Making Geotargeted Content Findable For the Right Searchers
A few weeks ago, I organized and moderated several sessions at SMX London. One of those sessions was about international SEO, which in part, touched on the issues related to having content available for multiple countries and languages. What’s the best way to make sure that searchers in a particular country or speaking a particular language are able to easily find the content you have available for them?
Last week, I was reading Eric Ward’s column Now Is the Winter of Linking’s Discontent, where he writes:
Personalized search results have been with us for a while, but this patent [about Google's personalized search patent that Bill Hartzer discssuses on his blog] is chock full of link building implications. I’d say this is especially true for web sites trying to do business in multiple countries but offering their content in only one language. And if you take the time and effort to truly make your content available in other languages, do you also need to host that other language content on a server based in that country if you want to rank well for searches originating from that country? What about duplicate content? Aren’t French and German versions of a site, if hosted in France and Germany, duplicate? Hmmm.
These questions came up at SMX London as well. How do search engines sort out content targeted for particular languages and regions and what are the best practices for making sure you’re being seen by your target audience?
How search engines determine the geographic intent of the searcher
Search engines try to display the most relevant results possible to a searcher. The language of the searcher, the searcher’s geographic location, way the searcher accesses the search engine, and language or regional intent in the query are all factors the search engines consider when determining relevance. Since queries are generally three to four words long, search engines use all the signals they can beyond the query to figure out what searchers are really looking for.
For instance, if a searcher is in Ireland searches for [airline booking], they’ll likely get a very different list of results than a searcher in the United States, as the results will skew towards Irish airlines. But this doesn’t just happen at the country level. If a searcher in Seattle searches for [pizza], they’ll likely get more Seattle-based pizza listings than a searcher in Boston would. And for Google in particular, a searcher who’s logged into a Google account and has set a default location in Google maps may get even more targeted results. Google has made this option more visible lately, and for queries they think may have local intent, they offer a zip code option:
In addition, a searcher will get get different results:
- Searching google.fr from the US.
- Searching google.fr from France.
- Searching google.fr and choosing “French pages”
- Searching google.fr and choosing “pages from France”
And, as you might imagine, including a geographic location in the query impacts results as well. A search for [restaurant in Dublin] returns different results than [restaurant], regardless of the other signals. And searching in a particular language will generally return results in that language. For instance, look at the results for the query [donde esta los cabos] from a US IP address on google.com:
So, to recap, some ways search engines determine regional intent include:
- Domain accessed (google.co.uk vs. google.fr)
- Language-restriction (only search French pages)
- Country-restriction (only search pages in France)
- Location of searcher (at the country level, as well as more local levels, such as the city)
- Locational or language intent in the query
- Searcher’s default location (such as set in Google Maps)
- The language the query was composed in
Remember that search engines make slight tweaks to their algorithms all the time as they test what changes improve results. As personalized search becomes more important, it would make sense that if a searcher generally clicks on results in a particular language or country, pages in that language or from that country may start to appear more often for that searcher.
Note that I’m mixing language and region together a bit for the purposes of this article, although they are, of course different. And issues can crop up because there’s not a one-to-one mapping between language and country. For instance, if someone is searching for Spanish pages, should a search engine return pages from both Mexico and Spain? (Probably if the query is language-specific but not regional; and perhaps search engines should use the country associated with the site as a signal for the language the site is in.) Conversely, if you have a site that targets Spanish speakers, do you need separate sites for both Mexico and Spain? (Maybe not if your content isn’t regional, but how then do you ensure your content is returned for searchers in both Mexico and Spain?)
How search engines determine the relevance of the page
Once a search engine decides what is relevant for the query, what signals from the pages come into play? They include the following:
- Top-level domain (TLD): Many domains can only be used for a particular country. For instance, .fr always signifies a domain in France. TLD could potentially be used as a signal in determining language as well. a .fr domain is likely to have French content.Many domains, however, aren’t country-specific. .com, .net, and .org are well-known examples, but some countries allow their domains to be used by anyone. For instance, .tv is the TLD for Tuvalu, but that country has negotiated an agreement to make the TLD available for anyone ).The exception to the standard seems to be .us. While it’s intended for US-based domains, it hasn’t really taken off, and .com is much more commonly used.
- Server location: For domains that are not country-specific (such as .com or .tv), search engines use the geographic location of the server where the site is hosted to determine country. For instance, a .com hosted in Canada is seen as a Canadian site and a .com hosted in Australia is seen as an Australian site.
