Recently I got my hands on an 8 year old domain with no backlinks at all. The site is very small, about 20 pages with no significant content, and is pure HTML. The perfect little site for experimenting. It has all the weight of an old domain and no bad history, or even a slight attempt for search engine results manipulation.

The current experiment is something I read about a while ago. I never believed that a site can do so much locally, only because it is registered and hosted in the country where its main market is located. I'm speaking of the United Kingdom.

You understand that I get way higher ranking in google.co.uk compared to google.com and even google.ie. So this sounds nice, I rank well locally after a few simple alternations. I've written unique meta information for each page, included keywords, rewrote the URLs, generated a sitemap, and removed a script from one of the main navigational menus.

With these chances alone I'm able to get on the 1st page for relevantly general search queries in google.co.uk. This is before any link building is initiated. Then a question popped into my head. What if I get an external link, from a site hosted in the US? Will this improve my rankings there?

Because I became interested in the subject of the site, I did a few posts (on a blog hosted in the US) on a relevant subject. I included a link containing the text of a search query I like to test. When it got indexed about a week later, I suddenly moved from ~190 to ~19 place in google.com. I'm only speculating that it makes sense for Google to give more credit to my site in google.com, after a local site linked to me (in this case a blog I run). I should mention that results in Yahoo and MSN remained completely the same.

I have two questions for you:

• Has anyone else noticed the effects from local domain registration and hosting on the domestic marked?

• Do you find linking from sites corresponding geographically with the localized Google search to be important?

In my future experiments I plan to engage some serious link building and I wonder whether I should be more precise about the links I get...

Thanks for reading ;)

Svetoslav Stefanov