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Targeting Countries

Submitted by Rocket32 on Tue, 2013-08-06 01:00 in

Is there a way to geo target specific countries within the header or robot.txt file to inform search engines of target visitor's location? Example is a server in one country targeting visitors in a different country. If top level domain(TLD) is a .com, it can be located in any country.

Submitted by support on Tue, 2013-08-06 08:12

Hi Rocket32,

Google have quite a detailed Internationalisation FAQ which talks about TLD, server location etc. much of which will be generic advice relevant to all search engines; but specifically they link to a Webmaster Tools help article which indicates that you can set the target country of any website added to your GWT account which will override the physical location of the server....

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

It may also be worth including a regionalised language attribute if there is one specific to the country being targeted, which according to a brief search Bing may make use of, for example:

<html lang='en-GB'>

...for a website targeting but not hosted in the UK.

There is a list of language tags (en in the above) here:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_language_codes.asp

And a list of region subtags (GB in the above) here:

http://rishida.net/utils/subtags/index.php?list=7&submit=List

Once you have an appropriate combination you can use the validator at the top of the above page to check that it's valid...

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
David.
--
PriceTapestry.com

Submitted by Rocket32 on Tue, 2013-08-06 22:51

Thanks David. Great Information.