Tuesday, December 01, 2009 at 4:25 PM
Webmaster Level: AllCountry-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan. However, for certain top level domains like .com, .info and .org, it's not as easy to figure out the location. That's why today we're adding region information supplied by webmasters to the green address line on some Google search results.
This feature is easiest to explain through an example. Let's say you've heard about a boxing club in Canada called "Capital City Boxing." You try a search for [capital city boxing] to find out more, but it's hard to tell which result is the one you're looking for. Here's a screen shot:
None of the results provide any location information in the title or snippet, nor do they have a regional TLD (such as .ca for Canada). The only way to find the result you're looking for is to refine your search ([capital city boxing canada] works) or click through the various links to figure it out. Clicking through the first result reveals that there's apparently another "Capital City Boxing" club in Alabama.
Region tags improve search results by providing valuable information about website location right in the green URL line. Continuing our prior example, here's a screen shot of the new region tag (circled in red):
As you can see, the fourth result now includes the region name "Canada" after the green URL, so you can immediately tell that this result relates to the boxing club in Canada. With the new display, you no longer need to refine your search or click through the results to figure out which page is the one you're looking for. In general, our hope is that these region tags will help searchers more quickly identify which results are most relevant to their queries.
As a webmaster, you can control how this feature works by adjusting your Geographic Targeting settings. Log in to Webmaster Tools and choose Site configuration > Settings > Geographic Target. From here you can associate a particular country/region with your site. These settings will determine the name that appears as a region tag. You can learn more about using the Geographic Target tool in a prior blog post and in our Help Center.
We currently show region tags only for certain domains such as .com and .net where the location information would otherwise be unclear. We don't show region tags for results on domains like .br for Brazil, because the location is already implied by the green URL line in our default display. In addition, we only display region tags when the region supplied by the site owner is different from the domain where the search was entered. For example, if you do a search from the Singapore Google domain (google.com.sg), we won't show you region tags for all the websites webmasters have targeted to Singapore because we'd end up tagging too many results, and the tag is really most relevant for foreign regions. For the initial release, we anticipate roughly 1% of search results pages will include webpages with a region tag.
We hope you'll find this new feature useful, and we welcome your feedback.
40 comments:
It's great that generic TLDs will now have their locations tagged if they are foreign. But what about ccTLDs that aren't actually located in that ccTLD? For example, identi.ca (no location, in practice) or my site, technobabbl.es (no location, but technically the United States because that's where I live)? There are a lot of ccTLD sites that use the ccTLD for domain-name shortening rather than indicating where they are. And it doesn't help that Webmaster Tools won't allow changing the geotargeting of a ccTLD domain.
Totally awesome! Thanks for helping all of us with control issues!
Cathy
Great features for users and webmasters alike; makes it easier to see whether or not Google has picked up the geographic targeting already.
Any ideas why http://www.ibm.com/systems/at/bladecenter/ wouldn't show Austria as the geographic target?
I second Voyagerfan5761's request to allow setting geographic targets also for ccTLDs. In addition to the use of ccTLDs for fancy domain names, there are companies that reside in one country and pick the appropriate ccTLD but do business in multiple countries.
What would be nice too is the ability to set more than one country target, for example "Austria, Germany and Switzerland", and to set the geographic target using the DC.Coverage meta data also.
Okay, that's enough feature requests :-)
Hello,
ok does this also mean that an Webpage which is hosted in USA could appear for a search with "Webpages from Australia" when Australia is selected in WMT?
regards Frank
Frank,
Yes...that's the primary purpose of the Geographic Targeting feature in Webmaster Tools. This new update expands its functionality beyond "Page from..." results.
Will linking a .com domain name to a country in the search results be done for .eu domains also?
Ludwig
@Frank Geotargetting is currently only available for gTLDs, regardless of the hosting location.
So as long as your domain is a .com, .net, .org or one of the other gTLDs, you can set Australia as the geographic target.
If your Website is in the .us domain, then the geographic target is determined automatically and cannot be changed.
Thanks very much - your answers helped me a lot. So i can choose an cheap Server from another Country than Australia - and can still appear in searches for australian pages.
This is really an great feature.
cheers, frank
In Bulgaria .me domains got some popularity lately because "me", combined with the domain name becomes a very good combination. For example "kupi.me" means "buy me" and it's better looking than kupime.com or kupime.bg so some Bulgarian webmasters are using such domains.
I am not one of them yet, but it would be a good feature to be able to change the geo-targeting of such domains too.
It's seems nice that we can GEO target our sites, but I think sometimes our websites are targeted for 2 or 3 regions, and we want to specifically target searchers from those regions, Why there is no facility to associate our site for more than one region. Also, should we develop separate site for separate regions? I do not think this will add any value to the content on Internet.
@Krusch You can apply geotargeting to subdirectories in Webmaster Tools. To do that, you just need to add the subdirectory (or subdomain) to Webmaster Tools separately.
@Yachts4U .eu is also seen as a gTLD (as is .asia), so you can set geotargeting for those domains.
@Geo We've also started treating .me as a gTLD, so you should be able to specify geotargeting in Webmaster Tools as well.
Surely this could/will have a negative impact on many sites.
I have a site (a .com) who’s content is targeted at both US and UK. At present I have GT set to UK as that’s where I am located and any country specific content will be targeted to UK visitors. According to Google doing this does not affect my US traffic but may help with UK traffic.
