Tell Google What Geographic Region to Associate With Your Site

Great news! According to ex-Googler Vanessa Fox, Google has just introduced a way for webmasters to inform them what country their site should be associated with.

This is an important new feature and can influence the way Google ranks your site, as Vanessa states:

“Country association is used both in overall ranking (for instance, searchers in Canada will see a greater number of Canadian sites than searchers in the United States will) and in country-restricted searches (for instance, searchers on google.co.uk can choose to see only “pages from the UK”).”

To use this tool, simply follow these instructions:

1) Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account
2) Click on the Tools tab and then choose “set geographic target”
3) Choose your country/region from the drop-down list

Please note: you can only change your domain location association if you aren’t using a country specific TLD. For example, if your site is mysite.com.au, the country Google automatically associates it with is Australia and you cannot change that.

Although you can’t specify multiple countries for a site, you can specify a different country for each sub-domain or folder.

To do this, simply add each sub-domain or sub-folder to your Webmaster Tools account and specify the location for each one.

This is a great addition to Webmaster Tools and should solve a LOT of the webmaster questions I’ve seen about how to tell Google about a site’s geographic market. It should also have a big impact on the way webmasters structure their sites from now on.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from SiteProNews Blog