I’ve just added a new search for Russian results, choosing .ru as the Google extension. The plugin allows you to save your favourite regional or city searches, for example, you can set up a new search for Moscow using the regional code of RU-MOW or city code of 1011969. RedFly have provided a tool for Google Regional Codes and Google City Codes.

Download The Google Global Firefox Plugin

A tool like this would be very useful for Yandex, the leading search engine in Russia, as they have been working hard make their SERPs region-specific. E-commerce is popular in Moscow and St. Petersburg so it makes sense to concentrate your SEO and PPC work for the audience there.

Technorati Tags: Firefox Plugins, Google Global Firefox Plugin, International SEM

For example, ICANN has already launched regional extensions, such as .eu and .asia. Unfortunately these domains have not been supported by Google. There is no Google.eu or Google.asia portal. That has left these domains with little advantage over other available TLDs such as .com, .net or .org.

At the moment Google ties domains, subdomains or site sections to one particular country. This is done with key indicators such as extension, hosting location, link profile, webmaster portal settings or language. While you can search in Google.it for Italian language pages you can not determine if those sites are geographically based within Europe. The SERPs include Italian language pages from businesses around the world or those from within Italy. This reality for .eu seems to run contrary to the branding on the EuroID site, as seen here on the right. An .eu domain does not give access to all European countries anymore than a .com would.

As a European address is required for .eu registration the searcher could find regional businesses by adding the site:*.eu parameter to their query, but this is unlikely to enter mainstream use. But again, without the search space being supported by the search engines there will be less movement towards the .eu in the first place. Orders now are largely due to cheap .eu prices compared to local country extensions or defensive registrations against cyber-squatting.

There are good reasons for searchers to shop by region, rather than ordering internationally. Europeans don’t have to pay import tax on their items and would benefit from the European Union’s consumer protections laws. There are environmental benefits in reducing transit times. In fact, launching creating a virtual search engine based limited by .eu domains may have been a better brand idea for the Europeans than their dubious Quaero project.

You can see the conflict between Google and ICANN again on the matter of .us domains. ICANN envisioned General Top Level Domains (gTLDs) such as .com, .org and .net to be a shared space for all countries. However Americans have adopted .com as their own extension. This no doubt has an effect on the sales of the lesser branded .us domain. Google has certainly had their hand in this development by refusing to support the .us extension with its own portal (Google.us).

The question is, will Google support any of the new TLDs that ICANN is planning to launch on the market? Will we see Google.hotel or Google.shoes in the future? Without a search space, these extensions have less chance of becoming viable businesses. On the bright side, these new TLDs create exciting opportunities for virtual search. Hopefully ICANN and the companies backing these new domains will start taking these points into consideration.

Hosting infrastructure in the US is large-scale, reliable and often cheaper than local providers in developing countries. The Planet states that 42% of their customers are located in international markets. On the other hand local servers are often faster for local users and have less chance of network interruption.

Will Google’s move towards site speed as a ranking factor push international SEOs to ask for local hosting? Patricio Robles over at eConsultancy seems to agree,

The location of your host could also be a consideration. An offshore host, for instance, might be at a disadvantage here, especially if it doesn’t have good peering.

However Richard Hearne at RedCardinal makes some good points against this argument on Twitter.

RedCardinal: @nickwilsdon You’re assuming they’ll test locally, but that’s not how this will work from my understanding. (status link)

RedCardinal: @nickwilsdon I think 2 things worth looking at: Page Speed (likely they’ll use these metrics), and Adwords QS page speed. (status link)

RedCardinal: @nickwilsdon server location will probably be normalised – otherwise this would never work (status link)

I think Richard’s right and he’s backed up by the notes Google has released on how site speed is tested in regard to Adwords Quality Score.

We evaluate your load time relative to the average in your server’s geographic region. If your website is hosted on a server in India, for example, your landing page load time will be compared to the average load time in that region of India. This is true even if your website is intended for an audience in the United States.

There is still an advantage in good local hosting if you can get hold of this, especially if it out-performs the average in the region. As Matt Cutts suggests, users don’t want slow websites. However the emphasis for this new ranking factor will likely be on the page speed metric rather than loading time and the physical location of the server.

** High Speed train by lrargerich one of the artists who make their work under a Creative Commons license at Flickr – thank you!