Now if US visitors see United Kingdom on their searches that list my site I feel they are quite likely to choose another link over mine as they will feel my content is not appropriate (or not relevant) to them.
If I change my targeting to neutral (ie no GT) then I will likely loose some positioning in the SERPS for my UK traffic.
Any thoughts as I hope I am wrong.
Andy
This is nice improvement in google result. This will help user to understand country of that website before clicking on the url.
Hi.. I have a query.. if i take the same example and search the keyword from any other country, will the same result show up.
Thnx
Nikhil Kurup
As Andy speaking about this new feature is exactly correct, even i am supporting him. Could any one answer his query.
http://www.web-developers.co.in/seo_sem_services.htm
@John Mueller Yes you can set different targets with subdirectories, but you cannot mark a single content element as applicable to multiple countries.
The geo tagging for http://www.ibm.com/systems/at/bladecenter/ seems to be set correctly but still doesn't get applied :-(
How about my BlogSpot blog addresses?
This is very cool, but I was disappointed that I couldn't specify a region any further than "United States." Maybe you could add each state to the list?
Wow...another new feature from Google, earlier it was display of site breadcrumbs at SERP's now geo target region tags in effort to serve with best relevant results. I am glad!
I am eager to see lot more addition from Google and off-course waiting to hear when Caffeine is going to roll out.
My comment is similar to Dee Dee's but in the other direction: We have a site that covers No. and So. America, another that covers Europe, Israel and So. Africa, another that covers several Pacific countries, from India to Australia. How can we tag that?
How long does it take for the geographic changes in country for TLDs to take effect if I made the changes in the Google Webmaster Tools.
I had a SEO work on my site and he used Pakistan (his country of origin) instead of USA (our company base) in Google Webmaster. I am not sure whether this will change once the site is crawled again...
My site is www.newsoftwares.net If you search for 'Folder Lock' you can find the link http://www.newsoftwares.net/folderlock/ with this country in the green area.
@John Mueller - what about .tv? Is that treated as a gTLD?
@Ian M, yes, we treat .tv as a gTLD. You can see these tags by searching selectively, eg for [fernsehen site:tv].
@Dee Dee, Beveridge D. Spenser, at the moment there is no provision for region-support. I would recommend just making sure that your site is in the proper language and only using geotargeting if you're targing a specific country.
Very cool feature, can i have different subfolders for UK and Ireland?
Have a similar question to Tony. What if your site is in different countries - Canada and US etc. Will it be possible to set different subdomains or directories point to different countries?
Google shows country tab at the time when you're searching for a specific keyword in another country's se.
e.g. if I search for "web designing" in google.co.in than I'll find my usa based website in serp with the tab USA near to my domain name.
Like wise these kind of tabs are being used now, if you use specific products, brand or regional sub categories in your website.
krusch - I see that link:
http://www.ibm.com/systems/at/bladecenter/ now is in "Pages from Austria" results :) How long it takes ? I try to do the same.
Regards
I've tested this new tool and the reasults are good, for example, even 3 weeks ago when my website wasn't a target geographical, visitors who came from Venezuela were almost always around 7%; after changing the location to Venezuela my website, mi page view has been registering over 25% from that country.
Oops! I almost forgot, my website is Peruvian.
The article states "these region tags will help searchers more quickly identify which results are most relevant to their queries"
In fact, the region tag is confusing since location of a site (.com or .net) may result not from webmaster tool geotargeting, but from IP location.
For instance, SERPs from google Canada include .com or .net pages which are not located in Canada. But the region tag (let's say United States) is not shown for the countless pages with an IP in the USA, but only for those with a webmaster tool geotargeting.
@jasmin: Also, more and more sites are using ccTLDs for branding rather than national presence (see Pidgin.im, identi.ca, tr.im, tcrn.ch, etc.) and the fact that these domains are automatically (and forcibly) targeted to the countries represented by the ccTLD causes even more problems.
ccTLDs are great tool for all of us
greetings from Greece aslo we fount very usefull also for traffic sourge at www.drossos-carpets.gr and www.carpet-stock.gr
It's seems nice that we can GEO target our sites, but I think sometimes our websites are targeted for 2 or 3 regions, and we want to specifically target searchers from those regions, Why there is no facility to associate our site for more than one region.
this blog about improving search results . http://improvesearchresults.blogspot.com/
thank you
I read all the post content and comments too but did not get the point where i stuck at this point, actually my issue is a little different and irritated as well. When i search a particular term related to my website, i get my link in serps with region tag of a country that has no link with my site ever but still showing when i search in .ca but my site is global and i never geo targeted to a specific country which is showing me currently in .ca with different country region tag, please help me to find the solution and remove it. Hope to hear from you soon. Thanks
Just wonder if this feature is still supported by Google. I could not find any working example and last info is dated 2010 on the web ???
Thanks
Hi, I've used the geo targeting on my UK-specific site for some time, and I notice this marvelous tag on searches on google.com. However, I believe the tag would be vastly useful for searchers on google.co.uk (to clarify that this .com domain is UK-specific) but the tag does not appear there. When will this be rolled out to the location-specific versions of Google? It would help users to visually sift their search results when they don't want to search only in the UK.
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has 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 Central Help Forum.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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