Andy Atkins Kruger of Webcertain, gave a whistlestop tour at ISS London of which signals matter for international search.
His toolbox would, broadly, include: local domains; ccTLD; webmaster tools; server location; sitemaps; alternate hreflang and canonicals; and signals such as currency and links. (The meta language tag is, he noted, now defunct.)
Last week at SES San Francisco State of Search talked to experts in the field about their experiences with differences in geolocation, local search and international search. We saw talks with Jonathan Allen and Brett Tabke already and now we are going to listen to Simon Heseltine of AOL. An Englishman who has been living in the States for many years now. What is his view on the matter?
As you may have noticed, Geo-targeting is ‘hot’. We talked about the new Linkdex functionality recently and last week at SES San Francisco it was a much discussed topic as well. But there is more!
Ask any international search marketer what they find most challenging about international SEO, and there’s a good chance they’ll say geo-targeting. Deciding between local domains or subdomains, choosing local hosting or not, managing duplication issues across languages – the list goes on. Google attempted to alleviate some of the geo-targeting pain by introducing the hreflang tag to improve the targeting of international websites and ensure users are presented with their local version – yet for many it has proved confusing and complex. (more…)
When websites try to determine a user’s geographic location, this is usually done via the user’s IP address. In theory an IP address can be related to a physical location. This is how Google determines a user’s location in Analytics and Adwords – and even search – and Facebook in Insights.
It seems the accepted wisdom is that while IP address geolocation is not perfect, it’s mostly accurate. Estimates reach from 60% accuracy all the way up to 95% accurate. The problem is that the actual accuracy of IP geotargeting is nowhere near that. (more…)
Working with websites that targets several countries is always challenging, especially from an SEO point of view, people just don’t seem to get that doing SEO in different countries goes way beyond different languages. I would go as far as to say there are probably more website struggling with geo targeting issues in one form or another than it is websites that are all ok and ranking in all the relevant countries they are targeting.
If you can imagine that the different Google TLD’s are people, you have Francois (Google.fr), Ingrid (Google.no), Helmut (Google.de) and so on. They all want to rank the most relevant websites highly in their relevant countries. How do they do that? Well, they need to find a way to separate the listings, making sure that a website selling iPhones but only to Helmut’s friends doesn’t end up on Ingrid’s list. (more…)
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