Website "A Record" in DNS - Geotargetting

[bjs2010]

Hi,

Our online shop is hosted with a French IP address. It is available in English and Spanish.

I have noticed, as to be expected, that we get quite a few french visitors, probably related to our IP address Google must think its geo related.

We don't want to particularly target any specific country, but more so english and spanish speakers.

Can you have various A records around the world to help with this? Any suggestions or things I could look into??

thanks

[matbennett]

Your A records are served up by DNS servers around the web.  There is no conditional rules in the system that can say "for france resolve www.mydomain to ip#1 and for spain resolve the same to ip#2".

You can have es.mydomain pointing to 1 ip and fr.mydomain to another of course. I don't think that is what you mean though.

[DiTomaso]

What did you set as the geographic target in Google Webmaster Tools?

[bjs2010]

Well that's the thing... Nothing, because we dont wish to particularly target any specific country...

[DiTomaso]

Then perhaps it's your hosting location but likely also the geographic location of any inbound links. Do you happen to have a lot of links from French sources?

[bjs2010]

OK - so if I Geotarget UK via webmaster tools, will that exclude a lot of other countries??

We dont have a lot of links from France no...

[DiTomaso]

From the mouth of Google: "setting a geographic target won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country". So if your users in the UK say "return UK sites only" then you likely wouldn't be shown unless you change your behaviour. And that depends on how users in your target country search, which I don't know enough about for the UK.