Specify Region code
- It would be useful to be able to tell the crawler where your site was primarily located, as you can in Google webmaster tools.
See my post http://forums.microsoft.com/webmaster/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3844284&SiteID=79
John Paterson
www.reallysimplesystems.com
Answers
Hi,
Thanks for your feedback. I believe this is in the pipeline, but I don't know when it will be ready.
- Hi everyone.
Just wanted to know these same sorts of issues impact Australian domains. I have a number of domains, all hosted on Australian servers and with .com.au domain names, that were classified as US and were excluded from search results with "only from Australia" filter applied.
I overcame most of this problem by the inclusion of this meta tag ...
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-au" />
I'm not sure if this will work for everyone else but it did for me.
All Replies
Hi,
Thanks for your feedback. I believe this is in the pipeline, but I don't know when it will be ready.
- Thanks Brett. Any workaround until then? Our site is still being shown as being in the US!
Thanks, John Paterson - I would just like to keep this thread going Brett, as two of my sites are also being shown as being in the US, yet they're definitely in the UK.
One side effect of this (I've been monitoring), is that over the last couple of weeks I've seen this as being detrimental to one of the sites ranking in Live.
Many Thanks
- Too right. Looking at the other forums it is an ongoing failure for many people. MS should either do a better job at working out where a site is hosted (ever heard of geo-locating IP addresses?), or read the geo-location meta tag, or allow webmasters to tell it. Assuming that all .coms are in the US is cretinous. Using Google searching for a hosted CRM system in the UK we are #1, in MS Search - nowhere! I think we'd all be grateful if this was fixed rather than "under development" - pretty please?
John and West_Pwith
Thanks for the additional feedback! We have heard from many customers that a tool to tell us you locale would be very helpful and we agree. We are also working all the time to improve our ability to detect and determine the country of origin. There are a lot of factors that we look at and sometimes those factors are more difficult to check especially when the language is English.
I hope we can offer more help in the near future and thanks again for the input!
Cheers
Jeremiah Andrick
- I second this too - I have a .com and hosting in the USA (it's cheaper and better) but my site is very much British and I'm not showing up anywhere in the local UK results :-(
Cheers,
Tim
Jeremiah
Thanks for picking up on this thread, but the problem we seem to having is that sites that are hosted in alternate countries to their target market are being affected now.
Jeremiah Andrick - Microsoft wrote: I hope we can offer more help in the near future and thanks again for the input!
Maybe this will be fixed in the near future, but the near future isn't much help as our sites are sliding down their own geographically targeted market rankings.
Is there a date in the pipeline - as John Patterson mentions above, Google have had this one sorted in their Webmaster Tools for a long time.
Come on MSN, help us with this one.- Let's be clear about this, it is not just sites that are hosted in the "wrong" country. Our hosted crm site is hosted in the UK, with a UK IP address, with a<meta name="geo.region" content="GB" /> meta tag, and MS Search still shows it as being US region - just because it is a .com? Just how much help does this search engine need?!
The ability to specify the region via Webmaster tools would be a work around, MS Search should have worked out the region correctly in the first place.
Wake up, Microsoft! (apologies for this thread getting more belligerent with each posting, but MS Search is just a joke if it can't work out what country a site is in!)
Keep the post's going, fellow angrys!
Thanks (with still a bit of humour left, honest!), John Paterson. - In the spirit of keeping the thread open in hopes that it can be resolved, I'll share my situation...
I have 2 add-on domains hosted on the same server, same IP etc in the US and one has been given the correct US region but the other one has a region of GB ...??? Not sure what's going on there...
The inclusion of a webmaster-defined method of setting/over-riding the stuff that MS comes up with would buy the MS Search dev team some time to fix it properly... Surely can't be too hard... ??? - I'm simply going to plug this thread every week or so till MSN resolve it, as this problem needs to be solved.
It's not right that a search engine wrongly decides a site's geographic location, especially when we go through the procedure of signing up to the Live Search Webmaster Centre.
My pages are tumbling in Live Search, in the UK they don't exist, MSN Live Search sort this one out... please. - I agree with the idea of allowing website owners to specify their geographic location or target audience in a country. I hope this will be available on Webmaster tool as soon as possible for Live.
I've sat this morning looking at a couple of my sites, they are still specified as being in the US, when I carry out a UK search the sites don’t exist, this is preposterous – they have English addresses. Google sorted out this geographic location problem one and a half years ago.
Live Search, don't stick the bills under the matt thinking the problem will go away - some people are also trying to make a living.- Hi everyone.
Just wanted to know these same sorts of issues impact Australian domains. I have a number of domains, all hosted on Australian servers and with .com.au domain names, that were classified as US and were excluded from search results with "only from Australia" filter applied.
I overcame most of this problem by the inclusion of this meta tag ...
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-au" />
I'm not sure if this will work for everyone else but it did for me. - I'll give it a go!
I was hoping that my <meta name="geo.region" content="GB" /> would do this for me, but it hasn't, so I'll gladly give this a go and let people know if it works for me.
Did you put it in ALL your pages or just the home page?
If it works, a lot of people will be very grateful to you, including me!
John Paterson
www.reallysimplesystems.com
Winner of the Software Satisfaction Awards 2008 - Small Business CRM Well, mirabile dictu, it works!
Putting <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-gb" />on the home page makes MS's crawler classify the region as GB.
I only put in on the home page, and only the home page has a GB region code. All the other pages are apparently still stuck in the USA!
So thanks to Rebaf for coming up with the solution, and shame on Microsoft for causing the problem and then being unable to come up with the solution.
Thanks, Rebaf! We all owe you a pint!
John Paterson
www.reallysimplesystems.com
Winner of the Software Satisfaction Awards 2008 - Small Business CRM- Rebaf
Marvellous, I think we owe you one, it's not gone across all my sites yet, but one homepage is now definitely classified UK, I used:
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-uk" />
My only bone of contention is why the guys at Live Search couldn't have come up with this earlier.
Rebaf thanks very much. - WOW - Finally a solution to this problem. I've been searching for one for 4 months, made the change as suggested to all pages on my site and they are all being reclassified as coming from NZ as live search reindexes the pages. My server is in the USA, and the domain name is .com, but my website is directed to NZ customers.I also can't believe that the Live Search people couldn't help us with this - another case of developers not talking with the support team maybe...??Thanks so much for the solution Rebaf!!All the bestPaul
Yes,
Thanks Rebaf. I am sure I mentioned this in the past, but it is such a common meta tag for me that I might have overlooked it. Sometimes it is also an issue with a scrambled signal from the Akamai servers. Regardless, I will add this to our FAQs we posted on the Ranking and Indexing forums.
Thanks again!
- Glad to be of assistance, but we all stand on the shoulders of those that come before us. This was a suggestion I found in this forum probably more than 12 months ago. I'm glad it has come back into the light and helped another collection of webmasters.
Despite the result I think it is an unfortunate solution to the problem as it relies on a meta tag that has a limited relationship to the website market. It's not an inuitive solution. - I was wondering the same thing. and thanks for that meta implementation.
