension and is hosted in Canada; it too ranks well in both Googles.

Both are Canadian sites, by the way...

[cbp]

My best guess is that Google may use some form of algorithm to determine pages from <region> based on:

1) Country of server (eg Australia)
2) Domain extension (eg .au)
3) Optimized for country (eg Autralia address, phone etc)

(1) is by far the most powerful determinant and only guarentee of a regional listing. I have only seen isolated examples where (2) and (3) work, but there is no pattern to why it occasionally works - it usually dosen't.

CBP

[minstrel]

I've been thinking about this question for a few days now but something just occurred to me reading your post, cbp.

Both the sites I mentioned (the .ca on a US server and the .com on a Canadian server) are listed here in ODP/DMOZ and therefore the Google Directory:

Regional > North America > Canada > Ontario > Localities > O > Ottawa > Health > Mental Health

So this might well be a strategy for Steve to try...

[cbp]

Maybe to my list above for a potential algorithm, could add:

(4) Regional listing in DMOZ/Google Directory
(5) Whois data

CBP

[minstrel]

I wondered about that "whois" information but it seemed improbable that Google would go to that much trouble - it seemed to me that on page factors like an address and phone number would be more likely factors but that notion was pooh-poohed when I suggested it elsewhere...

[Mel]

From a practical point of view a search engine has readily available to them the information on the extension and the IP address of the site (it is part of the pages record).

On theother hand attempting to parse out the address data from a site is much more complicated, and requires first of all making a determination of all that sites pages which are indexed, searching them and parsing out all the addresses (just determining if it is an address or a reference an address cold be daunting,and what do you do if a company lists the addresses of its agents in 50 countries?) determing somehow from all the addresses you find which one is the address of the entity operating the site and then applying that informtion to the sites region. That is a lot more work and takes a lot more processing and not all pages will have this information.

while much more straighforward process using the whois file, they have to do a whois lookup parse the results and apply them and there are many whois addresses which are simply not correct.

Given that reducing unnecessary processing time is a high priority on search engines the simplest reliable method it seems to me is likely to be the one used.

But the proof of the pudding is to go to the regional SERPs and simply look at the results. While I have only looked at a few hundred, the country extension seems to be used primarily (even when there is an address in a different country), and the .com .net .org listings in the regional serps all seem to have servers located in the country of the regional serps under discussion.

Others may draw different conclusions, of course.

[adore]

I think that when talking about non-English sites, some hints to robots can be delivered by <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" ...> tag also.