Quick Google Webmaster Tools tip

[asg]

Hey guys.

I discovered a small tip the other day. In Google Webmaster Tools there's an option that asks you if there's a country you'd like to target with your site. At first I thought "well, maybe this is going to improve my ranking on that country's Google page, so let's activate it for France" (since it's my targeted area).

A few weeks later I was #4 on Google.fr, but if I searched for my site on other french speaking Google pages (Canada, Switzerland, etc.), I was only on page #2, and besides my site was a small note saying "- France".

I decided to try to deactivate the option to see if I was going to drop on Google.fr or climb on other Google pages. And to my surprise I did reach #4 on all Google pages I've tried so far. Which led to a 100% increase of traffic the first day the new setting was applied by Google!

So maybe it's a known tip but I thought I had to share it with the community! Tell me if it works for you if you had clicked this option. Or maybe I'm the only one who thought it was a good idea to activate it :P

[Cyber Rankings]

Great tip for all the new people to SEO, I would also recommend setting it only if your targetting a specific country. However this option is not available for country specific domains i.e. .co.uk so it's something you may want to be aware of.

[doti04]

If I activate this option for United States will this effect on my sites ranking on search result?

[Cyber Rankings]

Originally Posted by doti04

If I activate this option for United States will this effect on my sites ranking on search result?

It depends on your website and how it's optimized. For example if your site is in french and you aim it at the USA then it's not really going to work. However if you have a .com website and the content is in english then yes from my experience it helps quite a lot. But remember that the rankings in other search engines could fall slightly because of it.

One test to do before you make a decision is go into Google's keyword tool and find out how much of the traffic from your target keywords is from the USA. If it's over %85 i would recommend doing it.

I have a website about **** and over %95 of the searches are from the UK so obviously i switched it to target UK users. After around 6 days I went from #8 to #2. However it's not a totally fair testing as I am always building links to my sites so it could be that a few powerful backlinks where found the day I changed it.

Also if your searches contain something like "Free iPad USA" then i would highly recommend targetting the USA as Google looks for websites with this in place when such searches are performed.

Note: this is from my experience I do not work for Google

[asg]

From my experience I don't think activating the option results in a better positioning. Instead it seems Google lets your site be where it should on the targeted area you specified, but lowers your position in other countries (because the algorithm thinks your site is going to be less useful to these people). I would activate it only for a specific area targeted search, this way maybe I'd get less traffic but a better conversion rate.

[dame016]

May I ask how do you guys activate this option? I'm visiting the Webmaster Tools Page but I can't see where should I change this option.

[dphotoguy]

Nice tip! I was always wondering what exactly that option in Webmaster Tools would do and you clarified it

[xxxJamesxxx]

I noticed it about 8 months ago but never bothered playing around with it as I thought it may screw my rankings up.

Thanks for the intel!

James Scholes