- Google Webmaster Tools setting: Google Webmaster Tools includes an option for specifying the geographic location of a site. This option isn’t available if the TLD is country-specific. This setting basically replaces the server hosting location signal. This option is useful not only because you can host your domain anywhere and still set a location, but also because you can set each subdomain and subfolder of your site separately, if you’d like. For instance, you can set es.mysite.com or mysite.com/es to Spain and uk.mysite.com or mysite.com/uk to the United Kingdom. The disadvantage to this solution is that it only works for Google.
- Location of incoming links: If 90% of the incoming links to a site are from Germany, then search engines figure the site is German, or at the very least, of interest to German searchers.
- Language of pages: Again, language is technically a different relevance factor than country, but the two go hand in hand. If a site is in French, then it’s likely a site from France. The biggest signal used here is probably (as you might imagine), the language of the text on the pages. This criteria isn’t foolproof. What if the page includes multiple languages, for instance? The meta data and character encoding can help here. For instance, if you are translating your English pages into other languages, don’t forget to translate your title tag and meta description tag as well.
- Address: For local queries (for instance, that [pizza] query from a Seattle searcher, search engines might use the physical address it finds on the page, as well as any information from the search engine’s local index (for example, Google’s Local Business Center). If your site is for a local business, make sure you include your full address and register with each engine’s local index.Even if your site isn’t specifically for a local business, you may want to include regional signals on your site. For instance, if your site is windycityrestaurantreviews.com, and you have a page about each Chicago restaurant, you might assume that anyone coming to the site understands the context is Chicago, and that you don’t need to include “Chicago, IL” in each restaurant’s address. However, when a search engine sees “Joe’s Pizza, 123 Main St.”, there’s no indication that this restaurant is in Chicago. This can cause a usability issue with visitors coming to the site from search as well. Those visitors aren’t coming to the page from the home page that may say “Reviews of all Chicago Restaurants”. They may go directly from search to the page about Joe’s Pizza, and would need confirmation that 123 Main St. is indeed in Chicago.
How should a site owner architect a geographically targeted site?
Ideally, a company should maintain separate sites for each country, each with the correct TLD. When you do this, search engines can easily determine which page to show for searchers in different countries.
What about duplicate content?
Even if the content is the same across each site, you don’t need to worry about duplicate content. Remember that search engines generally don’t penalize for duplicate content, they filter. And in this case, filtering is exactly what you want. You want the search engine to show the UK page to searchers in the UK and filter out the US page. And that’s what search engines typically do.
If you are targeting only one country and have the .com rather than the correct TLD, make sure it’s hosted in the target country. (Check with your hosting company, if you use one, to verify where the server is actually located.)
Sounds easy enough, but this solution doesn’t work for everyone. You may not be able to get the TLD for every country you operate in, or for other infrastructure-related reasons, you may need to host all the content on the same domain. In that case, I would recommend the following:
- Putting content for each country on a subdomain or subfolder. (Either is fine; but if you’re starting from scratch and have a choice, I’d generally suggest going with a subdomain.)
- Ensuring all content (including title tag and meta description) is localized.
- Focusing on regional link-building efforts. For instance, make sure that your PR team is targeting newspapers in local regions, not just near the corporate office.
- Including location-specific terms in internal anchor text. For instance, you might want to create an HTML site map that links to each country’s “home page” on the domain.
More strength in one domain?
At SMX London, there was some debate about if it was better to have a single domain for all countries to consolidate PageRank, and if multiple domains (one for each country) would dilute the overall strength. Remember that relevance is a critical factor for search engine ranking and PageRank alone doesn’t equal relevance. A page that is deemed highly relevant for a query, but has low PageRank is going to rank above a page that has high PageRank but has low relevance.
With that in mind, TLD is a strong relevance factor for results in a particular country. As for the argument that it’s more work to build links to multiple sites than to one, I content it’s around the same, since even if you had the country-specific information on subdomains or in subfolders instead, you’d still want to build regional links to each. So, I would generally recommend TLDs if you can get them.
However, if you have a .com (for instance), with separate subdomains that you’ve been maintaining for a period of time, it probably makes sense to leave things as is and consider the other relevance factors (regional links, language of content, etc.). If you radically change your site structure (for instance, from subdomains to separate TLDs), you’ll need to have the content recrawled, reindexed, and reranked, and may need to change user perception, branding, link building efforts, among other things. And that may take some time. In a situation like this, I would recommend changing only if you’re having substantial problems getting the right content to be returned for the right country indices.
