Geographical Relevance of Back links - Important for SEO?

[TracyMu]

If I have an AU domain, will Google give more weight to back links from other AU domains in the Australian search results, or will quality links from anywhere in the world count much the same?

Intuitively, you would think that AU links would be more relevant for an AU site in the Australian SERPS and Google would therefore give these more weight, but are there any good articles/research/anecdotal accounts to show this?

Thanks!

[Personnel_Concept]

Normally that's true. Back links from local sites with .au top level domain is better. But in many cases still if you get a high quality say .co.uk link, it can still work pretty well.

Though Link from a site with another language other than English doesn't make much sense and Google see it as fishy/spam in many cases.

[ElevateMP]

Hey Tracy- I would say yes it absolutely carrys more weight to get links that are relavent to the country you are marketing for. Look at it this way, if you were marketing insurance for Australia but you only had .fr links do you think it would help or hurt you? As you said, intuitively, it makes sense. With all recent algorithm updates centered at improving relavency and trusted sources, I think you should follow your intuition here. I'm not saying just .com links don't carry weight but I think you will find .au link will be better for your strategy, especially if you are appealing to local customers instead of selling worldwide. Hope that helps, good luck! Mike

[Debdulal]

Take it this way. You have a great website and you are targeting Australian audience. In that case, it is quote natural that your link profile should reflect that. Now, it will not be convincing to a human quality rater or to search engine algo if it finds that most of your links are coming from for say – Middle East or from Russia and they look unnatural. However, do not panic if you are getting links naturally from other English speaking countries, it is quote natural and will help your website gain global exposure.

The point is if you are building links via participating in communities, guest blog outreach, you need to make sure that you are focusing on your code audience i.e. Australian. Once you have a strong hold there, you can expand your presence in some other countries. There is no such problem with that.

[bele]

Local links are a lot better then international. Lower quality local links can bring you higher position then other ones. We experienced that with our 10 websites.