Geo Targeting in Googles Webmasters Tools
Posted By Melanie Prough on April 2, 2009
A tasty Halloween SEO treat from Google Webmaster Tools was announced 10/31/2007 yesterday in the Google Webmaster Blog. You can now Geo Target your location right in your tools dashboard! This is a pretty exciting tool for Google to add, a definite treat!
Google says you can now choose a location for your content per directory, domain, and sub domain to help them improve the geographic search results. Historically Google has used your IP address / hosting and TLD (top level domain) to determine its geographic association. Now, we are free to host our sites anywhere we please and still associate with the country / location of our target audience. Note, that country specific TLDs will remain associated with the perspective countries. For example, a .ca domain will still be associated to Canada and so on. The post states, at the moment we can only associate with 1 country. Sounds like that may change in the future….Good deal there.
Something that I picked up on was this statement….
Or let us know if your site isn’t relevant to any particular geographic location at all.
They went on to give an example of a domain you would not want to geotarget or associate with any specific location. So I logged in and made sure any sites that I don’t want locked in to any specific location or Google search platform are “non associated” , and thus wide open to all searches. I suggest you do the same.
Note also you can choose to give country only, country and city, country and zip…etc. You are not required to give the full address to use this feature, and Google states the information will be used publicly, so I advise you proceed cautiously if you are using a home address or such. I am thinking the SEO value of using this in your geo targeting campaign will be exponential.
So just log in to your Webmaster Tools dashboard, choose a site….Then in the “tools” section in the left hand column select “Set geographic target”. Just a note City/Town must be in all capitol letters..Odd but true. Don’t forget to save it!
Peace and SEO
Melanie Prough
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When geo-targetting a blog to a paerrticular country, does it prevent you from getting traffic from other countries other than the geo-targeted one?
I’m somewhat of scared of applying it so as not to lose plenty of search engine traffic.
Thanks
Honestly, if your blog is in French for example, it will likely rank better in Google.fr. If you are having a targeting issue, or you have a specific audience in mind… Like an online store who only ships to the US, then this is a very handy tool. In you case if you haven’t any issues I would not declare a specific country in webmaster’s tools.