How does the Yahoo.com search engine determine the geographic location of a website?

It is rumoured that where on the planet a website is hosted effects how search engines perceive the location of that website.



Google for example allows webmasters to associate a country with their website regardless of where it is hosted (http://searchengineland.com/071030-232502.php)

I believe they use a combination of techniques. I know that they have been granted patents on some of these techniques, for example on guessing geographic location from geographic-related terms embedded in search queries
(http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=784)

Other techniques are probably the industry-standard methods based on whois/DNS addresses and the like. That is, given an IP address in the web request, look up the IP block, then look up the address associated with that via 'whois' or the equivalent.

I do not know if they have fully documented their techniques anywhere but they could very well consider them too proprietary to fully disclose.

I too would be interested in any additional information or correction anyone else wanted to supply.

- the domain extension - e.g. .com, .net, .co.uk, .fr etc
- the server location where it is hosted
- the language it is written in
- the whois details of the site (i.e. where it was registered)