Geolocate or not?

[PLP]

Hello all,

I'm optimising an e-commerce site which is multilingual (English and Arabic at present).  The Arabic content will be on a separate sub-domain to the English.  There is a plan to have French content as well.

My question is whether to geolocate the sites in webmaster tools?  We don't really want to restrict the audience, but would definitely like to have a presence in the listings for google UK, google US and google Saudi Arabia.

Your advice and thought are appreciated as always.

Bilal

[CatalystSEM]

Hello Bilal,

Instead of geo-locating through Google Webmaster Tools,  use "hreflang" to target your website to visitors in a certain region.

The rel="alternate" hreflang="x" annotations will help Google serve the correct language or regional URL to searchers. More information is provided here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 and here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192&topic=2370587&ctx=topic.

Please let me know if this helps.

[PLP]

Catalyst Online,

Thanks for your reply.  I am aware of the tag you are referring to and have planned to implement.

I guess what I'm concerned about is if I don't Geolocate (I'm using a .com, so have the option), how will Google see fit to show my listings?

We were previously on a .co.uk domain and hence had a strong presence in google.co.uk, but not sure what will happen now.

BTW, we notified Webmaster Tools of the domain name change and set-up 301 redirects and we're still getting traffic, but this has only been a couple of days.

Thanks,

Bilal

[Hannah_Smith]

Hi Bilal,

Google will use hreflang to help determine which pages will show and where.

Geo-targeting isn't much use to you in this instance, as you can only geo-target, not language target - so you'd be determining a physicial location (i.e. a country) rather than particular language speakers.

I've never been particularly confident of the geo-targeting option in Google webmaster tools in any case - it didn't seem to make much of a difference to the sites I saw it implemented on.

Hope this helps

Hannah