Wednesday, October 31, 2007 at 1:09 PM
Written by Amanda Camp, Webmaster Tools and Trystan Upstill, International Search Quality TeamStarting today Google Webmaster Tools helps you better control the country association of your content on a per-domain, per-subdomain, or per-directory level. The information you give us will help us determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improves our search results for geographic queries.
We currently only allow you to associate your site with a single country and location. If your site is relevant to an even more specific area, such as a particular state or region, feel free to tell us that. Or let us know if your site isn't relevant to any particular geographic location at all. If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, we'll continue to make geographic associations largely based on the top-level domain (e.g. .co.uk or .ca) and the IP of the webserver from which the context was served.
For example, if we wanted to associate www.google.com with Hungary:
But you don't want www.google.com/webmasters/tools" associated with any country...
This feature is restricted for sites with a country code top level domain, as we'll always associate that site with the country domain. (For example, google.ru will always be the version of Google associated with Russia.)
Note that in the same way that Google may show your business address if you register your brick-and-mortar business with the Google Local Business Center, we may show the information that you give us publicly.
This feature was largely initiated by your feedback, so thanks for the great suggestion. Google is always committed towards helping more sites and users get better and more relevant results. This is a new step as we continue to think about how to improve searches around the world.
We encourage you to tell us what you think in the Webmaster Tools section of our discussion group.
48 comments:
City/Town: "All the characters in this field should be in upper case characters." OMG, why?
This is an excellent first step.
It would be more practical however if all the search engines got together and agreed upon a specific meta tag (preferably one of the existing ones) and all announced they would use this. This would be much easier for webmasters to use to work on all search engines and is much quicker to change.
In addition to geographic location, we urgently need clear guidelines by the search engines on how to define languages, in particular, variations of the same language (UK/US English). A simple blog post by the search engines explaining how they determine this would be invaluable.
If we limit our geographic location, will our search results be affected for overseas results? For example, if a company is based in the India and has their majority of customers in the India, while they also services across other geographic regions such as the US, UK, Germany, France etc., will the results be affected across these regions? Are there any potential benefits of limiting to a particular domain?
Adding this feature resulted in a glitch at the backlinks page. The pages with the external links to be precise.
It shows the count, but says "No Links Found" and thats really frustrating, Its one complete day passed by and I still cannot export my backlinks data since the addition of this feature.
Is this gonna be considered or repaired?
Okay. We operate a website aimed at Europeans (energy.eu).
I miss the choice for the EU region in your drop-down list.
Moreover, I am also concerned this may result in a drop in traffic when we specifically aim for the EU region only. Keeping the same volume in traffic, but only from the EU-region would be a great step forward.
There's a bug for ccTLDs which shows the "Country/Region" label twice. Once at the top without anything next to it (where the country/region drop down would usually be) and once after all other fields with a blank disabled text field next to it (which I assume should contain the country/region from which you've identified the website to be).
Um. Not allowing the geographical targeting for ccTLD is a bit restrictive. I myself own a .tv and a .to - both of which are obviously not targeted towards Tuvalu or Tonga.
I have a site that focuses on a particular county, so I would like to see County available for a geographic choice.
[...]
Finally, Google's Webmaster Central has a new feature to let you associate your site with a geographic area. Yet, for whatever reason, Quebec isn't a valid province there. Weird... At least their local search submission center is in order.
[...]
At least you guys are ahead of Yahoo and MSN.
yeah thats nice, but i want reverse satution, mean, i dont want that my website appear in google search in specific
country is there any way ? (due to wasting of bandwidth)
I have a .com, with a server based in Germany. Our site didn't appear on 'UK Only' search results. Suddenly, without using the new webmaster tool our site appears on UK results. Anyone know how this is happening?
You wrote: "If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, we'll continue to make geographic associations largely based on the top-level domain (e.g. .co.uk or .ca) and the IP of the webserver from which the context was served."
It would be great that this geographic association by default appears in the Webmaster Tools. Webmasters would then know when the geographic association is not as expected and when it is important to change it.
Very good one.
But how should we do if we have one top level domain (.fr for example)
And an online tool that provide: www.mysite.fr/fr_en/ for the english translation, and all the others ?
Could be nice to get an addition for that.
Hi Amanda
Thanks for the post. I'm sure you already know but as mentioned above for another domain, the form is not working in the UK at present.
Also, the only people I managed to speak to elsewhere have just been linked on to the standard Google Business application procedure, rather than a new tool. Is this what you are using, perhaps with added emphasis?
If that is so, will sites without a physical address be able to use the tool, rather than having to enter a complete address and verify by postcard, or phone.
The idea for this tool is excellent and I appreciate you need time to finalise the detail. Without doubt you will hone the procedure to perfection but any interim clarification would be welcome.
Hi,
I enabled this facility and associated my site www.kyakare.com with India and the very next day, my site completely disappeared from the index for certain keywords.
Did I do something wrong?