What about targeting multiple countries?
What if you want results returned to everyone? Or you have German content you want returned in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria? Unfortunately, there’s no perfect solution. In some cases, you’ll have to rely on the search engines to understand what results your pages are relevant for, but keep in mind that a more specific site may be seen as more relevant.
In some cases, other sites may be more relevant. For instance, if you have a US site in English that targets tourists worldwide, your content won’t be shown to searchers in France who select “only French pages”. And even if searchers don’t filter using that option, a site that has created content in French, targeted to tourists in France who are planning a visit to the US is likely to be seen as more relevant than your site targeting the world.
What about IP-Targeting?
Some sites detect the location of the visitor based on IP address, and redirect them to a country (or other location)-specific page. While this seems to be a user-friendly solution, some issues exist:
- The location may be incorrect. For instance, many AOL users appear to be coming from Virginia.
- The searcher may want a different location. For instance, when I was in Zurich, I still wanted the US Hertz site, but Hertz sent me to the Swiss site automatically and gave me no options for navigating elsewhere.
- Search engines need unique URLs in order to index content separately.
- Search engines crawl your site from a particular location, but you want all locations indexed.
If you have your site set to detect a visitor’s location and show content based on that, I would recommend the following:
- Serve a unique URL for distinct content. For instance, don’t show English content to US visitors on mysite.com and French content to French visitors on mysite.com. Instead, redirect English visitors to mysite.com/en and French visitors to mysite.com/fr. T hat way search engines can index the French content using the mysite.com/fr URL and can index English content using the mysite.com/en URL.
- Provide links to enable visitors (and seach engines) to access other language/country content. For instance, if I’m in Zurich, you might redirect me to the Swiss page, but provide a link to the US version of the page. Or, simply present visitors with a home page that enables them to choose the country. You can always store the selection in a cookie so vistors are redirected automatically after the first time.
Google isn’t the only search engine
Of course, Google and Yahoo and Live aren’t the only search engines. If you’re targeting other countries, research who the dominant search players are there and how to best optimize for them. Mona Elesseily recently wrote an article on Search Engine Land about international search markets, and while she was focusing on paid search, the players and numbers are similar for organic search.
An international strategy is about more than targeting
Of course, a lot more goes into creating localized content. You should localize, not just translate, the content. Searcher behavior and customer needs may be different from country to country. Even simple phrasing may be slightly different. Different PR efforts may be need to build awareness and links. And there are conversion factors to consider. At SMX London, several panelists pointed out that searchers are more likely to click search results that had their local TLDs in the domain, because they felt more confident those domains would give them localized content.
Hopefully, this article can help sort out some of the issues that arise when planning a global site strategy, but it’s certainly only a starting point.
More information
- Google Webmaster Central blog:
- Search Engine Land: International SEO Tips
- SMX London: Heini van Bergen Slideshare (international search markets)
(By Vanessa, who clearly is still working through technical blog issues.)
Hi Vanessa,
this one is very comprehensive and helpful. As asked in the London sessions, it still isn’t very clear about the issue of multiple domain / duplicate site. What I mean is – Listening to how you differentiate filter from penalty – we still are going to feed crawlers with the same content on different domain names, mostly n the same physical files too.
What I usually recommend is to enable such structure only if the regional versions offer enough substantial unique content on their own, and moreover to block via robots.txt and via web master tools crawlers from crawling duplicate data – your thoughts?
Ophir
In most cases, I don’t think there’s any need to block duplicate data or only offer regional data if it’s different. As I mentioned in the blog post, the filtering should work exactly as you want it to as long as the search engines are associating the content with the correct language. That second part is really vital to all of this working though, so if a site isn’t set up in a way that makes it easy for search engines to associate content properly, then your method makes sense to me.
For instance, if you have a US site, a UK site, and an Australian site as follows:
-mycompany.com (hosted in the US)
-mycompany.co.uk
-mycompany.au
All three sites are in English and have pages with substantially similar (or even identical) content. For instance, the about page for each may be exactly the same. So, you have three URLs with identical content:
-mycompany.com/about.php
-mycompany.co.uk/about.php
-mycompay.au/about.php
In this case, when someone does a search in the US for [about my company], mycompany.com/about.php should show up in the search results and search engines should filter the other two URLs. When someone does the same search in Australia, mycompany.au/about.php should show up in the results and search engines should filter out the others.
