Recently I have been thinking a lot about natural linking and posted over here about how to make your links look more natural. Most SEO's doing work for smaller sites will advise them to exchange links with other local businesses first. For example a hotel can exchange some targeted links with pubs, bars and restaurants in the local area. These links are not chosen because they are related to a hotel but because they are related to the town itself. If the same hotel had a bunch of links from another country then this would not look as natural in the eyes of google. Clearly we can all contact local businesses and exchange links with no problem but what if google goes further than this and finds the location of a particular server and compares it to your web server location? Some sites have no address listed and its not always clear where they are based. Google can look at the server location from the IP address and will know exactly where the site is hosted. Obviously some international sites need links from everywhere but I believe that sites looking to rank highly for terms like "London Hotel" or "New York lawyer" should be chasing links from sites that are either based or hosted in London or New York even if they appear unrelated. Obviously this is speculation but it makes a lot of sense for google to look at these factors when they analyse backlinks. Does anyone have any experience of this?
I think you may be on to something here. I run a local Web design site and a local directory for my area (2 separate sites). Naturally I link all my local client sites to them and back. I have found that I get a fairly good PR and serps off of very few backlinks in comparison to larger sites which have global links targeted by industry.
Exactly. If you think about it from a humans point of view a local web design site with loads of links and good reviews from local sites clearly has a good reputation and is trustworthy. Google probably looks at it in the same way.