Just noticed that Google has added a Geo Targetting option to Webmaster Tools. This will be handy for those who have difficulty ranking in the "correct" region for your site. For example, people with a .com (as opposed to .co.uk) domain have had problems not ranking on google.co.uk, unless the server/IP is located in the UK. Good move from Goog
Yes. I also blogged about it. Please read: You can tell Google to Set Geographic Location of your Site! Thnx.
thank you for posting this. you got some rep from me. my site targets five countries, but i didn't put the countries in separate subdomains or subdirectories. i think i will now have to do just that. but i don't want to spend a week re-engineering my site if it makes no difference. at this stage we could all use some feedback. can people post throughout the next few days and tell me if geotargetting bumped them up in the serps? did you select geotargetting? did it make a difference?
one other thing that's not clear is, if your site is ABOUT country A, but most of the traffic comes FROM country B (this is the case for a lot of travel or tourism sites, because your site is about something in a third-world developed country with a tiny internet population, but your traffic comes from rich countries like USA, EU or Japan), then should you use geotargetting or not? it might be the case that it backfires. for example, let's say your site is about some safari destination in, say, Botswana. so you select "Botswana". consequently when someone INSIDE Botswana searches for "safari", they find your site doing well in the serps. But when people OUTSIDE Botswana, eg EU or USA search for "safari" your site might go down in the serps, because you didn't target EU or USA. the problem is that there are only about 17 people who use the internet inside Botswana, and you couldn't care less about them. catch my drift?
Thanks for the green This is a good point you raise - will you give up one SERP at the expense of another? I guess at this stage we do not know. There is a lot of .com sites in the UK, targetting the UK but hosted in another country. Those sites struggle to rank in google.co.uk, but can rank well on google.com. For sure this new tool will be good in this kind of situation. I think the safest is to use a .com hosted/IP in your main target country without using the new tool (if you want to rank in various countries) I have a UK based .com hosted in London and it ranks equally well on google.com and .co.uk
this is very nice man, we can now even target a single street people or even a single person if done properly?
i realized that if i use geotargetting and subsequently drop in the serps, or my ad revenue goes down, i can turn the geotargetting off. i'm going to do some major re-engineering and geotarget all of my content.
I placed the geo targeting in one of my sites.... Im kinda worried about it as now, I am very well ranked internationally and not well in the country specific, but the geo targeting would really benefit if I were.... I just dont want to loose the international traffic and be so-so ranked in the local one...that would be the worst case scenario....
Very nice! Good find. I'm glad Google is trying to improve things with unique ideas. Unlike MS, who just seems to copy others.