New Region Tags in Google SERPs

[Receptional Andy]

Announced [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com] on the Google blog today:

Country-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan. However, for certain top level domains like .com, .info and .org, it's not as easy to figure out the location. That's why today we're adding region information supplied by webmasters to the green address line on some Google search results.

Similar tags have been present on region-targeted Adwords for some time, so it will be interesting to see what effect (if any) the appearance of the tag will have. Google are certainly drawing more attention to the snippets and "green line" in SERPs recently.

[engine]

Another requirement for GWT!

[internetheaven]

Another requirement for GWT!

It's a great plan by Google, really. Finding it difficult to control spam and find the patterns amongst sites Google came up with the idea of WMT to "help" webmasters ... and then slowly make it a requirement. All the site data, bug control and pattern checking done for them. Genius.

[rmjvol]

It's only when the result is from a different country than the search (Canadian site from US based search was the example) so most results in most industries aren't affected. I'd expect this won't make a big difference until they try to add this for smaller geo regions like city/state.

[idolw]

so how will global sites offering widgets worldwide to worldwide customers be shown in [city widgets] SERPs?

[ronin]

So... the internet removes geography enabling small businesses to be local in many locations across the planet simultaneously... and then Google re-introduces geography, so that the historical town-guide book-seller from Chicago who has Quebec City optimised pages for selling guides to those visiting Quebec City then appears in the SERPS with a big CHICAGO next to the entry, making it appear much less relevant?

Or am I missing something?

[piatkow]

What the **** has the location of the site got to do with anything. I know of several small music venues in England using a hosting service in Vancouver.

Or am I missing the same thing as ronin?

[rainborick]

The premise is that the closer a site is to the search engine user, the more likely it is to be relevant to the user's query. It's been an important ranking factor on all of the major search engines for several years.

The change being discussed here is that, for at least some searches, Google adds a region tag or label to results when the site's Geographic Target setting is available from WMT and that setting differs from the origin of the search. It's essentially providing a location clue for SERP entries from generic TLDs. If you have a generic TLD and you haven't set a Geographic Target, listings from your site won't be affected by this change.