in other words do links from a site that is located within your state have more power to rank you for search queries in that state v. links from a site outside of your state?
Richard Zwicky of Enquisite says “yes” – more on this later.
Is Google Hyperlocally Geotargeting Inbound Links?
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….to be honest I have thought this could be so for a year or less now.
It really does make sense I try to get clients to mention me in their blogs and online work – I only work locally and as has been noted I do tend to dominate in my area…..
Nice little thought really… the www has to fragment more to be of value long term
I hope so, because that could really help out sites in local search. Why? Because it would be harder for national companies to rank locally. They would have less access to local links.
The question then, is how is google figuring out the location of the site. You can’t trust the IP address of a hosted servers.
Or is it being done by sitation on the site. Maybe the sites contact information is local and google takes that as the location of the site.
My first thought when I heard about this was that there was some combination of locally targeted inbound anchor text, locally targeted keywords on the pages including address and links from other sites that had the same kind of inbound link profile. It would be pretty cool if they could really accurately detect the company’s location in some way. I’ll dig into Richard’s data a bit more when I talk to him. I may have just lost something in the translation.
During Pub Con last year this came up as well. We are seeing that having “local” links from local sites places you in a “local neighborhood”.
We looked at Google Local results and noted this for one of our client’s competitors. The client was closer to the center of the area, had more reviews, but seemed to lack the “local” links that his competitor had, thus the competitior ranked higher in local search.
Could be so. Of course you might expect Google’s relevancy algorithms to give this result anyway, e.g. if lots of sites related to New York point at my site, then Google will assume my site is also related to New York.
That said, geographic location is potentially such an important factor that it could well be worth Google special-casing.
How can website location have any value at all? I bet you most sites will be in texas, seattle, chicago, and DC because that is where all the datacenters are. But how can that be of any value
I think local links are better for local businesses but the opposite should be true for a national brand in my opinion. Think about each business or industry as an individual group and for each group there was to be a bell curve as to what was normal. The closer your site is too normal for the group the better the source of the links. So for a site that is locally targeted, local links make more sense, the opposite is true for a national or international brand.