Let’s start from the definition - what is the Google Geolocation? Answer is really simple, in fact - it’s a process that affects listing of search results. Effect of this process consists in showing results adjusted to user nationality (precisely - his IP number). I think we can say users always get search results adjusted to their home country, as well as ones that don’t live in the United States are automatically redirected from Google.com to Google service in domain extension of their home country. I was very surprised when I noticed many people (including SEOs ) simply don’t know that thing exists, maybe this is way I do write this post.

Factors that (don’t) matter
If you read the “tips” published on Google’s Webmaster Central, you might think that there are only three major factors that lie in the process of geolocation:

• extension of your domain name
• IP address of your server
• language

If you agree with factors listed above, I am afraid you’re totally WRONG and it’s the high time for you to figure out that it’s just a fairy tale. The whole process of Google Geolocation might be much more complex than you used to think. Yes, that means extension of your domain name simply doesn’t matter, as well as location of your hosting. And yes, I do think we can say the language used on your site doesn’t matter, too. In fact one can make an English site localized as Polish, German, Italian, Spanish or whatever.

So how the heck does it work?
It’s all about your incoming links. When you do have a d of links from American sites, your site is labeled as American one. And no, this is not enough. When I started Florchakh Dot Com the domain was linked from Polish sites (1k + some strong PR5 links), so I guess the thesis about the “first batch of incoming links” is just a fairy tale, too.

How to check my rankings in respective countries?
Well, it’s enough to use proxies. There are so many proxy services (including web ones) placed in different locations of the world. You can use Google to find some list available proxies placed where you need, then you can visit Google again and check keyterms in your chosen market…

Notification:
This post is based only on my own thoughts and experience. Please remember that only engineer of Google knows how does it work (and surely won’t share the knowledge with you) so please take my post only as a remark made by folk interested in SEO, okay?

Post dedicated to Miche, I promised to write about that issue long time ago.