Question about search engines..need help urgently!

[pioneertw]

Dear fellow Warriors,

Hope all's going great for you on the money making front.

I went traveling recently and when I searched for information on local businesses such as "budget hotel" for example, The local sites tend to be ranked higher. But for some other businesses, this wasn't the case. For example, when I searched for "wine delivery", I still get sites from the States, Australia and UK.

My question is this, do the sites from the countries that you are surfing from tend to come up higher on search ranking? If I'm in Japan and I build a site optimized for a generic keyword such as "wine delivery", will my page appear higher than similar sites from UK for the surfers in Japan? Or does this only happen when they specifically go to Google.co.jp (Google's Japanese site).

Do local results also appear higher on the ranking like MSN and Yahoo?

Sorry for the long post, would appreciate any input!

[pioneertw]

Is there anyone who can help me with this? I would greatly appreciate it....

[Dan Foley]

Hi PioneerTW,

I can only speak about what I have observed about Google in the U.S. Google is now making searches more "personal". They are reading your IP address and anticipating that if you are looking for information about plumbing, they will serve up more local sites related to plumbing when all other things are equal.

If you will look at the ads on the right, notice that they will put ads in for your city.

To answer your question, it has a lot to do with what Google thinks are locally related subjects compared to nationally or internationally related subjects. To be framk though, unless the visitor is doing a local search, sites with high PageRank will almost always trump an IP address.

I hope this helps.

[pioneertw]

Thank you so much Dan! That is some great information which is going to be extremely important for me. Thank you!