You can tell Google to Set Geographic Location of your Site!

It seems Google Webmaster Team is on the roll with some very remarkable updates. In my last post about Google Webmaster Tools, I have announced a very useful updated about sitelinks, code search sitemap and historical keyword data. Well, they are back with another update - Now it is possible to tell Google to associate your site with a specific country. This will help sites in the niche market fighting for Local Share. This country specific control can be applied to a domain, a sub-domain or a particular directory on your site.

The location can be set in Google Webmaster >> Tools >> Set Geographic Target. If the site is targeted towards specific state or region within the country then its possible to set this state or region as well. If the geographic target is not set, Google will determine the location through two different ways:

1. Google can determine the geographic location of the site through its domain, e.g. domainname.ru would be considered a Russian site.
2. Google considers the country where the site is hosted to determine the location of the site through IP, e.g. if your site is hosted in Canada, it will be given preference in Google.ca.

More Reading: The official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Tags: Google-Webmaster-Central, Set Geographic Location

Google Webmaster Central Updates With Some Great Features!

Google Webmaster Central was updated last week with some pretty new features. The update was needed in order to give more information to webmasters and site owners. Now here is the new features that were rolled out.

Webmasters always wondered how Google can show different sitelinks under some of the websites results. It was for sure that Google was showing this sitelinks for Authority sites only and webmasters guessed that Google would decide which links to show.

Now Webmasters have control on what links to show under the sitelinks. This will facilitate the site owners to decide which links are more important and which links can be shown to visitors in the search engine.

The other functionality that has been added is the inclusion of Code Search Sitemaps. It is possible now to submit the sitemap specific to Public Source Code that is hosted on your site. Isn’t it cool to have all your pages indexed and rank in Code Search??

The Top Search Queries Section under the heading Statistics in Webmaster Tools now can show you the old data. It is highly possible that your site content changes and you rank for new keywords that has not been targeted before. So now you can compare your performance with old keywords and decide which keywords would fetch you more traffic. The data can be downloaded as well.

More Information: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog