How To Geo-Target Your .com Site With Google Webmaster Tools

I don’t know about you, but I have often been asked the question about the best method to geo-target content to different countries or regions. Most of the time it comes down to either use country specific TLDs, or create subdomains and set a geo preference in the Google Webmaster Tools console, and as a third alternative, we can always use sub-folders in a similar fashion to the subdomain method.

Susan Moskwa from the Google Webmaster Tools team has published a very informative video about the using the Set Geographic Target function in the webmaster tool to geo-target subdomains and sub-folders to different regions. There are many people who do not know that you could geo-target sub-folders, and basically all you need to do is to add and set the geo-targeted location for each sub-folders after you have authenticated the top domain.

Susan also raised a very good point about using the physical locations rather than languages for geo-targeting, as you might miss out about other countries that use the same language.

I have recently bumped into a similar problem, as one of my projects required me to SEO websites with Chinese content. As most people already know, there are two different Chinese written character sets - traditional and simplified (do not mistaken these two with the two main Chinese spoken language - Mandarin and Cantonese), and the problem gets more complicated when many countries, including China, support both character sets.

The question I was asked immediately was how should we structure our sites with similar content to target multiple countries in both language sets. I’m not going to disclose the final decision here, but I could assure you that it took many weeks of debate and discussions between the developers, management, content team and SEO team to finally come up with a solution.

There isn’t really a one-size-fits-all solution to this dilemma, and each method has its own pros and cons as well. Regardless of which solution you want to go with, you definitely need to make sure you really want to geo-target the domain, as it could take awhile to get it off Google’s record.