I have noticed that one of my sites has all of the webmaster tools grayed out except for "Analyze robots.txt"
I have searched the help and web for reference to explain this, but I have found nothing. Why would these settings not be available for any particular site?
It would be best to add regional groupings as well.
Examples are:
1) ASEAN Community
2) East Asia Community (aka ASEAN+3+3)
3) European Union
4) African Union
5) South-Americas
and so on...
Today, more people, companies, and sites are targeted "regionally". The days of "country-targetting" is the 90s.
For example, I have sites (and the company I work) that are targetted for the East Asia Community (ie ASEAN+3+3), then the company I work for is targetted towards ASEAN Community.
I/we of course want our sites to show and be ranked on google searches for the respective countries of those regions and care less for other regions and countries.
I strongly believe there is a need for regional targetting, and I hope Google will be the first to implement such. It will surely make shockwaves, and the rest will follow suit.
I am personally more interested with:
1) ASEAN Community
2) East Asia Community (aka ASEAN+3+3)
3) European Union
Best Regards
JC Cuneta
- Philippines, ASEAN Community, East Asia Community
Excellent tool. My websites were all hosted in USA while my target public were spanish speaking people.
As a result, I usually started ranking well for google.com, and then on other regional google´s.
google.es for example,
I use META name="ICBM" in my website... Is it similar?
Thanks!
Excellent tool. My websites were all hosted in USA while my target public were spanish speaking people.
ink miami tattoo
if i associate my blog
www.indianglitz.blogspot.comor
hacksecurepc.blogspot.com to a geographic location then other countries can not see my website in search engines
This is a great tool, but I think there is more detailed explanation required as to how this interacts with HTML language settings.
For example, since I am in Canada many clients use English and French. If I set the /fr/ subdirectory to geographically target Quebec, how does that affect searches in France?
Or, more accurately, since I use a lot of .ca, can I target France instead and still have the /fr/ directory show for French Canadian queries because of the .ca domain?
JJ, if you want visitors in both Canada and France to see your French content, you should not set a geographic location. Note that the tool handles *geographic* data, not language data. A good example of where it would be useful is for a restaurant website: if the restaurant is in Canada, it's probably not of interest to folks in France. But if your content is in French and is of interest to people in multiple countries/regions, there's no reason to restrict it.
If your site has a .ca TLD, you won't be able to set it to target any location other than Canada. Here's why.
I have a site .pt and on my webmasters tools, the geographic target was set automatically like this:
"Your site's domain (.PT) is already associated with the country/region: Portugal"
My target is all the people coming to Portugal, from Europe America etc…
How can I cancel this Country/region association?
I read on the post that we can contact google to change this situation but I can not find any link to do that.
Can any one or google (Amanda Camp) can Help me on this.
Thank You
Happy new year 2008
Baptista
Hi Baptista,
As the blog post notes, having a country-coded TLD (top-level domain) implies that your site is targeted at the region specified by that TLD. The geographic targeting tool only lets you specify a geographic target if your site has a geographically neutral TLD (such as .com or .org).
Dear Susan Moskwa,
Thank You for your reply.
I do not agree with your reply, because what I think about to have a TLD, and in my case .pt it mines it is a Portuguese site, that is ruled by a DNS authority and only a company or a official Portuguese organization can use.
Is not a .com or .org that any one can have.
If google think in quality and in trust it should be more attention to this subject.
Now, my site is target to Portugal but my 1st target is out side Portugal for Tourists coming to Portugal what I should do now, do another site?
Than You
Baptista
Hi Baptista,
Since it sounds like you're targeting more than one geographic region, you don't need to use the geographic targeting tool. See my comment above—the tool is only meant for sites that want to target one particular geographic area.
I would recommend looking at where your search traffic is currently coming from. If you're getting traffic from locations outside of Portugal, then it sounds like you're meeting your goal and you don't need to change anything. If, however, you're only getting search traffic from within Portugal, you might want to consider switching your site to a geographically neutral TLD.
Hi Susan Moskwa,
Nice to hear again from you again.
Well, that is the problem; the tool is now targeting Portugal and it doesn’t give the me the option to change it.
I get much ranking in google.pt then in other ones as .co.uk, .ie, .de, or .nl.
However I get a few visitors from other countries, not many.
Can google change this tool to be not targeting any county?
Thank You.
Baptista
Not right now, no.
You might be interested in this blog post or this help article for more information about how having a cc-TLD affects your site.
Hi Susan
With respect to your comment regarding France/Canada (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/10/better-geographic-choices-for.html#c3293128508788971518) Can you confirm that setting a target country will not affect rankings in other Google properties as per JohnMu's statement over on the Group? (I cant find the post link, but will dig it up).
I think this tool has the potential to really make a huge difference, but currently there is a very big knowledge hole in terms of how it will work (when it finally does) and the outcomes of using the tool.
