This week, Rand talks about a topic that has been very prominent in the Q&A lately: geolocation. He talks about what the engines look for when trying to locate where your site is located, and offers some advice on how to optimize your site for your location.
P.S. Just a FYI, since Scott is leaving for a well deserved vacation for the next 3 weeks, I’ll be handling the Whiteboard Friday duties.
UPDATE from Rand: I figured folks might want a printed list of the factors that influence geo-location identification from the engines, so I’ve placed that below:
- Language
- Domain Extension (e.g. .com.au, .co.uk, .fr, .de, .nl)
- Host IP Address (you can try using the IP Location Lookup Tool for that data)
- Registration with Local Search Engines (Here’s Google’s, Yahoo!’s & Live/MSN’s)
- Link Sources (if lots of links point to you from domains in a particular country, that data may be taken into account)
- On-page address data (placing your physical business address in the HTML on the page)
