Multiple geographic targeting in Europe

[zeropointlabs]

I have a site that is applicable to German speaking people in central europe. If I were to geotarget the site in google webmaster tools to Germany, would that prevent users in Switzerland or Austria seeing the site in their search results.

[RobertFisher]

Daniel,

It will not prevent the site/page from showing in SERPs for Switzerland or Austria. But, it will likely limit how often that happens. So, if you want to be sure people see the result in any of the countries where German is more prevalent as a language  do not use the geo targeting.

If you can give us more details re the site (generic or cc tld, more than one language on the site, etc.) we can probably give you better assistance.

Best

[MoosaHemani]

I agrre with Robert, It will not prevent sites from showing is SERPs for other locations but it will definatly goingto give more importance to the geographic area you have defined.

If you have other site for other geographic locations so you can send them to the targeted website by tracking their IP address (not sure how SEO effective it will be).

Hope this helps!

[zeropointlabs]

I'm using a .de domain, so google does the geo targeting by default. I have several region specific sites that have a high degree of content overlap, so I use <link rel="alternate" tags to prevent duplicate content issues. I also do ip based redirections so users are sent to the most relevant site.

the urls in question are

http://fiik.com (this only does the ip based redirection)
http://fiikelectric skateboards.com - USA
http://fiikelectric skateboards.com.au - Australia
http://fiikelectric skateboards.co.uk - UK and english speakers in europe
http://fiikelectric skateboards.de - Central Europe, German speakers, not built yet

maybe the best approach would be to use a .com or .eu domain, so geotargetting isn't forced, the rely on the <link rel="alternate" tags to do language based targeting.