New Webmaster Feature - Geographic Location

Hey there,

I was wondering if anybody else noticed a new google webmaster feature called geographic location?

I wonder if this has any impact on SERPs?

Sincerely,
Travis Walters

 

Yes it's new, just been announced here:

http://searchengineland.com/071030-232502.php

A great improvement

 

I first want to know how much effect it will have until I set it..
I'm not sure yet if it's really an improvement.

My flippers.be site gets a lot of traffic for 'pinball' related keywords from Belgium and the Netherlands: because of its .be domain name it gets a boost. Even for a keyword like 'wallpapers' I rank quite well on google.be (while I have no chance to get anywhere in serps on google.com for this keyword).

There are too many pinball.com sites so on google.com I rank low.. but still I get some decent traffic from all over the world (usa, australia, ..).

I want to keep it this way.

I fear that if I set my location to belgium, I will only get the .be/.nl traffic and lose a lot of traffic google.com (or other country google sites) sends me as they'll lower my position even more than it is and I'll get almost no international visitors at all.

And if I set it to 'no geographic location', I fear I may lose my .be advantage I have now ??
(and I'll rank like my site has a .com name)

Anyone with a country-tld site that wants to check the influence of these settings ?

 

I blogged about this today. If you have a .be or .co.uk domain it might expose you to a lot more traffic if you move your location to the US.

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/blog/set-google-geographic-target/

 

Ahh

i was just about to post about this as i have a golf centre website that is .com and is hosted in the US but was not coming up in the "pages from the UK" search results.

Anyone know how quickly the changes are made?

 

It's only gone live today so its hard to say.

Previously if you switched hosting for a .com site from the US to the UK it took a couple of weeks to appear in the UK results.

 

well thankfully we got the .co.uk domain today so will be switching it to that

 

I have 2 .com sites aimed at englishspeaking visitors.
The servers are located in Holland so i have set the location to United States.
I wonder if it will work

 

Sounds interesting any1 got a review ? I will have a look

 

I will try this today. Seems nice tool.

 

Thanks for the heads up, will have to check it out. Have a couple sites that can really use this feature.

 

this won't limit traffic elsewhere in any way, would it? I have a lot of Canadian & UK visitors.

 

For me it's a bunch of crap.
I'm sure Google knows where the traffic to a website come from.
My site is hosted in Italy, but my traffic is 60% US 20% UK 10% AUS and 10% rest of the world.
This can only be useful for very locally targeted websites, for example a plumber or a carpenter.

 

i certainly want to target but I don't want to lose my current rankings in the process.

and what about if you target specific areas of your site to different locations

 

Bringing up an old post sorry. I imagine you would benefit from that as it would help Google know you are targeting US users more than people from Holland.

My main concern is that if I set my location to Blackpool, UK will Google think I am ONLY targeting that area and drop my normal rankings. I offer my services nationally but due to my location I obviously would like to rank well for this region etc as I get a higher conversion ratio on inquiries form Blackpool than lets say London.

 

I think this is a great idea.

My site is "irish" own but has a "british" audience, is hosted on a "german" server and is monitized using an "american" company google.

And uses a .com not a .co.uk (but has a .co.uk and several other tld's which cost a fortune to me to point/redirect the site, dont worry its the same base domain im not camping on any killer domain names other han my own )

I also only want uk traffic for various reasons, im in the same timezone, so i get a maintence window to update stuff on the server, which is a lot harder if your international with a single site...

So yeah I think this is a killer idea!

Pierce

 

I have a local home improvement business, and by necessity, I can only work in my local area--so for me, this would be a good move if I set my local area to "austin, texas", correct?

Because I want to increase my rankings for viewers from austin, but I don't care about rankings in other parts of the country.

Any thoughts? I am a noob when it comes to optimization.

 

Hi,
My question is this...Do we set geographic location as per the host server or as per where the owner is located?

For example if I am in Asia and my site is hosted on US servers, can I change my location to US?
Thanks is advance.

 

I have tried the function for weeks, still can not see a difference

 

I'll try this toool later and share reveiw here