Geotargeting

Geo-targeting in Search Console indicates to Google that a page is more relevant for a specific country, and it may rank higher for local search queries, not that it will be removed for other countries.

Other than the US, Google only crawls from a handful of other countries. If you block US IP addresses you’re probably blocking Googlebot, but you can test this with Fetch & Render or by checking log files. John recommends having at least some content accessible from the US, so that Googlebot and US users can go to your site.

Google does use words in URLs if there is anything useful there, but this is a relatively small factor compared to content on the page. However, Google does pick up country and language codes that they think are relevant to identify different versions of a page.

If content served varies dependent on location then John recommends having a shared content block across all variations as Google primarily crawls from IP addresses geo-located to San Francisco.

It is common for ranking fluctuations to exist from country to country because of differences in the level of competition for these queries. You may consider splitting your site into individual country versions, using subdomains or subdirectories, if you have content specific to users in different countries. The target country for individual content can then be specified in GSC.

Unlisted setting used in Search Console explicitly says to use geo-targeting on the site. John recommends using this setting if a domain was previously highly focused on a particular country and you want to change it to have an international or global focus.

Google will promote ccTLDs for that specific country but you can’t set up geo-targeting for other countries outside of that ccTLD.

Geo-targeting is based on user’s location, so this will be overridden if Google recognises you�۪re looking for something in a different country.

Googlebot should see the same redirects the same as normal users, so automatic redirects to a different geographic site should be avoided. Google only recommends a redirect from a generic page to a specific geographic site, or a pop-up to suggest a different geographic site to the one being used.

Regional domains which don’t targe specific countries, such as .berlin, will be treated as top-level domains and won’t have any geographic targeting applied.