Search engines will crawl all three URLs, so there is a bandwidth hit, but I think that’s the kind of bandwidth hit that’s worth the tradeoff, as it’s going to be a better user experience for the Australian searcher to end up on the Australian site. (Rather than have the mycompany.com/about.php page show up for all English-speaking searchers, which would cause the Australian searcher to either stay on the US site throughout the site visit or have to figure out how to navigate to the Australian site after landing on the US site’s about page.)
Now, going back to my second point, if you don’t have separate TLDs for each country and search engines can’t easily tell which page goes with each country, then you may want to consolidate duplicate pages. For instance, if you have mycompany.com/en and mycompany.com/uk, then you can’t easily use language signals (as UK English and US English are pretty similar). You can use link building signals, but those will likely take time to build up. You can specify the subfolder in Google Webmaster Tools, but that won’t help with Yahoo. So, in this case, Yahoo may see that mycompany.com/en/about.php and mycompany/uk/about.php are the same content but may not associate each URL with different countries. Yahoo will show one URL and filter the other out as described in the previous scenario, but might filter the wrong one, which gives you no benefit and simply adds confusion. UK searchers might see the mycompany.com/en/about.php page, for instance.
For this second situation, it’s better to have a consolidated about page that explains the company serves both the US and the UK and links to the country-specific pages.
Hi vanessa,
Yes, you are right. some times sites with low page rank also has good SERPs due to their higher relevancy to the user search.
Regards
Sankar
Hi, Vanessa.
Regarding the previous comment. Do you think that (although Google will decide itself based on top-level domain) server location, local back links etc still matter. I mean if we picture the situation, when 25 sites reside on the same server, have links from more or less the same sites, have absolutely (100%) identical content won’t that be a duplicate content form the Google’s point of view? I mean if it is not, then I can go and by domain name of some well known brand (I need just find the top-level that is not taken), copy all the content and then rank great for the geo location, specified by the tp-level. Is this true or am I missing something?
Thank you very much.
Great post indeed.
As I’m currently setting up a site targetted at potentially every language and country in the world, I was looking for the best SEO, usable and clean way of doing this.
Your information helped to eliminate some of my possible options, which were:
* Buy TLD’s (not even an option for me, like you said: many may not be available). But this only takes care of the region/country part, not of the language of the visitor since some countries are multilingual.
* Only use a language subdomain/subdirectory like site.com/en/ and only keep track of user region/country in cookie. This looks nice but complicates a lot.
* Use full language-region combination in subdomain/subdirectory like site.com/en-us/.
The longer I look at it, the last option looks most future-proof to me.
Does it have any major disadvantages? Besides a lot of duplicate content?
Another great post, Ms Vanessa!
Just a silly question. Does Meta Content Language really help pages of multiple lanagues very much? You seemed to ignore this tag by stating: “The meta data and character encoding can help here…” but using the example of Title and Description tags.
Thanks for your thoughtful notes and recommendations, as always!
Hi Vanessa, many thanks for the post, this is really valuable for me. I am based in Belfast Northern Ireland (part of the UK) but as we are a seperate country from Britan then my furniture site is really only targeting N.Ireland customers.
My problem is if i target a general keyword like “pocket sprung bed” i am competing with all the UK population 60million with some huge online stores. Where as if i can target only NI with 1.75 million people there is little local online competition in the furniture industry.
So how do i do this? At the moment i need to add, “NI” , “Northern Ireland” or “Belfast” to all my keyword phrases that i target, and if someone in belfast googles “pocket sprung bed” they get UK results even though we are really a different country. Our TLD is “.co.uk” too which is no use.
I have local address on site, in webmaster tools, and local business listings and backlinks.
I have been studying the subject for some time and have subscribed to StomperNet etc but no one has really tackled this issue that i can find.
Additionally i am now going to target the South Of Ireland, which is much easier as it uses TLD “.ie” and i can copy site to there and localise, and pray there is no Duplicate Content penalty!
Any advice would be greatly appericiated.
Best regards, Eunan.
Excellent post on this difficult subject.
It’s was a great discussion we had on this at SMX London and it would not be the last discussion.
Your point on subdomains / subfolders is also somewhat explained by Matt Cutts in this video, http://videos.webpronews.com/2008/11/18/matt-cutts-on-changes-at-google/. Starting at 7.55.
Matt is suggesting the use of subdomains for international targeted content too. Although he mentions that you can also geo-target subfolders.
Oh, and thanks for linking to my slideshare presentation
This is the very information I’m looking for just now.
