Does Google Really Listen to Webmasters?
Posted On: 2007-11-05
Oh I know that Google says that it listens to Webmasters but sometimes you have to wonder just how much of what Google says is really just spin and how much is genuine. Let's not forget that Google would still have you believe that it's doing no evil simply because that's been its credo for years.
For a skeptic like me, who has seen Google say one thing and do the complete opposite so many times, it's hard to believe anything that Google says. However last week it seems that evidence did emerge that sometimes Google really does listen to those of us who provide it with all the content that makes it money.
For some time now Google has been hinting that it might be assessing websites and their relevance to searchers based on geographic extension and where they are hosted. For example, someone searching for some local information in the United Kingdom might be shown websites with a .co.uk extension over a site that has just a .com extension simply because Google thinks that a site on a .co.uk domain is more relevant.
Google might place even more relevance in that .co.uk domain if it was hosted in the United Kingdom and so it would rank that site over a similar ... and perhaps even more relevant ... .com domain hosted in the United States.
Now you might think that an approach like that was perfectly fine but in actual fact it didn't take into account the realities of life on the Internet for Webmasters. For a start there was always the problem that in the early days .com domain names were invariably much cheaper than those from other countries; here in Australia for example a .com.au domain name was very very expensive and you could only obtain one if you were a registered business.
Of course those days have gone but many of us have well-established Australian sites sitting on .com domain names. That meant that when Google began considering .com.au names to be a sign of relevance we were going to have a problem.
Then there was the question of where the site was hosted. In many countries the cost of hosting is either much more expensive than in the United States or a whole lot less reliable than in the United States so people made sensible business decisions and hosted in the United States.
When Google started telling people that there was what amounted to a relevancy penalty simply because of where a site was hosted many Webmasters began moving sites away from American hosting and onto hosting in the countries that the sites were targeting. For us that was quite a culture shock and a hit to the hip pocket as well.
Even in the days when the American dollar exchange rate was worth so much more the cost of hosting here in Australia was way more expensive than it was in the United States. The standard of customer service wasn't anywhere near as good either.
However last week everything changed when Google announced that it was now giving Webmasters the chance to tell it what countries sites were targeting. Unfortunately it's not quite as simple as filling in a form in Google's Webmaster Tools and telling Google what country you want a particular site to be considered relevant for.
Instead you need to link your sites with an actual physical address in the country that you're targeting. I'm not sure just how closely Google checks that address for authenticity but I have a suspicion that they probably have some link into Google Maps that allows them to identify it as a real address.
So if you've got some .com domains that should be ranking for searches in some other country then you need to head over to Google's Webmaster Tools and set a geographic target. Whether or not that will give any sites an added boost in the search engine results - if they're already ranking well - remains to be seen and it's something Steve and I will be watching closely.
It would also be nice not to have to move all our clients' .com.au domains off some quality hosting we have for them in the United States. Even now getting the same deal at a reasonable price in Australia with a similar level of customer service is almost impossible so we're very happy that we may not have to make that move.
When you think about it you will also see that it opens up some new linking opportunities within your own sites as well.
So maybe Google might really be listening to Webmasters but it's not something that I expect will happen all that often.