New Region Tags For .com, .net TLDs

Writing by Nick Stamoulis ShareThis

Google announced on Dec. 1 that it had added a new region tag to top-level domains where a website’s location could not be discerned by a title tag or snippet and where the country code isn’t a clue. In other words, for .com, .net and .org TLDs.

Why would Google do that? Obviously, it’s because things can get confusing if you are looking for a specific result and you know where an organization is located, but you don’t know its URL. You perform your search and the results do not give you the clues you need to find what you want. Google’s example can be found on the official Webmaster Central Blog.

I think this is going to be a helpful tag and if you want to give away your location to help searchers find you more easily, all you need to do is log in to Webmaster Tools, click on Site Configuration – Settings – Geographic Target. Choose a country or region to associate with your site and your region tag will appear when appropriate.

My only concern with this is will you get pigeonholed into that region? Will, at some point, Google decide to show your website only to people searching from that region or will your site still be available globally? I hope the latter. I’d hate to see people’s businesses fall off because a search engine decided that because you are located in South Africa your site should only be seen by South Africans. That would be bad of that business conducted business throughout the world.