Country Specific searches up for the taking

[Chatmaster]

I have had a couple of issues with Google lately. The most important one is certainly the amount of spammy redirect ranks in their local search results. I am currently targetting the South African market for it's most competitive keywords in our industry.

http://www.google.co.za/search?num=1...cr%3DcountryZA

The first result is a redirect page
#5 is exactly the same.

This made me realise I have been caught napping again!

The only possible way to rank on Google local searches is to either have the country extention or host in that country. In the case of South Africa there are legal issues and local online casinos make use of splash pages/domains hosted locally to get ranked as there are very little competition.

When looking at other local searches it becomes clear that the UK and Canadian markets are already being targetted by the big boys. Mainly because most sites are hosted in those countries (Once again for legal reasons)

Does that mean there are oppertunities for use to take in other countries? http://www.google.co.za/language_tools?hl=en at the bottom is a list of the different countries where Google has local rankings. Maybe a new source of traffic if we get local hosting domain extentions in some of those countries. Any opinions out there?