I have developed several websites in Ireland.
I have them hosted in USA, India and UK.
When I search 'the web' on www.google.ie my sites do very well.
When I search 'pages from Ireland', I do very poorly.

I know that many companies who claim to be Irish hosting companies, physically host outside of Ireland.

Does anyone know if an IP address can be associated with a country, or does one need to host within the country to be included in the 'country pages search'.

The sites that outrank my sites are not .ie domain names, but .com

Any suppory would be appreciated.

IP addresses are associated with countries. They are the basis of geo-redirects....

This is a handy tool:
http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm

Thanks.... great tool.
Does that mean that you need to host within the country you are serving, if you want to appear in the local google serps.?
I added the 'country meta tag' to a few sites to see if anything happens.
One is PR6 and was indexed last night.

The tool could not locate some IP addresses, eg, 212.67.197.38
Any idea why this might be.?

Just register some domains with the .ie domain, park them on your current sites, then do some link building using those .ie domains. You'll be considered a "local" at that point.

There is a lot of information about various tactics related to localization in this thread here: http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6585

Good luck!

Ian

Hi Ian,
great thread.....

I checked several sites that outrank me on google.ie
The .com sites all have .ie nameservers
Could this be a factor.?

In some cases the hosting is local and in others it is overseas (Holland / US).

BTW .ie domains are 150 euro each, plus you must have a business registered in that name.

PC

"Just register some domains with the .ie domain, park them on your current sites, then do some link building using those .ie domains. You'll be considered a "local" at that point."

Does that mean that the new .ie domain name will need to be aged and build up PR before it will have any effect.?

could be a possibility they may need to age or they could be entered and then as they age that impacts more.

I registered a .ie domain name and parked it on one of my better sites.
It had an immediate effect with some of the pages appearing in the 'pages from ireland' listings. Most of the links on the site are absolute, so that may limit the effectiveness.
Ant thoughts.?