Because there are so many issues related to not having the requisite number of in-country in-language unpaid for links, this is almost certainly the top issue facing global search marketers today.

No links - no chance

Right on the money, Andy!

After the last google algorithm update we believe that links account for 80% of rankings being of the utmost importance a good correlation among anchor text of inbound links, keywords in title tag and keyword rich copy.

Unfortunately, link generation is the hardest part of the seo process since at the end of the day if your site is not worth linking to nobody will. Just as compatibility issues or even most of the on-site optimization tasks can be done without linguistic competence, that is not possible when it comes down to link building: you need native speakers that can crawl the net in search of potential sources to link to you.

I talked about this with a friend of mine that worked at Yahoo some months back and asked him what was the most important factor in gaining local success, his answer went like this: "Yahoo calls it "Concept of Region" and there are four main factors, the language, ccDLT ending, local hosting and finally inbound local links and even better if they are in the local language." So if Yahoo is doing it this way, then Google, MSN and ASK are very likely to be doing it in a simular way?

I have seen a raise in local visits/referals (Google) just by moving the site from a .com to the ccTLD and in some projects I have worked on, the radio button for "pages from the.....", has been marked in nearly 40% of searches. So go local of you can.

I must admit, this thread surprises me a bit. I've always thought that if links are king in the English language, it probably must be the same for other countries (if I analyze the German or French SERPs, I see sites with many links rank high too after all).

But your main point is, that it's important to get inbound links in the same language (from sites in the same language)?

I assume this would play mostly a role if one is using the same domain for international versions of a site and focussing too much on getting links to the main site (in English) without getting links in other languages to the other versions of the website?

As in having an English site and a German, French, Spanish version of it on the same domain, but making the mistake of seeing the country-specific versions simply as a translation..and getting tons of inbound links in English, but not getting any/enough links in (and to) the German, French, Spanish versions of the site?

@Proffi: Nice to hear some information like that on local search, as the discussion whether it's hosting or ccTLD or both comes up quite a bit.

Was this a big site with a lot of traffic? Just curious if I can count (and cite) it as evidence ^^.