I posted a related question on WebmasterWorld.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3797740.htm
What solution do you think is the best in my situation?
I would like your advice an expert.
Sergei,
The suggestions in my post should work well for those who are looking to build real value and customer engagement in international markets, not for those looking for loopholes in the system. Remember that relevance is a key factor for search engines when determining ranking. If a site has great content and ranks well in its target country, and you take that content and copy it to a different TLD, it won’t automatically rank well for the other country. Real, quality links to the second site from that target country, for instance, help determine relevancy. If you copy the content and don’t change the language, then the language may not be relevant for that second country. And if you simply translate the text (using something like machine translation) rather than localize it, then again, you likely won’t get quality, organic links to that content (because it won’t be authentic content that local sites want to link to).
So the scenario you describe is not really a duplicate content issue. It’s a relevance issue. 25 sites with exactly the same content and the same links won’t be relelvant for 25 different countries. And if the same links point to each site then not only are those not relevant for each country, but it’s unlikely they were organic and editorially given. That sounds a lot more like a link scheme or some kind, which aren’t the kind of links that factor into better ranking.
There are two main issues that go into geotargeted content:
-What country does the site target? This question is most easily answered by TLD, but if that’s not available, other signals can help determine it.
-What is the most relevant result for a query? Once the site is associated with a country, it still may not be deemed as super relevant for the query if it doesn’t have the other factors (localized content, local links, etc.)
The duplicate content issue in this case is a minor one and only comes into play when figuring out which page to filter out and which page to show. Search engines want to show the version of the page that is more relevant to the searcher (in this case, the one targeted at the searcher’s country). But even if the right page is selected for the display, it won’t rank well without being seen as the most relevant.
Sam, your biggest issue may be making sure the search engines associate each subdirectory/subdomain with the right country. And of course, creating localized content for every country/language in the world.
(Not from a duplicate content perspective, but from a user engagement perspective.)
Hi Du, I don’t think using the meta language tag can hurt, so you may as well use it if it’s easy to add. But I asked the panelists at SMX London if they found it to be helpful, and they said that they had experimented and not found it to be a strong signal (and couldn’t really tell if it was a signal at all). I imagine that search engines can’t use it as a definitive signal since it’s so often wrong (my earlier blog was set up by default as en, sv by WordPress, for instance). Analyzing the actual language found on the page is likely a much better signal for search engines.
Eunan, as I mentioned in an above comment, relevance is going to be big for you. Just associating your site with a country makes sure that the site is a contender to show up for searchers in that country, but doesn’t guarantee it will rank well.
Duplicate content shouldn’t really be an issue, since you’ll want the .ie site to show for those searching on google.ie and the .co.uk site to show for those searching on google.co.uk.
Since, as you point out, it’s difficult for you to compete with all of the .co.uk sites, you’ll likely do better competing locally, by making sure you’ll listed in the local directories and have local address information. (Which you’re doing.) I would imagine that searchers in Northern Ireland are sometimes frustrated by results that are dominated by British sites, so may be appending their queries with location information to get more targeted results.
Hi Vanessa and thank you. This post helps me explain the various scenarios and potential outcomes to clients in a way I’ve never been able to. Awesome.
-Eric
Vanessa,
I have a small question…
If I am searching for a keyword from in India (Under Indian IP) using Google.co.uk. Are these search results vary from the results If I search from uk (under uk IP)? or else both results are same?
My question is “Does local IP has any role in displaying relevant results in google”?
Thanks
Good points – very detailed – one thing you overlooked (unless I missed it) is that when targeting different countries you must also consider different algorithms at least when talking about Google.
Hi Vanessa, great post. Remember the questions we had about 2 years ago during the Google Tech council about this issue?
It looks like Google was finally able to help multinationals that run under .com.
Take a look at http://www.google.com.au and searche for “HP Printer”
The top organic result is:
http://welcome.hp.com/country/au/en/prodserv/printing_multifunction.html
Can you speculate how Google understands the “AU” and “EN” on the above HP URL?
I have not been able to find Google’s guidelines for country and language structure for enterprise sites under .com in the USA.
The “Set Geographic Target” from Webmaster tools does not help multinationals as one .com site has multiple Geo and language targets.
Thanks, @SocialJulio
Hi Sankar, Your local IP does play a role in the results you see. Search engines use all the signals they can to determine intent and provide the most relevant results possible. So you will likely see slightly different results on google.co.uk, for instance, searching from the UK vs. searching from India.
Hey Julio, I do indeed recall that meeting!
