New York, Rio, Tokyo – where does it rank?

Johannes Beus
Google has recently made some changes on how they treat websites and their association to their respective country-indexes. Since I believe these are grounds for some confusion, here a short, lovingly illustrated explanation. While in the past, the decision on which language- or country-index a domain ranked was largely dependent on its language, nowadays Google is using the incoming links more strongly than before. The following example shows 3 German and one site from the Netherlands linking to a target site with a keyword, Google will take the target site and sort it in the German-index:


If new links come in now which Google identifies to be from the Netherlands and if this tips the scales between German and non-German links, then it may happen that the target-site for “Immobilien” will rank in the Netherlands but not in the German index anymore.


It seems that Google can control this process so well that it is not used for whole domains or hosts but for individual pages. It also seems that Google does make an exception for links to English-speaking sites – which are apparently not considered in this calculation.

Johannes Beus

 Johannes Beus, Founder and CEO of SISTRIX, has been interested in the optimisation of websites for searchengines since 2001. In 2003 he started to regularly publish summaries of his evaluations and share his thoughts on the SEO-sector on one of the oldest German SEO-blogs.
Johannes Beus - on Tue (03/04/2008) at 10:34 AM

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