Google has begun including geographical region information on some search results. The information is used when supplied by webmasters, and appears in the green address line on the results that include it.
“Country-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, “.fr” for France or “.co.jp” for Japan,” explains Google software engineer Piyush Prahladka. “However, for certain top level domains like .com, .info and .org, it’s not as easy to figure out the location.”
“With the new display, you no longer need to refine your search or click through the results to figure out which page is the one you’re looking for,” says Prahladka. “In general, our hope is that these region tags will help searchers more quickly identify which results are most relevant to their queries.”
If you wish to provide Google with the information required for getting your site’s region to show up in search results, you will need to log in to Webmaster Tools and go to Site configuration > Settings > Geographic Target. There you will be able to associate a country/region with your site.
Webmasters have been able to utilize the feature that lets them associate their sites with regions for quite some time, but that information hasn’t appeared in search results in the past.
Right now, Google is only showing region tags in results for certain domains like .com and .net. They don’t show them at all for sites that have location-specific ccTLDs (.br, .co.uk, etc.). The feature is designed to help users figure out where a site is based if that is not already clear.
It is also worth noting that Google will only show the region tags when the region associated with the site is different than the region the searcher’s query originates from. So if I search from here in the US, I will not see results that say “US”, but I might see results that say “Canada”.
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