It was just a couple weeks ago that Google confirmed the addition of breadcrumb information in place of URLs for some search results. Today, Google has announced another change to the green URL line: In some cases, “region tags” — geographic information about the web site — will appear next to the URL.
Google shares this example of a boxing club with a fairly common name:
Site owners have some measure of control over the region tag by using the geographic targeting settings in Google’s Webmaster Tools.
When will this geographic information show? Google says only in very specific circumstances:
- only for sites with .com or .net addresses, and never for sites with geographic TLDs such as .br for Brazil
- only when the geographic info supplied by the site owner is different from where the search takes places
Google estimates that only 1% of searches will include results with region tags during this “initial release” of the feature.
Related Topics: Google: Web Search
Surely this could/will have a negative impact on many sites.
I have a site (a .com) who’s content is targeted at both US and UK. At present I have GT set to UK as that’s where I am located and any country specific content will be targeted to UK visitors. According to Google doing this does not affect my US traffic but may help with UK traffic.
Now if US visitors see United Kingdom on their searches that list my site I feel they are quite likely to choose another link over mine as they will feel my content is not appropriate (or not relevant) to them.
If I change my targeting to neutral (ie no GT) then I will likely loose some positioning in the SERPS for my UK traffic.
Any thoughts as I hope I am wrong.
Andy