
Published: Dec 02, 2008 - 10:43 pm
Story Found By: MattMcGee 4428 Days ago
Category: SEO

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Comments
Targetting content to individual geographic locations can result in significant dividends when aimed at countries with high internet saturation.
So what about the Geo location settings in Google Webmaster Tools setting? Will Google honour your settings or is it better to send users to a local server using IP-targetting?
Taco, youre asking two different questions:-Will Google honor the geographic location setting in webmaster tools, regardless of the location of the server? Yes, if you have a non-country specific TLD such as a .com and you set a country in webmaster tools, Google will use that country setting (so if your server is in Italy, but you set webmaster tools to Germany, then Google will associate the site with Germany).-Should use send users to a "local" server using IP targeting? I generally dont recommend this other than for load balancing reasons (and in that case, youd have one URL and a single set of content; youd just be routing the traffic to different servers to improve performance). I talk about IP targeting a bit in the article. If youre automatically detecting the users location andsending them to a country or language-specific site, you should at the very least provide a link to other content. That way, users who end up in the wrong place can find the right place, and search engines will be able to access the other locations. And if you do this, you need to make sure that each location is a distinct URL. Dont change the content (for instance, provide the content in a different language) and keep the URL the same.