How to determine country of backlinks

[tfbpa]

In order to try to determine what kind of effect country specific links have on SERP's and to try to get those links if they have a significant effect, I have been searching for such a tool and to date I've only found one, being Exalead.

Only problem is that it is a small SE and therefore doesn't display that many links and was wondering if there are other tools that display the country of the domain that points a link to a site.

Example: notice the 18 links from Europe and 15 from the Netherlands.
link:seorefugee.com

[kichus]

AFAIK... the country specification is gained by two factors:
1. country specific domains (e.g. co.uk, .ca )
2. country where the site get hosted.

I guessed these, since I read these two are the factors, determine a site listing in 'pages from [country name]' search option in google. - I could be wrong easily, but just a thought -

So a tool should fetch both of these details to classify a site region|country-wise.. is n't it...??? so the condition will be 'and' | 'or' -

[eKstreme]

Well, MSN may be different than the others in how it determines localization. To use this technique, do Yahoo searches like this:

linkdomain:example.com site:.ca
linkdomain:example.com site:.uk

That picks out all links to example.com coming from Canada and the UK.

Having said that, I agree with kichus: The Google sitemaps blog spelled it very specifically:

If you want your site to show up for country-restricted searches, make sure it uses a country-specific domain (such as www.example.com.br). If you use a domain that isn't country specific (such as .com), make sure that the IP address of the site is located in that country.

All this is doable with a tool... Gimme a shout if you want me to write something like this for you. I'm quite affordable

Pierre

[tfbpa]

Great, didn't know that trick yet!

Reason is not Google, but for MSN as this SE is the easiest to make money with.

I'm trying to rank in the Australian version (ninemsn.com.au) and that doesn't go that welll yet... In msn.com I'm nr1, but in ninemsn it's somewhere around nr25 (well after checking it today it seems to be nr 8 now, but anyway...)

Reason for the difference I think is the nr of Australian backlinks, even though msn doesn't have the option to only display country specific websites.

Thanks for the offer Pierre, but first I will try it manually!

[eKstreme]

Hi all

tfbpa and I have been working on a new tool to localize domain names. I've coded it now and it's ready for beta testing. Please hammer at it and give me feedback.

If all goes well, I'll launch it this week.

Temporary URL (no links please!):

ekstreme.com/dev/e4/

Cheers.
Pierre

[dazzlindonna]

1. it's a little slow, but when i saw what it was doing, i understood why.
2. i had no idea what the tool was trying to accomplish - i assumed it would just tell me where the domain was hosted, or something like that.
3. when it finished, i realized (or at least think) that it is determing the country of origin for the backlinks to a site (right?)
4. pretty cool...although i'm not sure what its use really is.

[tfbpa]

Looks great Pierre!

Is it possible to also show the country where the sites are hosted of the non-country specific TLD, like .com, .net. .org, .edu, etc.?

As you stated above, that is also a factor for ranking in local SE.

Main reason for wanting such a tool is that I can research top-ranking websites in local SE's and try to mimic their linkingstructure. I.e. get those country specific links they have in order to rank high. For example one of my sites targeting Oceania has nr1 rankings in regular MSN search, but is now at nr12 in the Australian version, ninemsn.com.au. IMO main reason is that I don't have enough Australian backlinks and because of this tool it will be easy to spot those links and try to get them!

Now I'm off to get some

[mvandemar]

Hm. Ok, so it doesn't look like it's affected by the tld, but for some reason I'm ranking great in google.co.in and not so great in google.com. Do you have a geoip database? If you did have access to one, would you have the means to do an ip lookup on domains on the fly? I could throw up a quick page if so, something like geoip.php, where you hit it with ?ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, and I return the country code associated with it... think that would give more data?

-Michael

[eKstreme]

1. it's a little slow, but when i saw what it was doing, i understood why.
2. i had no idea what the tool was trying to accomplish - i assumed it would just tell me where the domain was hosted, or something like that.
3. when it finished, i realized (or at least think) that it is determing the country of origin for the backlinks to a site (right?)
4. pretty cool...although i'm not sure what its use really is.

Donna: The tool profiles the geolocation of incoming links as explained by Rand the ensuing discussion (here). The idea is that if you have a lot of (say) Candian sites linking to you, you will rank highly in the Canadian-specific search engine (like google.ca).

When I go live with, there will be a lot of documentation

Looks great Pierre!

Is it possible to also show the country where the sites are hosted of the non-country specific TLD, like .com, .net. .org, .edu, etc.?

Oooh, I spot a nice feature to add. I'll do that.

Hm. Ok, so it doesn't look like it's affected by the tld, but for some reason I'm ranking great in google.co.in and not so great in google.com. Do you have a geoip database? If you did have access to one, would you have the means to do an ip lookup on domains on the fly? I could throw up a quick page if so, something like geoip.php, where you hit it with ?ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, and I return the country code associated with it... think that would give more data?

Yeah I have a geoip database, and this tool already uses it. I'll just use it again - it's quite fast for lookups.

By the way, I have a combo whois-geolocation tool that tells you a bit about a domain name, doing exactly what you are suggesting, Michael.

Am I making any sense? Please just ask if I'm not!

Thanks for the feedback

P

[mvandemar]

I meant grabbing the geo-ip of the links, not the site being linked to.

-Michael