Tell Google Your Geo-Target

It’s now possible to tell Google where your target audience is geo located (see here and here for info). For those of us who like to purchase inexpensive .coms and hosting from the States but whose target audience is the UK this is a useful facility.

For example, you’ll now be able to buy expatsinsunnyspain.com from someone like godaddy for about £5, host it on a server with a USA IP address but indicate to google that your target audience is Spain.

If your domain is already country specific (.co.uk .fr .ie etc) then whilst you can’t set the country for such a ccTLD you can further refine to a city/town/street address/post code. I suppose this could be useful if you had a local photography club, church, village take-away, whatever and wanted to define it’s physical location. If you are a local business you should be listed in the local business centre too.

I see that you can undo any geo-targetting preferences that you set, though presumably any intial and subsequent changes take time to filter through the system.

I’m going to use the facility for my running blog (which is a .com, hosted on USA servers) to start with as a test.

I’m not aware of any similar geo-targetting facilities from yahoo or msn, so consider that before you go on a .com spending spree!