Geographic targeting tools is a nice idea, BUT...
Take the following case. Our company resent pick up the SEO work for a
UK magazine.
The geographic targeting tool had already set it's-self based on the
TLD which was incorrect for the client.
The tools can not be amended to correct this error, which makes it no
help at all.
I can see if you are starting from the ground up on a new site then
you have the chance to effect the geographic area's but if like us you
are handed an older established site you have no chance.

You view on this.

Hi Yoburd and welcome to the groups!

If a site is being hosted with a country-code top level domain, we
generally take that as a really strong signal that this is the country
the site is targeting. In some cases, a website opts to (mis-)use a
ccTLD because it either "looks neat" or was the only one available.
That might be fine if a user already knows about the site (in which
case they wouldn't have to search for it anyway :-)), but otherwise it
could really be confusing. If I am looking for a local plumber and see
a result with a ccTLD that is not from my area, that would be
something which I personally would generally not look at -- it would
be a bad result for me personally.

It's different with generic top level domains such as .com, .net and
even .eu and .asia. These domains are not tied to any particular
country and you can set geographic targeting for them.

Hope it helps!
John

An interesting one, but I tried to respond to this last night using my
itouch - couln't submit my post :(

While that explanation is a great one, I wonder why when I go to
google.ie and search for many long tail phrases that almost the entire
result set is .co.uk's?  Yes I'm 'searching the web', but then surely
I'd get .com's etc.  Showing a whole bunch of UK sites to Irish
searchers is less than optimal.  When I select 'pages from Ireland' I
do get a good result set, so this isn't caused by lack of Irish
content on the subject.

Sorry for the hijack yoburd - but what I was trying to post last night
was a comment that without at least the TLD of your site no one can
really help you.

Rgds
Richard

On May 15, 11:13 pm, JohnMu wrote: