I am based in the US and just started working with a site in the UK that needs to do some link building. I understand all (or at least most) of the important factors in terms of link quality - but what about the impact of this UK site having links from many US-based sites?

For instance, I assume that if I do a search for stereo in the US, I will get different results from the guy doing the same search in Ireland.

Does anyone have any indication if links from US sites to a UK site would influence how it appeared in

a) US listings: would it be more likely to appear?
b) UK listings: would engines see the US links and start associating it with US searchers?

Anyone have any idea? :) Tough topic!

Hi
Im British born and bread. to be honest i dont envy you, I mean depending where you are from we call so many things different names. For example we greet someone differently as in hi ya mate, hi ya fella, hello, hi, hi ya buddy, the list is endless.
I mean a males genitals has over 50 differnet expressions to name just 2 examples and if you are not from this neck of the woods the right words are quiet hard and something you cant just guess.

Also stereo might not be a popular keyword over here as it is overthere radio hifi(maybe unlikly though) all depends on your audience but it is mostly ipods mp3 etc.. pretty universal at the mo.

Now i've been doing something similar but uk-french uk-spain uk-us. Everthing that i have read says the server ip address plays a big part. as in a server in the uk will rank better for uk than us terms. I dont know how true this is though and any feed back would be really good for me aswell. I mean we get a lot of US results for ecommerce terms in the top ten results over here. At least i do. however all the mian sites amazon ebay paypal yes this backward little country gets those sites to but we get amazon.co.uk ebay.co.uk paypal.co.uk. If the big sites have there servers in those contrys which they do does leave me to beleave that this is the main thing. i know there are other factors download time, phone call rates from uk-us, etc.. etc..

My personal thoughts would be the site linking location plays very little but it is the keyword in the url that linked that has the most weight. If the uk site does most of it bussiness in the uk then you will need uk words, US relevant words will rank the uk site high for only US terms and not uk terms and visa versa.

The main problem i'm having for uk-french etc.. is the keyword. I run an adult toy site and the word for butt plug when translated into french is bottom cork. However just becuse thats the translation that doesn't mean if i start putting links back to my site with the word bottom cork, but in french, i will link well for the term butt plugs in french this is where competent copywritting needs to come in and is probally by far is the most important isssue. When i say competent copywritting i also mean competent copywritting for english speaking countrys aswell i mean i imagine US and Canada has different ways of saying the same thing, i could be wrong but UK-US is a differnet language all together. I mean you yanks dont half come up with some stupid words but we have chavs so i cant complain, and if you dont know what a chav is then that is my whole point.

Also American-spanish is different to Spanish-spanish or Argentine-Spanish. to my knowledge.

To sum up dont be fixated on url address but on competent copywritting. competent copywritting uk style will get you the link.
if anyone knows anything different plaese let me know as this was 6months worth of work and i've still found out very little apart from i need to know some differnet languages.

Hope this has helped and let me know what you find out

Another thing that you have to condsider when doing foregien link building or seo is cultural differnces. What i mean is how much do you yanks or infact anyone outside britain know about britain. Now you might say why does this matter to SEO well this matters quite alot.

One thing that has even surprised me is the differences when it comes to the scots-welsh-irish-english regarding SEO.

What i thought england was full of english who are these other people? i hear you say, well there are ruffly 61million ppl in britain a country that can fit into the US 121 times. 7million are welsh, scottish and irish. Wales, scottland and Northern Ireland all have seperate parliments with seperate laws but are all governed by Parliament in London. In fact there is alot of english-welsh, english-scotts, english-irish rivalry. When i was at university in wales a freind of mine was beaten up because he was english, thats not to say all welsh and english hate each other but it shows you the differences.

So what has the writtings of this crazed english man have to do with SEO
Well actually quite a lot. what i'm trying to say is just because you have learnt to speak British-English and you have your keywords and your SEO plan, it doesn't mean that you will crack the market in scottland or wales or northern Ireland it means you have a good shot at crackng the English market. Just because a english person might search for you keyword doesn't mean the other regions will.

What i'm trying to say is that from what i have found out from my research is that just because you have good competent copywritting for that country doesn't mean your search engine optimized for a specfic country, and if you are trying to break into another countries results, are you ready? what if you get an email in welsh, scottish, or irish can you translate it?.

Recently there has been a massive and when i say massive i mean 8million polish people arrive or will be arriving in britain. Would sites need to start optimizing there sites for polish as many of the migrants wont be able to speak english fluently and optimizing your pages for polish or even punjarbi (appologies for incorrect spelling but punjarbi is the second most spoken language in britain and i dont know any sites that offer there sites in punjarbi ) could bring in higher converstion rates for what ever because you are the only site in your area doing it- quite possibly.

I mean you can take this to other countrys for example for sites that target canada do you have your pages in french aswell as english. I mean that extra time translating the pages to french could get you the niche that the other sites dont have.

I dont know much about canada i have not done the research so if this is wrong i am sorry.

To sum up when you are trying to do SEO from another country there is alot more than do my pages translate correctly or even do my pages translate. Going the extra mile might bring you results you hadn't even thought about
Any way i know i have gone off topic a little bit to your orginal question but to be honest when doing foregien SEO and when i say foregien SEO i include in that UK-US and US-UK you have to think out of the box and not just about keywords.

If anyone has any thoughts on any of this i will be very intressted to hear them

Hope this helps

Linking to a site in the US won't matter that much. I market American, French, UK and German sites and as long as the site has relevant keywords it doesn't matter what country it is in. You want to have a look at your competitor sites in the UK see what keywords they use, you can also use ad words keyword tool to only target specific countries.

Allinanchor results also favour "local" sites on the English language Gs but it's hard to say whether "local" link text gives the boost or not; though with G increasingly regionalising results the possibility of local link text getting weighted is not unreasonable IMO....

Hi sam 890 I was just wondering if you have any advice on optimizing keywords for a foreign language.

I have a welsh friend who is helping me on my welsh version. But i was just wondering about SEO for france. Is it just good competent copywritting aswell as an understanding of how french people search? or is there more to it.

Hello Jazajay

I have a French speaking friend who helps me.

There is another thread about this topic here (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=253)

yeah i have an Irish and 2 Welsh friends helping me but the more info i cant get especially on europe the better. Thanks for the thread much appreciated.