Thanks in advacne,
Richard
This does not solve the problem for my multi-langual websites. The top level is in English(.com) has no geographical restriction, i.e. worldwide search. However, I have French and Spanish pages within their own subdirectory, which I would like to restrict their appearance on French or Spanish searches. Surely the easiest way for Search Engines to identify this is by looking at language setting, using English as default Wordlwide search.
@Cognisant
In my experience Google already does a pretty good job of identifying languages.
As long as they identify the language through signals you give when they crawl your pages should dhow up for searches in those languages. Just not when the user selects 'pages from [country]'.
This tool would allow you to set the preferred country for say your French sub folder so that at least your content will be available to a larger potential subset of searchers.
Big problem is that the tool appears to be very broken. Lack of response here probably confirms that.
Well I am used to choose per add which country and province/city to display. As we have physical stores we need to be more accurate.
I really simple use the arrow option to click onto the worldmap and zoom until I reach the city targeted. I for sure select also surrounding areas and voila! I can spend more than anyone for clics but in these cities only and so it turns back the challenge to something more like hood-wars. It allows me to still challenge huge companies into my territories.
So thank you google for having it seo well done
Sincerely,
Dave
my template
Hi Richard:
Setting a geographic target shouldn't affect your site's performance on different Google properties (google.fr, google.ca, etc.), unless a searcher limits their search to a particular country (other than the one you've targeted). For example, if you set your site to target France and a searcher selects the "Only show results from Canada" option, your site may not show up.
Hi Susan
Thanks for the response.
I now have some very, very deep concerns about this tool. We have used it on a very large site with country level segmentation in sub folders.
To date we have had zero results appearing in the 'pages from' searches of the targeted territories.
The most concerning issue however is some of the gyrations we're recently seeing in French, and to some extent UK, SERPs - some of our top keywords (that the site would be considered an authority for) are displaying wild movements from top ten to mid nineties and back again on a daily basis. While perhaps totally unconnected, the lack of feedback from Google on the issues with this tool are starting to really scare us.
Any insight you can offer would be really, really appreciated.
Hi Red Cardinal
This is exactly my concern. Like you we have sub-folders on our site with English, French and Spanish. We have not associated any geo-location to the website since you can not use this tool on per sub-folder basis.
So here is the problem. Search engines including Google are supposed to display "the most relevant content". If you are a French or Spanish user, I would have thought my website content in your native language was the "Most Relevant" to you. However, my English results are always on the first page for the relevant keywords; whilst the French or Spanish is languishing in the dark matter of cyberspace!
This tool is near to useless if you are running multi-lingual website, unless it allows you to set subfolders for different languages. It will also reduce my high bounce rate from French and Spanish sources, which are being forced to land on a English page! This is despite having language selection keys on the main .com page.
Please folks at Google, this is not a request just from Webmasters but the users of your search engine need to get the most relevant content and the most relevant content by definition is always in user’s “the native language”. You cannot argue with this logic. At the very least, you should heavily bias your algorithm towards the HTML language setting of the page (here is an idea for the patents department!).
Hi Cognisant
"We have not associated any geo-location to the website since you can not use this tool on per sub-folder basis."
You are able to set the target on a per sub-directory or sub-domain basis. Just create a new account for each sub-directory.
But I'd wait until this tool is working as envisaged. For now there is certainly no positive effects (for us anyhow), and until we know otherwise no guarantee that the tool wont harm your current rankings.
A small update on my various rants above:
As of yesterday Jan 30 the site in question has started to appear in 'pages from' search results :)
Watching carefully to see how this pans out.
Thanks Googlers!
I have 2 .com domains which I am trying to change the geographic location for. They are currently indexed on google.co.uk
I have set the target area to the United States, and the sites are now running off American IP addresses but the geographic location has still not been updated.
Any ideas why? Do you know how long it takes?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Andy
To be quite frank the enforced geolocation sucks.
Please tell me where this page that allows you to change or request a broader location. Mine says your goelocation is South Africa and that is that.
Since the December 27th 2007 update we have lost our entire US, UK, AUS, NZ and English speaking South African market.
However we feature promenently in non english pages such as Hindi, latvian ,afrikaans ,japanese and Chinese Google located SE's.
Our site is in English as the main language, Spanish and French. We have never been Google indexed in French.
I wonder too how a site with long standing and top 20 page position on the US and UK Google can be dropped from those DC's while all those with check out and .com still feature prominently even though they have not changed or optimised their pages since July 2007.
Your feedback is appreciated.
hi, i have a question to as you that, when i search my website of a keyword i see my website top in google.com or googl.co.in but when i search google.co.in i dont see my site on top google result page.
my website location in india.
I have a domain on a .uk.com. Until yesterday this domain ranked on 1st page of google.co.uk for all major keywords, then suddenly vanished. Still ranks highly on google.com and .de, but can not be seen at all on .co.uk. Can anyone help or explain this?
Hi everyone,
Since several months have passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Help Group.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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