Vanessa Fox over at SearchEngineLand describes a new feature in Google Webmaster Central which allows you to set the geographic preference of your website. One of the main issues for people new to multilingual marketing is how to set up their website to be well ranked in a specific country, or even to be included in the local results for that location.
To date Google has looked at the following five factors to help them correctly position and rank a website geographically:
- domain extension
- page language
- document language type
- physical location of website
- inbound links
Google is now offering a new method of setting the preferred location yourself. You can only set one location for each website but could use this method on sub-domains as Vanessa points out:
www.example.com/ (US website)
france.example.com/ (French website)
russia.example.com/ (Russian website)
If your domain extension already determines your website location, such as .ru for Russia, then Google will not let you change this but will display the associated country in the control panel. Although the ccTLD approach is usually recommended for ensuring inclusion in local engines this tool will be very useful on existing com/net/org websites or sub-domain structures and may mitigate the need to buy local hosting.
Source: SearchEngineLand
Nick Wilsdon
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Good job bringing this back up though Nick. Some people may have missed Andy’s first posting back in August (good scoop Andy) and we need to talk about this more. This is huge if you are doing any global and/or multilingual seo. Let’s see how well this works!
[…] Free Cash Quest wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIf your domain extension already determines your site location, such as .ru for Russia, then Google will not let you change this but will display the associated country in the control panel. Although the ccTLD approach is usually … […]
Ah sorry Andy, I must have missed that with my holiday this year. Anna had me on an internet ban for 2 weeks 😉
Thanks Nick. In fact, Matt Cutts told me this development was coming at San Jose in August. The Multilingual-search.com story is here > http://blog.webcertain.com/google-webmaster-tools-starts-to-think-international/29/08/2007
[…] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerptVanessa Fox over at SearchEngineLand describes the new feature in Google Webmaster Central which allows you to set the geographic preference of your site. One of the main issues for people new to multilingual marketing is how to set up … […]