Multilingual Sites and Search Engines: Part 1 - IPs, TLDs, and Searching by Country
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Since Google is the number one (and often only) search engine for the majority of users, it makes sense to discuss its options for searching for pages by their geographic location and how these options affect search results.
Searching by country is the second option, in addition to searching for pages in a particular language only, that Google offers for language (or dialect) specific content. In a sense, this feature allows Google to imitate a local search engine, where results are displayed only if they come from sites hosted in the local Internet space. The criterion for "local" is the IP of the hosting server -- if the IP is registered as belonging to the local Internet space, then all pages hosted on it are local.
There is no need to say that searching for local pages for a particular search query reduces the number of search results several times in comparison to performing the search for the same query globally. What is worse, SEO experts rarely have control over deciding where to host the site, but in those cases when it is vital to achieve presence in the search results for a particular language, hosting it on a server in the target country seems a must.
Searching by country can also be done by using a TLD search. When specifying a TLD (Top Level Domain - e.g. .de, .fr, .es, and so forth), only pages that are under a root having this domain will be listed -- i.e. if you are searching for "liebe," and specify that you are interested only in pages that belong to sites ending with .de, you will get a listing that includes only these sites and none for sites that end with .com, .org, and so forth, regardless of whether the latter are hosted in Germany or not.
As I already mentioned, global corporations as a rule have separate sites (and most often separate domains) for the countries they operate in. One reason for this is the IP and TLD filtering mechanism of search engines just described. Google might not be the most dreadful one because, by default, search by IP and domain is turned off, but many local search engines (for instance some French ones) do not list sites which do not have .fr as a top-level domain and/or are not hosted on a site with a French allocated IP address.
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