Setting Your Website Geo-Location

The major search engines maintain separate sites for individual countries or geographic regions. These localized search engines allow users to restrict their search results to websites that reside within their own country. But most webmasters are not aware that even normal world-wide searches are biased by geographic location - a technique often referred to in marketing circles as "geo-location". The underlying premise is that the closer a website is to the user, the more relevant it is to that user. Naturally, website owners need to insure that the search engines are aware of their site's true geographic location. But how do you accomplish this?

The answer is really very simple. The major search engines - Google, Yahoo!, and MSN - use two common criteria for determining where a site is located (ie. it's geo-location). The first is to check the Top Level Domain (TLD) name. If your site has a Country Code Top Level Domain Name - that is, a domain name that ends in a country code like ".ca" for Canada, ".uk" for the United Kingdom, or ".fr" for France - then your site will be included in the country-specific search results. The second method used by the search engines to determine the geographic location of a website is the IP address of the site. If your site is hosted on a server that is physically located in the target country, then that site will be included in the country-specific searches even if you have a generic TLD domain name like ".com", ".net" or ".info".

What does all of this mean to the small website owner? It means that if you buy a Country Code TLD domain name, you can have your site hosted anywhere in the world and still be automatically considered to have a geo-location in your target country. Until recently, web hosting was very expensive in many countries outside the US. Its still easier to find cheap hosting in the US than elsewhere. This leads many small companies to buy hosting services in the US. The requirements for getting a country-code TLD domain name, if any, are usually limited to a residency or relevance requirement that is easily met. The WikiPedia has excellent links to all of this information for each Country Code Top Level Domain that include the governing registrar, the second-level domains, and the usual requirements. See the above link.

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Google has enhanced the Webmaster Tools console to allow you to select the geo-location of your site. In fact, Google has gone several steps futher than simply setting the country for a website. You can now set the exact location in conjunction with Google Maps, and have different geo-location settings for subdomains and subdirectories within a single domain.

To set your website's geo-location in Google, log into the Google Webmaster Tools console and select the Tools tab. Choose the "Set geographic target" option and you'll see a form that you can fill in with your website's target location. Once you've done that, you can also add your website to Google Maps. This is another important reason why you should definitely participate in the Google Webmaster Tools program. See the Google Webmaster Blog Video on this subject for details on using the Geographic Target tool.

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If you're a non-US website owner and you've already bought hosting service in the US and (for one reason or another) a generic TLD domain name (ie. ".com" or ".net" etc.) all is not lost. You can always buy a Country Code Top Level Domain Name, and move your site to the new domain by installing a server code 301 redirect for all requests for your old domain name. This will preserve most of your old domain name's search engine rankings by transferring the link popularity (a.k.a. PageRank). There will be a period of weeks (or, sadly, months) during which the rankings of your site will be reduced while the search engines absorb the change of domain name. Once the new domain name has replaced the original domain name in the search engines, you should also request that your link partners to change their links to your new domain name to insure the long-term benefits of those links.

Its also very useful to examine pages like Google's Country-Specific Search Advice to see how they advise users to do country-specific searches. Checking the search engines' online documentation can lead you to a much better understanding of how search engines operate, as well as how actual users do their searching. And Google's Matt Cutts has posted a good video on this topic on Google Webmaster Videos.