How does google decide what city a blog belongs to?

[adriandg]

I'm trying to build links from more local blogs at the moment and considering a huge list of blogs that are in my city, of which many do accept guest posts.

I'm trying to discover a metric to thin this list down further.  Is there any way of finding out if google considers a specific blog to be local to a certain area?  What signals does google consider when it is making this analysis?  Is it the content? or is it the "about the blog author" section?

Thanks,

Storwell

[DanSpeicher]

I imagine Google uses the same techniques for blogs that they use for AdWords, which are:

-Domain

-Search Term

-Physical Location (IP Adress)

-Google Search Personalization

The following link explains it in more depth:

http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6401

[adriandg]

Hmmmm interesting.  Is there any way to confirm that a specific blog is actually considered by google to be in a certain city?  Like if there was some sort of tool that you could plug the address into and it would spit out the google city???!

[KeriMorgret]

I don't know of such a tool, but one thing to try would be to set your location in Google to the city you want to target, and see if that site (blog in question) ranks when your city is set to that location.

[adriandg]

Thanks for the tip!