Several visitors had reached me after searching at Yahoo! for quite generic phrases like freecycle, janine and cross stitch. On clicking through to the Yahoo! results pages, I saw that the searches had been made at Yahoo! UK and Ireland with the search in Ireland filter option selected e.g. search in Ireland at Yahoo! UK and Ireland for janine

If you search at Yahoo! for the same generic terms mentioned above using the search the web option my site is either ranked lower or has no significant ranking at all. Yet, a pages in Ireland search has me very near the top.

I was very surprised to see my site included in a regional search like this. Why? Well, I have a .com domain rather than a .ie one, and I host my site in the USA so my site does not have an Irish IP address. I understand that these are the major factors involved in appearing in pages from Ireland searches at Google.ie. I thought the same criteria was used for all major engines.

Yet, Yahoo! clearly recognises my site as being Irish. The question is how? Is their algorithm simplistic enough to think that if your content mentions the word Ireland enough you must be Irish? Clearly that would make things far too easy for spammers and it seems unlikely that Yahoo!’s process would be so flimsy. Are they doing something far more subtle, recognising certain authoritative hub sites and directories for Irish sites e.g. Planet of the Blogs, IrishBlogs.ie and deeming sites included in these to be Irish?

More likely, there is just a very straightforward reason for this that I have missed. I’d love to find out how Yahoo! decides which sites belong to a particular region, so please let me know if you’re in the know.