Google says that Search Console geolocation can injury website positioning

Using The international targeting function of the Google Search Console, also known as “geotargeting,” can negatively affect your SEO Strategy, according to Google itself.

According to the giant search engine, the tool can hurt your website’s search ranking if your goal is to reach a large audience of viewers.

This statement was made by Google Search Advocate John Mueller during a last meeting point during Google SEO office hours while answering a question from viewers.

What does that mean anyway? And what do you, as a marketer, have to do to keep your SEO strategies from being harmed?

Follow me, I’ll explain it to you.

First, let’s understand the case …

During the hangout, an SEO analyst in charge of a major financial news portal based in Pakistan – but with global content – raised a topic relevant to Internet internationalization strategies.

Although the portal had good Google ranking potential and published exclusive firsthand content, as soon as other smaller websites with less ranking potential started republishing the same content, it lost space between the first few search rankings.

“We’ll have a story. We’ll be the exclusive, the first, the whole e-thing will be trustworthy, we will rank very high. And as soon as other websites post the same story, even if they turn our attitude, they suddenly start higher and we instantly disappear into oblivion. My job is to improve the SEO and the editors are frustrated. “

According to the SEO analyst, this happens even if the smaller pages in question correctly refer to their portal in reposts.

Why is that happend?

After examining the website and ruling out problems that could affect the portal’s higher rankings in search engines, Mueller concluded that the cause could be in the settings for international targeting in the Google Search Console.

And what is the purpose of geotargeting the Google Search Console?

Before we talk about how geolocation can negatively affect your SEO strategy, we need to remember what this feature is supposed to do.

Basically, the tool allows you to show local customers from a specific country or region the correct version of a website. For example, if you have an online store and only sell to customers in the United States, that region will be defined as the store’s country of destination.

When someone interested in your product searches for stores in the US or uses Google’s “Near Me” feature, search engines return results from websites with domains specific to the buyer’s country or region.

How international alignment can damage your business strategy

After digging deeper into the landing page during the hangout, Mueller found that the geolocation settings of the website in Search Console were configured for Pakistan.

In other words, Pakistan was defined in the tool as the target country for the site. This has a direct impact on its ranking in search engines in other countries and affects its reach.

According to Müller:

“When it comes to searching, if you want to address countries other than Pakistan, e. B. an English news site, then I would definitely disable it. Because that can have an effect because it really focuses on Pakistan and then a little less on other countries. “

In other words: if you want to reach a worldwide audience with your website, it is important to pay attention to the settings in the Search Console and to deactivate the targeting.

That way, your site will be able to reach a more general audience with more views and better search engine rankings, like the “sister site” of the example that brought up Google’s Hangout.

When should international targeting be used?

The answer to that question is: it depends.

Enable International orientation of the Google Search Console, you need to evaluate your current business strategy.

If you want to invest in a more local reach of your website, for example in virtual stores that only serve a certain region, enabling segmentation for your strategy makes a lot of sense and helps to better segment and qualify your customers.

If you focus on a more global reach, e.g. For example, on websites with worldwide news, you should turn off targeting in Search Console. In this way, you can reach audiences all over the world with your website, which enables greater reach and better positioning on search pages.

There’s no rule or cake recipe – review your SEO strategy and choose the option that makes the most sense for your business.

So which strategy works best for you? If you want to understand better Content internationalization and how Google sees it, I strongly recommend that you read this article as well.