You can now tell Google what country/region your site targets

Just caught this on Sphinn this morning. According to ex-Googler Vanessa Fox, Google has introduced a way for webmasters to inform them what country their site should be associated with. This is an important feature and can influence the way Google ranks your site.

To use this tool, simply login to your Webmaster Tools account and follow the instructions in Vanessa's post.

This is a great addition to Webmaster Tools and should solve a LOT of the webmaster questions I've been getting on this blog about regional domain issues and how to tell Google about a site's geographic market.


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Q and A: Why isn't our site coming up on Google for "pages from Australia"?

Dear Kalena...

We have an Australian website and until now, we have been hosted in the US. Two days ago, we moved to an Australian server, but our site is not coming up on the Australian sites yet (even if you do a Google search for Cairns Unlimited). However, we have other domain names redirected to specific pages within our site, and these come up when you search for sites from Australia. The main reason we moved to an Australian web server was to ensure that our site comes up on Google search results even if readers search for sites only from Australia. Any idea what the problem is?

Thanks for your help
Maria

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Maria

You don't say, but I'm assuming you mean your site doesn't come up when searching on Google.com.au and restricting the search to "pages from Australia"?

I've checked and here's the score:

1) Conducting a search for "Cairns Unlimited" using Google.com brings up your site in first place.

2) Conducting a search for "Cairns Unlimited" using Google.com.au selecting results from "the web" brings up your site in first place.

3) Conducting a search for "Cairns Unlimited" using Google.com.au selecting "pages from Australia" doesn't bring up your site in the first 50 matches, but it does bring up links to your site from other sites.

There could be a couple of things influencing this:

a) It's only been a few days since you made the hosting switch. The DNS entries may not have propagated across the net yet or Googlebot may not have picked up the switch yet. Google datacenters may still be storing cached versions of your pages from your old server. You should give it some more time.

b) Your site has a Google Toolbar PageRank of zero, meaning it hasn't built up enough trust-rank yet to be shown for related search queries on Google, unless you search for very specific terms such as your brand. Things might change when your PageRank improves.

c) You may have switched your hosting company from one based in the US to one based in Australia, but are you SURE the server they use to host your site isn't based in the US? We also use an Australian host but they outsource their server rackspace to a larger company in the US.

d) Even if your site is now hosted in Australia, the domain you are promoting is still a dot com domain. Google takes several things into account when determining a site's origin with server location being only one factor. It is unlikely you'll be able to outrank any sites with AU domain extensions in the regional results with a dot com domain.

e) A site with an Australian domain extension always has a better chance of being included in the regionally-specific search results and out-ranking dot com domains. I see that you also own the .com.au version of your domain but Google isn't caching it as they have determined your dot com domain to be your *correct* one. Have you thought about setting your preferred domain to the .com.au version and parking your dot com domain to that one? Or using 301s to point pages on the dot com to the .com.au? You could then update your Sitemap in your Google Webmaster Tools account to reflect pages on the .com.au domain.

Keep in mind that doing this may improve your site's results in the regional search results, but it may have the opposite effect on your site's performance in Google.com.au "web results" and the wider search results shown on Google.com. You really should decide whether the Australian market is more important to you before you make this switch. You should also keep in mind that many Australian searchers still use Google.com or Google.com.au without selecting "pages from Australia".


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Q and A: What can I do to improve the rank of my regional domain on Google.com?

Dear Kalena...

My question is on regional google sites. I have a .com.au and rank well on google.com.au when selecting 'search web' and 'search australian sites' but my rank on google.com is very bad. I would have assumed that the results for google.com and google.com.au 'search the web' would have been the same? What can I do to improve my google.com rank, perhaps I could register a .com and point it to my .com.au? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks for offering this service by the way :)

Tim

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Tim

First up, never assume anything with Google. Secondly, search engines use a few different methods to determine a site's country of origin. Here are just two:

1) IP address the site resides on (physical location of host servers)
2) Domain extension

The physical location of the server that stores your site can have an impact on how search engines treat your site. Even if your site is hosted by an Australian firm, if they use server space located in another country, that is usually the country search engines will associate with your site. Check with your host about server location if this is an issue for you.