My guess is that HP has set the welcome.hp.com/country/au folder to be associated with Australia.
I guess I’m not quite sure what you’re asking re: multinationals on a .com with multiple geo and language targets.
If hp had a structure like hp.com/en/content and they wanted that to target the US, UK, and Australia, then yes, there’s no great way to do that. But in this case, HP does appear to be targeting Australia specifically with that folder.
This would also work if you had different language content for one country. For instance, in the US, you might want to have both English and Spanish content. You could do site.com/us/en and site.com/us/es and set the site.com/us folder to the United States. You might have a different folder (site.com/mx) or TLD (site.com.mx) for Spanish content target at Mexico.
[...] 2nd December – Making Geotargeted Content Findable For the Right Searchers (MattMcGee) Vanessa Fox writes a fantastically detailed and comprehensive guide to optimising geo-specific content for search engines and users. It follows a very well-received session at SMX London which Vanessa moderated this year, covering the topics brought up and expanding upon them. If you work on international sites or are interested in capturing a new non-domestic audience, this post will give you all you need to know. Direct Link: Nine By Blue [...]
Hi Vanessa
I think even Google has some way to go with figuring out what to show both on international google properties and google.com from outside the US.
I have a little experience with the geolocation tool in GWT, and I’ve seen some truly weird and wonderful outcomes that make me think this area is still not quite refined.
Great post, and happy to fond your blog.
Rgds
Richard
I would just like to say – you kick ass Vanessa. Appreciate the effort you put into your articles.
Nice post vanessa, i have a doubt what will be the effect on tld specific results like if you have .fr and redirect that domain to your main domain will those keywords get the same ranking from serps as the main domain. In a specific case i have seen this happening with the local tld domain ranking and even the local tld shows in search results but when you click the search result it redirects to the main domain.
I need your help.. I have a website that rank well on Sharepoint Consulting at google.com but if someone search it from USA then we aren’t anywhere in Google. Please help me The geographical location has been set as USA already in Google Webmaster tool.. domaain is also hosted in USA and Domain name is 7 or 8 years old.. but still we are not in Google USA
Please Please help
Hi Vanessa,
I’m struggling to develop a URL strategy for an client. There will be several key market sites with country-specific TLDs and unique content; however the “primary” site is a .com TLD with language-specific subdirectory structure (e.g. mycompany.com/zh) with translated content for those non-English speaking countries hitting the .com.
My concern is this strategy will create both a relevancy and/or ranking issue for those visitors hitting the translated .com.
Any thoughts?
Thanks!
[...] Making Geotargeted Content Findable For the Right Searchers Vanessa Fox, Nine by Blue | 12/1/08 [...]
[...] Making Geotargeted Content Findable For the Right Searchers Vanessa Fox, Nine by Blue | 12/1/08 [...]
[...] search engines wasn’t important. Vanessa Fox, previous Google Engineer, explains very clearly how search engines determine location relevant search results, putting at the top of her list country specific local domains. This is something that is [...]
[...] Making Geotargeted Content Findable For the Right Searchers [...]
Excellent article. The points you make about the advantages and disadvantages of ccTLDs are spot on.
No solution is perfect, and there are usually plenty of things you can do to overcome obstacles if you cannot use a TLD.
I’ve found the biggest challenges involve a domain that targets a region that shares a language (for example: using a non-ccTLD domain hosted in the US to target searchers in South America). When a site like that is not hosted in one of the countries in the region, it can be tough to establish that country/language association.
[...] past because Google admits it too. See Vanessa Fox blog post about how Google determine geolocation Making Geotargeted Content Findable For the Right Searchers – Nine By Blue. As you might know Vanessa Fox was the Google Engineer in charge of the Google Webmaster Tools [...]
[...] to Know Local SEO – Search Engine Watch Using Images For Local SEO – Search Engine Land Making Geotargeted Content Findable For the Right Searchers – Nine by Blue Guide to geotargeting – Blog storm Building links for geo-targeting – Search Engine [...]
[...] will the search engine bots see and index the geotargeted content? A very good question for Vanessa Fox to answer for [...]
[...] – Hosting Location Quoting Vanessa Fox: For domains that are not country-specific (such as .com or .tv), search engines use the geographic [...]
[...] Making Geotargeted Content Findable For the Right Searchers [...]
[...] the UK in results. But for top level domains that aren’t restricted to a particular country, Google uses other signals, such as the location of the server in determining what country a site is most relevant [...]