Hello

As more and more engines, Google and Yahoo are going to use geolocalisation and personnalisation request. Results will be differents for each people. So My question is : how to follow correctly the optimisation we made in search engines ?
How soft as agent web ranking, advense web ranking, topdog... could give us the correct site's position ?
I'm waiting for your ideas
Thanks

Hello

As more and more engines, Google and Yahoo are going to use geolocalisation and personnalisation request. Results will be differents for each people. So My question is : how to follow correctly the optimisation we made in search engines ?
How soft as agent web ranking, advense web ranking, topdog... could give us the correct site's position ?
I'm waiting for your ideas
Thanks
You really can't (at least with 100% accuracy), since the results/ranking are going to vary for each user. The best thing to do is use them as a reference. If you are moving up/moving down based on queries from the same location.

Focussing on the locational real-time information of the user (which is very broad, namely mostly at the country level):

I assume (and hope) that the results of a query should be the same given the same location (e.g. country).

Gaetan: Do you (or somebody else) have examples, which support or falisify my assumption?

And to my opinion, it's the user who should be able to set and override his. If not, users and webmasters should vote for such a policy; shouldn't they?

It's most definitely at the country level. Although I have noticed AdWords have been targeted down to the city, but I'm not sure if web search results are or not.

In a recent article there are some comments about accurracy of Google's geotargetting: "Google's Regional Targeting Power (http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/strat/article.php/3101731)".

gaetan: Coming back to the initial question (if I follow your initial post): What is the goal of "optimization" in geotargetting/geolocalisation from the webmaster's view?

I don't see any sense faking the localization (so-called georeference) of a web document by the author? Moving someones location seems to me not useful and hardly legitimate.

I think there is nothing to "optimize" regarding localization except you buy or rent a flat and open another physically existing store...

Congrats sfk. Another great thread. I just wanted to stop by to say hi to all and give my two cents. The more I read, the more I'm getting interested in the topic.

I agree with sfk. If a search engine filter and sort out results by geolocation criteria (longitude, latitude, country, zipcode, area code, etc..) then optimization will not matter at all.

The only case in which I can see it would matter is if the search engine resources to geolocation data to filter out results and eventually uses relevance/content/link analysis algorithms to sort and rank results. Optimization would also matter for a reverse scenario; ie., relevance ranking followed by geo-filtering. Still for a given query, results will be different in different geo-locations.

If a search engine uses such "hybrid" approaches to return results then only at the user's location optimization techniques would matter (keyword optimization, link analysis, semantics, etc), I think.

If a business person want to fetch query-triggered documents or ads to different locations he/she could outsource a new generation of geolocation products (http://www.bannerspace.com/pr_030804.htm) or resource to spamming techniques (http://www.pandia.com/sw-2003/40-google.html), which is not recommended. Either way he/she would need to ponder ROI (return of investment) values and decide if this is worth the effort.

I can visualize spam marketers with servers all over the globe designing documents and renting blocks in such pages for geo-targeted ads. A lot of money to make. Let's call them geo-spammers.


Orion

Hi, sfk

Apparently, there is an impression in some seo circles that geo-tagging and geo-targeting are the same things. The way I see it, while one may lead to the other, these are two different things. It seems the confusion arises from the fact that some search engines have found a way to avoid the use of geo-tags with results quality a bit below the average and at times, quite poor.

Still, placing keywords to identify places in titles, descriptions, etc. while may be one form of targeting traffic for a given demographic or location, is not geo-tagging as geo-tagging involves special tags, parameters and technology.

I thought you may want to visit http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/searchinsider/wpn-49-20040827OptimizingToTargetGeographicLocation.html and expand on the issue for them. I found this article an oversimplification.


Orion

Thanks, Orion, for the pointer.

You are right: Treating references to geographic locations like any other word is like navigation in the middle age compared to GPS navigation today: Of course one can light up more or brighter light towers in the dawn in order to be found easier (thus optimizing).

This is what SE algorithms seem to support now. As a consequence SEO want to "optimize" by adding local words (even in HTML-tags where they don't belong) for being found in local searching (= geo-targeting).

But in fact, geo-tagging (or geo-referencing) means to me, adding a "well known tags" into the META and BODY section, like these

<META NAME="geo.position" CONTENT="47.2333;8.8333">
<META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="Rapperswil, Z&uuml;rich">
<META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="CH-ZH">

These 'geo-tags' you can find in context for example here in the HTML source of this specialized search engine http://www.geometa.info/search.jsp?query=geotags (see also the thread "Anyone using geo-tagging?" here: http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=636.

Adding geo-spatial information like this seems to me one of the first big steps towards a "Semantic Web"! ... besides the movement behind blogging which is strictly based on XML tags and which would also benefit from geo-tags!

It is all right if SE do applied research in finding place names in web documents. But imagine what benefits would come from self-assigned geo-tags which are much more precise and 'in-context' than simply mentioning 'place' names in free text, like 'Whitney Houston' or 'Jack London'?

Obviously we have a problem, that geo-tags are neither standardized nor well known... Well, this is an opportunity!

I invite every SEO, web master and SE developer to discuss it here. One time it's our turn to make SEs better. Who from the big SEs like Google and Yahoo! is first in realizing and propagating geo-tags? Who from the blogging community (tool writers) is first to include such geo-tags in their blogs?