LBi Netrank: Better geographic choices, but only with Google.

RSS 2.0 Feed

Better geographic choices, but only with Google.

Posted on 7th November 2007 at 9:45 am by Manley

Google Webmaster Tools now allows verified site owners and webmasters to set the geographic location of their target audience; is this a useful addition or a token gesture?

The options available include 'no geographic location', a country and even a location within a country, which can be specified right down to a street address. Geographic locations can be specified on a domain, sub-domain or subdirectory basis, providing webmasters with a very flexible and extremely granular configuration.

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.) (Google Webmaster Central Blog)

This is only available for Google at present and is no replacement for more traditional methods of geo-targeting content, such as using appropriate TLDs, but it can still be a useful addition to the Webmaster Tools. Larger corporations in particular, with a variety of different language or nation-specific sites in sub-directories, will benefit from being able to specify target geographic locations for each version, rather than having them all lumped in together by IP location or TLD. But only in Google.

The only reservations I have would be with the methodology. Confining this functionality to Webmaster Tools keeps this a firmly Google move, where a meta tag approach (such as the old Dublin Core 'spatial coverage' tag) would allow cross-engine adoption, in the manner of sitemaps.org or the robots.txt protocols. Additionally this approach does not address the duplicate content issues surrounding similar languages (most notably English and American English) which so many webmasters are still falling foul of.

A step in the right direction, but this could be so much more useful if it was on a platform which the other engines could access.

Comments

No-one has commented so far, or all comments are awaiting moderation.

Post Your Comment

If you would like to be alerted when there are new comments to read please enter your email address below.

RSS 2.0 Feed

Search

Archive

Tag Cloud

Subscribe

RSS 2.0 Feed

Better geographic choices, but only with Google.

Comments

Post Your Comment

Subscribe

RSS 2.0 Feed