How to do Country specific indexing ?

[ozil]

We are a business that operate in South East Asian countries and have medical professionals listed in Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia.

When I go to Google Philippines and check I can see indexing of pages from all countries and no Philippines pages. Philippines is where we launched recently. How can I tell Google Philippines to give more priority to pages from Philippines and not from other countries

Can someone help?

[TomRayner]

I would set up a new profile for your Philippines pages in Google Webmaster Tools.

Whether you're on a country sub-domain and sub-directory structure (ph.example.com or example.com/ph/) won't matter - you can set up a new profile in WMT.  Go to WMT and add a new site, then enter the URL for the Philippines part of your site.

Once this is done, you can then instruct Google that those pages in your subdomain/directory are targeting Filipinos.  From the International Targeting section, choose the Country tab - then Check the Geographic target checkbox and choose your country target.

Hope this helps.

[SajeetNair]

I would also suggest that you add alternate language tags (in the HTML code as well as the XML Sitemap).

This would avoid any duplicate content issues that might arise due to different country websites.

The instructions for alternate language tags can be found here.

Thanks,
Sajeet

[ozil]

Thanks. But the content in each country is different

[ozil]

Thanks Tom. This was really helpful. I will try to set up WMT for each country as you suggested

[gfiorelli1]

The use of the hreflang can be useful anyway, especially from Brand searches (aka: "name of the brand" as search term), because in that case you can see your "local country" web site outranked by your most powerful one despite of the geotargeting you have set up in GWT.