What Ranking Factors Are Used For International Search?
- by Itai
Google.com vs Google.ca vs Google.co.uk (etc) all rank their results differently. The intention is to return more locally-relevant content.
What factors, other than the ones below, are used to determine local relevancy?
I already know the TLD (.com, .ca, etc) and likely the server IP address is used but there has to be more as this would not explain some search results I noticed this week.
Particularly, I see a US-based site ranking #3 for some keywords on Google.com, ranking #5 on Google.ca and not ranking within the first pages on Google.co.uk. On Google.com it outranks a Australian site which outranks it on Google.ca. The site itself is relevant for all English-speaking locations and it being outranked by sites from different regions on different Google TLDs (but not ones from the same region as the TLD).