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Personally I've been against the 'abuse' of the domain name system in this way (using ccTLDs as if they were gTLDs) for years, but the world disagrees with me.

by sp8 13y ago

Personally I've been against the 'abuse' of the domain name system in this way (using ccTLDs as if they were gTLDs) for years, but the world disagrees with me. So at this point there seems little point in hanging on to geo-targeting by ccTLD, might as well flatten the playing field. But we do need some country-targeting and while we do have the Webmaster Tools thing (but that is only Google-specific, you'd end up having to do this for any and all search engines, if they offered it) I'd like to see control put back into the hands of the sites themselves, and have some way of tagging available in the HTML of the page. It'd also get rid of the ridiculous assumption that search engines make that if your site is hosted at an IP in a country, then that's the country that should be targeted in their results (if there are no other signals, ie ccTLD). Here in the UK there are many web hosts which are based in Ireland or Europe, and at the moment I worry that using them would hurt the site's reach into a UK search result.

ScottWhigham 13y ago
> I'd like to see control put back into the hands of the sites themselves, and have some way of tagging available in the HTML of the page. I'd like to think that, as a web dev/master/admin/whatever, I wouldn't have to tag each one of my thousands and thousands of pages with the exact same tag. This is just a tough approach - it would work for super small sites only IMO.
- sp8 13y ago
  Point taken (though presumably you do tag other things about each page - language, direction of reading, cache length etc). Tagging each page would give you the ability to nominate that different sections of a site target different countries though? An alternative then might be something akin to robots.txt - place a geo.txt (or whatever) file in the root of a site to indicate its relevance to particular country or countries?
  - ScottWhigham 13y ago
    Yeah, something like that would be more ideal than the tags. That way you could do it at the folder/subdir level.

by sp8 13y ago

ScottWhigham 13y ago

> I'd like to see control put back into the hands of the sites themselves, and have some way of tagging available in the HTML of the page. I'd like to think that, as a web dev/master/admin/whatever, I wouldn't have to tag each one of my thousands and thousands of pages with the exact same tag. This is just a tough approach - it would work for super small sites only IMO.

sp8 13y ago
Point taken (though presumably you do tag other things about each page - language, direction of reading, cache length etc). Tagging each page would give you the ability to nominate that different sections of a site target different countries though? An alternative then might be something akin to robots.txt - place a geo.txt (or whatever) file in the root of a site to indicate its relevance to particular country or countries?
- ScottWhigham 13y ago
  Yeah, something like that would be more ideal than the tags. That way you could do it at the folder/subdir level.