Posted by Ríona MacNamara, Webmaster Tools Team

The Set Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools lets you associate your site with a specific region. We've heard a lot of questions from webmasters about how to use the tool, and here Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa explains how it works and when to use it.

The http://www.google.ca/ example in the video is a little hard to see, so here's a screenshot:

Want to know more about setting a geographic target for your site? Check out our Help Center. And if you like this video, you can see more on our Webmaster Tools playlist on YouTube.

Written by Amanda Camp, Webmaster Tools and Trystan Upstill, International Search Quality Team

Starting today Google Webmaster Tools helps you better control the country association of your content on a per-domain, per-subdomain, or per-directory level. The information you give us will help us determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improves our search results for geographic queries.

We currently only allow you to associate your site with a single country and location. If your site is relevant to an even more specific area, such as a particular state or region, feel free to tell us that. Or let us know if your site isn't relevant to any particular geographic location at all. If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, we'll continue to make geographic associations largely based on the top-level domain (e.g. .co.uk or .ca) and the IP of the webserver from which the context was served.

For example, if we wanted to associate www.google.com with Hungary:


But you don't want www.google.com/webmasters/tools" associated with any country...


This feature is restricted for sites with a country code top level domain, as we'll always associate that site with the country domain. (For example, google.ru will always be the version of Google associated with Russia.)


Note that in the same way that Google may show your business address if you register your brick-and-mortar business with the Google Local Business Center, we may show the information that you give us publicly.

This feature was largely initiated by your feedback, so thanks for the great suggestion. Google is always committed towards helping more sites and users get better and more relevant results. This is a new step as we continue to think about how to improve searches around the world.

We encourage you to tell us what you think in the Webmaster Tools section of our discussion group.

Written by Trevor Foucher, Webmaster Tools Team

I'm happy to announce that Webmaster Tools is expanding support for webmasters outside of the English-speaking world, by supporting Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). IDNA provides a way for site owners to have domains that go beyond the domain name system's limitations of English letters and numbers. Prior to IDNA, Internet host names could only be in the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the numbers 0-9, and the hyphen character. With IDNA support, you'll now be able to add your sites that use other character sets, and organize them easily on your Webmaster Tools Dashboard.

Let's say you wanted to add http://北京大学.cn/ (Peking University) to your Webmaster Tools account before we launched IDNA support. If you typed that in to the "Add Site" box, you'd get back an error message that looks like this:



Some webmasters discovered a workaround. Internally, IDNA converts nicely encoded http://北京大学.cn/ to a format called Punycode, which looks like http://xn--1lq90ic7fzpc.cn/. This allowed them to diagnose and view information about their site, but it looked pretty ugly. Also, if they had more than one IDNA site, you can imagine it would be pretty hard to tell them apart.



Since we now support IDNA throughout Webmaster Tools, all you need to do is type in the name of your site, and we will add it correctly. Here is what it looks like if you attempt to add http://北京大学.cn/ to your account:



If you are one of the webmasters who discovered the workaround previously (i.e., you have had sites listed in your account that look like http://xn--1lq90ic7fzpc.cn/), those sites will now automatically display correctly.

We'd love to hear your questions and feedback on this new feature; you can write a comment below or post in the Google Webmaster Tools section of our Webmaster Help Group. We'd also appreciate suggestions for other ways we can improve our international support.

In 2006 we ramped up on international webmaster issues and particularly tried to support Eastern Europe. We opened several offices in the region, improved our algorithms with respect to these languages, and localized many of our products. Should I find only one word to describe these markets, I would say they are diverse. Still, they have two things in common: their online markets are currently in a developing phase and a high number of webmasters and search engine optimizers work there in a variety of languages. We are aware that a certain amount of webspam is generated in this region and we would like to reinforce that we have been working hard to take action on it both algorithmically and manually. Since I have seen some common phenomena in a bunch of these markets, here are a couple of suggestions for Eastern European webmasters and SEOs:

• Avoid link exchanges. If a fellow webmaster approaches you with some sketchy offer, just refuse. Instead, work on the content of your site. Once you have the quality content, you can use the buzzing blogger community and social web services in your language to get nice linkbaits. Creating good content for your language community will pay off. Help the high-quality people in your language community and they will re-power you.
• Use regional and geographical domains in line with their purpose. First, a sidenote for the Western webmasters: some Eastern European countries like Poland and Russia have so-called regional or geographical domains. Imagine that all the states in the U.S. had their official second level domain and if you wanted to open your webshop delivering to Kentucky, you could do it cheap or for free on eg. ky.us. This could help Google serve geographically relevant search results. In case you wish to sell organic soaps to people in Szczecin, do open your webshop on szczecin.pl. If you are from Kalmykia and would like to show the world the beauty of your area, go ahead and set up your Kalmyki travel site on kalmykia.ru. If you like a region, support it by hosting your site on the related regional or geographical domain. Be aware that webspam on these regional domains violates the correct use of them and prevents the development of your country's web culture.
• Say no to Cybersquats! Sneaky registering of strong online brands with Belarusian, Estonian or Slovak top level domains is just bad. While it will not particularly help you boost the ranking of your site, cybersquatting often has created disappointed users and legal actions as side effects.
• Think long-term. You have your share of responsibility for the development of your market. Creating quality sites that target users who search for highly specific content in your particular language will help you get your market into a more mature status -- and mature markets mean mature publisher revenue too.

When a searcher enters a query that includes a word with accented characters, our algorithms consider web pages that contain versions of that word both with and without the accent. For instance, if a searcher enters [México], we'll return results for pages about both "Mexico" and "México."



Conversely, if a searcher enters a query without using accented characters, but a word in that query could be spelled with them, our algorithms consider web pages with both the accented and non-accented versions of the word. So if a searcher enters [Mexico], we'll return results for pages about both "Mexico" and "México."



How the searcher's interface language comes into play
The searcher's interface language is taken into account during this process. For instance, the set of accented characters that are treated as equivalent to non-accented characters varies based on the searcher's interface language, as language-level rules for accenting differ.

Also, documents in the chosen interface language tend to be considered more relevant. If a searcher's interface language is English, our algorithms assume that the queries are in English and that the searcher prefers English language documents returned.

This means that the search results for the same query can vary depending on the language interface of the searcher. They can also vary depending on the location of the searcher (which is based on IP address) and if the searcher chooses to see results only from the specified language. If the searcher has personalized search enabled, that will also influence the search results.

The example below illustrates the results returned when a searcher queries [Mexico] with the interface language set to Spanish.



Note that when the interface language is set to Spanish, more results with accented characters are returned, even though the query didn't include the accented character.

How to restrict search results
To obtain search results for only a specific version of the word (with or without accented characters), you can place a + before the word. For instance, the search [+Mexico] returns only pages about "Mexico" (and not "México"). The search [+México] returns only pages about "México" and not "Mexico." Note that you may see some search results that don't appear to use the version of word you specified in your query, but that version of the word may appear within the content of the page or in anchor text to the page, rather than in the title or description listed in the results. (You can see the top anchor text used to link to your site by choosing Statistics > Page analysis in webmaster tools.)

The example below illustrates the results returned when a searcher queries [+Mexico].