To those who want to start a new website read here http://www.digg.com/tech_deals/Local_Search_and_How_to_Make_it_Work_For_You So the first step that you need before even sign up your domain is deciding who is your audiences, are they limited to one country (Canada, Uk, Australia ..etc) or they are wild wide, the right answer for this question will help you a lot to choose the right extension to your domain (.ca, .uk.co, .au) and then choose the right location for your host, and you will see how much time you will save seoing a website for local search engine if you choose to go for the local Best regards
There are a couple way to do this. That article touches on them briefly With the country specific TLD like a .ca or a .co.uk it does not matter where your host is. Google knows your a Canadian site if your using a .ca but could be hosted on a server just about anywhere. If you are using a general TLD like a .com then you should consider using a host with servers that are physically located in your country. When doing a search on a country specific version of Google like Google.ca or Google.co.uk the main results will be slightly different from those at Google.com PLUS, if the user hits the "pages from Canada" on the .ca engine or "pages from the UK" on the .co.uk engine then the results are different again. Sites without the specific TLD and not on a server in the county get ignored in that search. A site that lands on page 3 on Google.com could land near the bottom of page 1 in Google.ca, and then near the top for a 'Canada only' search. Not too many people actually use the "pages from whatever country" but for most users Google will automatically do a redirect based on ip to the local engine. So most Canadians use Google.ca and most UK residents use Google.co.uk. Likeley the same for most countries that have their own version of Google. So, choosing your TLD and/or server location can matter. And even make a huge difference. One thing I think the author of that article gets wrong though is the general publics view of country specific TLD's. Almost every Canadian knows that .ca means Canada and UK residents know .co.uk means UK sites. French people know .fr means France. Indians know .in is India, etc....... So i really do think this can portray a real sense of trust if you are specifically targeting traffic from a particular country. Users are reading titles and descriptions on SERP pages and probably paying little attention to domain names when clicking what might be what they are looking for. But when they do click and land on the site, you may have some better sticking power and repeat users based on your TLD. maybe. If you can get your hands on the .com version and the .country version, buy them both and redirect the .com to your .ca, or .co.uk, or .whatever. This takes care of the type-in traffic that assumes you're a .com or forget your actual TLD which can happen a lot when a site is passed on by word of mouth.
Thanks to elaborate in this, actually this is very complicated issue and needs a lot of tests I hope this true, but a site lands 3 on Google.ca lands 56 on Google.com
That was just one generalized example from one of my clients sites. Lots of factors of course influence where a site will land on Google.com vs Google.ca But it does show how much of a difference using the right TLD or host can make.
I need to ask you of you also compare google.com results inside Canada and outside Canada (i.e USA) Will see a big difference sometimes
As in different results based on Google detecting a searchers location by ip? Could be, but I've never looked into it. Not sure if it has that much relevance for a site that would be targeting traffic from its home country, not US. Do you search from a proxy to test this?