Google: more geographic targeting for websites

Google recently announced that they have added the ability to define Geographic Targeting within a webmaster tools account.

This is an optional control that allows a website to define associations with particular countries or regional locations. The one proviso for use is that your site must have a non-country specific TLD or top level domain (e.g. a .com, .eu, .net).

Google uses country association for both ranking calculations and country specific searches, taking your domain and other factors into account. For example, a site aimed at the UK market which has a .uk domain or is hosted in the UK may feature strongly in UK-only results but do less well in global or other Google country-level results. Generally, this automatic association works well for websites with a country-level domain.

However for top level domains such as .com Google has historically looked at where a website’s server is based to determine which country level results to include it in.

In the UK this has led to a number of top level domain sites which are hosted in other countries not being visible within the ‘pages from the uk’ results.

If your website is in this situation, or you have a website with subdomains targeting a number of countries, using this new tool may help.

If you are not sure how this change will effect you, contact us and we’ll give you an overview, we can also help you set up and configure a Google webmaster tools account to take advantage of this new feature.

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