News Source: http://searchengineland.com
Published: Oct 31, 2007 - 05:13 am
Story Found By: planetc1 1665 Days ago
Category: SEO
I’m loving everything Google and others are doing to improve local search, and I’m surprised so few are as excited about it as I am.
14 Comments
Comments
I’m really impressed that Google’s heard the voices regarding this feature... I can’t count how many times I’ve seen it on a "wishlist".
Here here ... very much needed, though I can see in some cases why advertisers might want to opt out of completing it.
Great move from Google! Specially for local advertisers definetely favourable. Even greater value if Google would provide a more detailled granularity of geographic definitions - ideally just the Google Maps tool in IP-based local AdWords to draw regions of target deliberately ...
I was a bit surprised to see this article come from Vanessa. I’m glad to see she still has a good relationship with Google and am even happier that her departure didn’t mean a lessened commitment to Google’s relationship with developers. There seem to be a lot of recent changes in Webmaster Tools.
I liked the original title better.
Vanessa’s other comments are here: http://www.vanessafoxnude.com/2007/10/30/google-tell-them-geographic-data/
Thanks for the Article.I tried to update our Site, But it is giving me an error. It says: No such State/Province in this country. Please enter a valid State name (or Province name)I guess i have wait and see
It’s a good feature, especially for sites that have set up the sub-domain structure on a com/net or org. I’d still strongly recommend going with a ccTLD over that set up though as some of the local engines look to the extension for inclusion. There’s also the branding issue, it’s preferably to stick to the country extension and I think this trend will increase in the future (esp as .com availability decreases even further). Good addition though to WMC - the local aspects are especially interesting (by state etc). That’s probably where I would use it.
My apologies. No offense intended with initial title.
The initial title "Vanessa Fox Nude in Washington" was better. Everybody knows Vanessa, but who’s Mr. GoogleLocalized? Never heard of this guy while spreading servers all over the globe to rank where I host ...
My comment about it being the most awesomest ever was both because as Burgo mentioned above, so many people have asked for it for so long and because it was Buffy night so I hypothetically may have had a bit of vodka. Heh.In any case, DrPete, ’course I still have a good relationship with my former team and they definitely are still plowing full steam ahead.
It’s so close - and a "most aweseome" addition to WMC I agree - but it is still not a final solution for global web sites that don’t use subdomains to identify target countries. I hope Google isn’t checking this off the list as complete as there’s still more work to do to provide the most comprehensive country-specific indices.
If you’ve got a .co.uk site that targets people out of the UK you are out of luck - there’s no option to say that you really want to target another country instead.
Has anyone got this to work? I’ve tried it on our taiwan website to get it indexed into the taiwan search engine, but so far it still doesn’t recognise the site to be targeted to taiwan.