How to target nut just one country in webmaster tools?
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Can’t find geo targeting for many countries in webmaster tools?

Can’t find geo targeting for many countries in webmaster tools? - answered by Matt Cutts

Summary:

The problem with including in webmaster tools a feature for multiple country targeting is that there definitely would be some people who will check every single box and saying that their site is relevant for each country in the world. Another reason why such feature exists in AdWords and doesn’t in webmaster tools is that AdWords is a paid service so it should offer higher quality resources.

 

Matt's answer:

 

I can see at least a couple possible answers to that. The answer that I would give you first and foremost is that I always worry whenever you give someone the option to say: “I’m relevant to country A, Country B, Country C, Country D”, all the way down to Country Z, that at some point, they say: “You know what? Yeah, I’m relevant to all those countries. I’m relevant to Chad, I’m relevant to Chile. Tag, you know, show me for every single country”.

 

And, so, at least in the beginning, whether we were talking about having Meta Tags to tell what country you were relevant for, or whether we were talking about targeting something in Webmaster Tools, I at least was a little worried that people would say: “Yes! Click every single checkbox.” Because even on the spam report form, for example, we sometimes see people say: “Yes, I’m going to click every single box- Hidden Text, sure, Cloaking, why not, every single one.” And that’s not the highest-quality of information that you can possibly get.

 

So that’s one big reason is, we wanted to explore, see how it looked, see what the quality of the data looked like, before we started to release the ability where someone could say: “I’m relevant to every country! Show me in Libya, show me ah, in every country in the world!” The other thing to bear in mind is that with AdWords you’re paying for it now, so, a lot of the features that eventually sort of show up in, in webmaster tools, things like delegation, showed up a lot earlier in AdWords,

 

Since you’re paying for AdWords, you expect a higher quality of service

It’s definitely a good feature request. If we could find a way to do it where, it wouldn’t take up a ton of engineering resources, it would improve the quality of the index, and the engineers had the cycles to do it, I would definitely support it, I’d just want to make sure that it wouldn’t result in some sort of spam. But it is a good feature request, we’ll put it on the queue, and thanks for suggesting it.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: