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Hi Dave

TO the best of my knowledge Google looks for 2 things when geo-targeting:
1. the ccTLD;
2. the location where the IP is registered (not resolved to)

This means that to get listed in the Google country index you have to either have a ccTLD from that country or your IP address has to be registerd in that country.

Its a slight quirk - some people think it is to do with the physical location of the hosted server but I have heard it is based on where the IP is registered. Google sitemaps blog have an entry that states you should host in the country you belong to.

I have heard that hosts have had issues with this when their servers are physically hosted in one country but the IP blocks for those servers were registered in the US.

I reckon a good person to ask about this would be Michele over at Blacknight - this would really be in his area.

Hi Dave,

The fact that Google is displaying your site in the “Pages From Ireland” category and you DONT have a ccTld proves that it is indeed indexing your site by the Irish registered IP . The majority of our IP’s are registered to an Irish address , not USA .

Can you tell me which websites you checked ? I would be interested to see which IP’s they are using as some IP’s are UK and USA based

Kind Rgds
Martin

Hey Dave

I know your not having a go , I am genuinely interested in this. The website you checked, up until recently, was using a UK registered IP address . Perhaps your right in that MSN and YAHOO checks if the ccTld relates to the ‘Pages From Ireland’ search (i.e it checks if its a .IE domain) and if not, bases it on the origination of the IP ??

Although, The following are websites we host using an Irish IP

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lenanetoolanddie.com&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t340&x=wrt&meta=vc%3DcountryIE

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.fanahanscollege.com&fr=FP-tab-web-t340&ei=UTF-8&meta=vc%3DcountryIE

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.frameworksfilms.com&fr=FP-tab-web-t340&ei=UTF-8&meta=vc%3DcountryIE

If you find out any more info please be sure to send it my way .

Thanks Dave,

Kind Rgds
Martin

Martin thanks for the heads up on them sites. But are they physically hosted in Ireland, the US or somewhere else? Their IPs are resolved to Ireland? or are they registered to Ireland?

Hi Janine, very interesting. Can you provide the link to this discussion on your blog? Is your IP registered to Ireland I wonder? So the domain whois record would have the domain owners address (most likely) and you reckon Yahoo could be looking at this? Yahoo has been a domain name registrar for a awful lot longer than Google.

This is exactly the same setup as me. I couldn’t get access to the domain name records for any of them sites you gave though on http://www.betterwhois.com/. I tried akamarketing.com however and my listing showed. One thing I noticed was that my address is actually listed as::

David Callan
12 Lorcan Crescent
Santry, Dublin 9
IE

The record can be seen here :: http://www.betterwhois.com/bwhois.cgi?domain=akamarketing.com&x=33&y=5
As we can see Ireland is actually shortened to IE, perhaps Yahoo (and MSN?) is looking at this and not spotting it as Ireland. It really should be proper full addressing so I might get in touch with dreamhost.com who I registered the domain with and ask them to update it.

Martin all registrars now just use their own domain databases so I think to get a good look at the records of the domains you list we will need to know who they are registered with, is it with your company?

Hi David

It depends on the customer, some come to use with pre registered domains and look after billing themeselves, others dont . For new registrations we use Enom.

Rgds
Martin

Ok this is getting into deception really when hosts claim to be based in UK when actually they are IP US registered. Myhost told me straight up about their setup and this is different so I do not consider this to be an issue.

OK so I have decided to actually email Yahoo and MSN to see if by chance they might actually reply to my question. This is what I asked::

Hi there, I’m wondering what the factors are for your ‘Ireland only’ results. My sites IP address is registered to Ireland but still I don’t show up for a search on my company name - akamarketing.com on yahoo.co.uk search. Does it depend where is domain name registrar is located? Curious to know how this part of your results is handled.

Obviously I changed the above to be correct when contacting MSN.
Janine I see your whois record has IE also as opposed to Ireland so it must not be the issue for akamarketing.com.

I’ll let people know if I get any reply.