Now about your specific example - think about who uses Google.com.au - the primary users are from Australia, correct? So why would Google show the same results to Australian users that they would show to users of Google.com? They (correctly) assume that Australians want to see results that are relevant to them. So Google naturally gives preference to sites with a .com.au domain extension or sites that are hosted in Australia for both regional searches and "search the web" searches on Google.com.au.

Not only that, but Google uses IP detection to determine a searcher's geographical location and present results they determine relevant for persons in that location. How else do you think they decide what AdWords ads to show to different searchers? Advertisers request their ads to be shown to specific regions, countries or towns, so Google have a highly sophisticated algorithm to make sure this happens automatically.

If it is really vital that your site be shown more prominently on Google.com, I would suggest moving your site to a .com domain, on a server located in the US. You could then 301 redirect your .com.au domain to the .com. Pointing a .com to a .com.au won't do anything because you are still instructing bots that the .com.au site is your primary domain. I would really only consider switching domains if your major market is the US, the Australian market is relatively unimportant to you and you are happy to lose visibility in Google.com.au, which is what would inevitably happen.

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Q and A: What determines whether local results or AdWords get top listings on the search engines?

Dear Kalena...

Why do local results sometimes get top listing, and other times adwords? Is there any way to predict this?

Toronto Baskets and Gifts

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Toronto

As search engine technology becomes more sophisticated and engines get better at predicting what users are searching for, the way results are structured becomes more and more complex.

These days, there are a large range of factors that influence the ranking of search results. They can include:

- searcher IP address location
- geographic qualifiers in search query
- language used in search query
- site IP address location (where it's hosted)
- site TLD extension (e.g. site.com or site.com.au)
- search preferences chosen by user (e.g. language or region)
- location of search site chosen by user (e.g. google.com.au vs google.com)
- user's advanced search preferences
- user's search history (if using Google Toolbar or My Google)

As for AdWords results, they are influenced by:

- site IP address location (where it's hosted)
- advertiser's location targeting preferences
- advertiser's language targeting preferences
- language of advertisement
- click-through rate of ad itself
- advertiser's maximum campaign click-through budget
- advertiser's maximum keyword click-through budget

Whether organic search results or paid results like AdWords appear depend on all these factors in combination with each other. So a searcher in another country from yours could see completely different search results when conducting the same search query on Google.com

Sometimes where a search query is more obscure, there won't be any related AdWords ads appearing because nobody is willing to pay for clicks on those queries. At other times, the search query is so common that hundreds of sponsored PPC ads appear next to the organic listings. Sound complex? Yep, it is!

Q and A: How do I get my .com site recognized by search engines as Australian?

Dear Kalena...

I have launched a website for my father's Australian-based architectural business but am having a few problems getting it listed with search engines as an 'Australian' site.

Although the site is a .COM (not .com.au), the site is listed under Australia in DMOZ, and the word Australia is mentioned quite frequently throughout the META and home page.

Any tips on getting the site recognised as being Australian without a .COM.AU domain name? (e.g. on google.com.au or ninemsn.com.au)

Many thanks
Ian

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Ian

Search engines use a couple of different methods to determine country of origin:

1) IP address the site resides on (physical location of host servers)
2) Domain extension

The physical location of the server that stores your site can have an impact on how search engines treat your site. Even if your site is hosted by an Australian firm, if they use server space located in another country, that is usually the country search engines will associate with your site. Check with your host about server location if this is an issue for you.

Also, use of a .com domain can automatically put your site at a disadvantage if a searcher selects "sites from Australia" as their default search option in Google.com.au, because Google naturally gives preference to sites with a .com.au domain extension for regional searches.

Some Australian-based search engines won't even include sites that don't have a .com.au domain extension, so you might want to consider purchasing the regional domain for submission to such engines and have the regional domain point to the IP address of your main site via domain parking.