Google tool to specify country target

chandrika · #1 (**permalink**) 03-25-2008, 08:06 AM

In webmaster tools you can specify which location you want to target your website at.

As I have more than one sitemap, one for a UK part of a site and the other for the USA part of the site, I have chosen different options for each.

I am just wondering whether anyone knows if Google will register that it is diferent for each part of the site. Whether they will target the UK folder pages for UK and USA on USA, or whether it will mix things up, because they might associate one country only with one domain and get confused by having different folders on one domain targetted at different countries?

Time will tell I suppose, but does anyone already know whether this will work ok?

Dubbya · #2 (**permalink**) 03-25-2008, 11:24 AM

If you want to, you can specify your target country in the head of the document and it's quite effective. This negates relying on the Google tool.

For the US:

HTML Code:

<html lang="en-US">

For the UK:

HTML Code:

<html lang="en-GB">

.02

chandrika · #3 (**permalink**) 03-25-2008, 11:40 AM

Ah, thats handy to know, thanks for that!

J8 Zoekmachine Marketing · #4 (**permalink**) 03-25-2008, 06:15 PM

Good answer! Thanks!

Jean-Luc · #5 (**permalink**) 03-25-2008, 06:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by J8 Zoekmachine Marketing

Good answer! Thanks!

This <html lang="en-US"> is theoretically correct, but I bet that Google will disregard it.

Jean-Luc

vinay11111 · #6 (**permalink**) 03-26-2008, 03:54 AM

Submission to that country specific search engines, directories may help

Dubbya · #7 (**permalink**) 03-26-2008, 01:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jean-Luc

This <html lang="en-US"> is theoretically correct, but I bet that Google will disregard it.

Jean-Luc

According to W3C:

Quote:

Search engines can group or filter results based on the user's linguistic preferences.

It is also common to use meta tags to specify keywords that a search engine may use to improve the quality of search results. When several meta elements provide language-dependent information about a document, search engines may filter on the meta elements, using associated language attributes, and display search results according to the language preferences of the user.

Source:
W3C I18N FAQ: Why use the language attribute?

According to Google:

Quote:

Targeting by Geographical Location
You can target campaigns by cities, countries, metros, and regions. However, a single campaign can only target one geographic area. For example, you can target a campaign by countries or regions, but not both. You can specify multiple values within a single type of geographic area. For example, you could target a campaign by more than one country.

You can target by language in addition to targeting by one kind of geographic region.

To target a campaign by specific geographic type, define the geoTargeting field of the campaign data to have one of the cities, countries, metros, or regions fields.

Note: For statically typed languages such as Java, the value of the geoTargeting field is a GeoTarget object, which in turn has cities, countries, metros, or regions fields.
For the list of accepted geography values, see:

Country Codes
Worldwide Region Codes
U.S. Metropolitan Codes
Worldwide City Codes (outside the US)
U.S. City Codes

Source:
Language, Geotargeting, Currency and Time Zone Codes (AdWords API Developer's Guide)

You'd have lost that bet.

davidweb · #8 (**permalink**) 03-26-2008, 06:39 PM

When google geographic tool was launched, there was an option to include location like :- US --> New York

However this option has been removed.

Did anyone spot this change ??

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