Google Country and Territory Codes

Turning Off Auto Redirection

Have you ever been annoyed when Google always redirects you to your country domain (eg. google.com.au), even if you enter google.com into your browser address bar? This is because you’ve either set your Google Preferences to your country in the past (and your preferences are therefore embedded in a cookie on your computer), or Google is using your IP address to work out where you are in the world (geotargeting).

You can stop this automatic country redirection by entering http://www.google.com/ncr into your browser bar or clicking on the link toward the bottom of the country specific Google page (eg. google.com.au) that allows you to go to google.com. This link uses the same URL mentioned above – http://www.google.com/ncr – where ncr stands for “no country redirct”. Entering this URL into your browser address bar or clicking on the link resets a certain cookie on your machine that forces Google to go to your country domain.

Please note that only the organic results are shown as if you were sitting in the USA; the paid ads (top sponsors and right column ads – called Google AdWords) will still be relevant from the country you are physically sitting in (this is based on your IP address).

Specific Country Searching

How do you “force” Google into conducting organic and paid searches as if you were sitting in another country?

Use the &gl=xx parameter on the URL (where xx is the Country Code)

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re sitting at your computer in Australia but wish to see the organic search results as if you were sitting in the USA. Simply add &gl=US to the end of the Google URL, like this:

URL before
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=serp+tracking&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

URL after
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=serp+tracking&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=&gl=US

Refer to Google’s handy list of 2 character Google Country and Territory codes when you need to “put yourself in” other countries for country specific searches, including the paid ads (Google adWords).

Why do this? You may be based in one country but provide Internet Marketing (SEO and/or SEM) services in another country. Using the &gl=xx URL param will ensure you are looking at Google results like your client would be.

Language Control

If you need the results displayed in a language other than English, either change your Google Preferences (which sets a cookie on your machine so all future searches will use that language), or modify the &hl=en paramater (ie. &hl=es for Spanish). Again, refer to Google’s Google Country and Territory codes.

How to get lots of viewers reading your articles

Here’s a quick tip for all those of you who enjoy blogging and want your articles (posts or blogs) to receive lots of traffic from the search engines …

For those of you who may not know, the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) pay particular attention to the title of an article blog (or post).

Google’s keyword analysis tool can tell you how many searches are regularly conducted for very specific keywords and phrases. It’s a fantastic free tool to use when you’re thinking of how to title your article.

Simply select which country you’re interested in (eg. use USA if the social / blog website is a .com), enter a phrase into the search bar, click the button, and see how many people search for that term (and many related terms) on a monthly basis.

Here’s an example to demonstrate …

Let’s say you are writing an article about kitten training. You’re not sure what the title of the article should be, and decide to utilise the free keyword suggestion tool provided by Google (hey, good thinking 99!!). Click on the next 2 images to see the 5 simple steps to take and Googles keyword suggestions (the image will open up in a new browser window when clicked on).

How to use Google's Free External Keyword Tool

How to use Google's Free External Keyword Tool

As you can see how to train a kitten is an excellent choice for our kitten training article, because out of all the keywords that have a search volume, how to train a kitten enjoys the highest number of searches year round (an average of 2,900 searches per month for the past year, and more specifically 5,400 searches last month – which happens to be June 2009 as the example Google keyword search was conducted in July 2009).

So for our kitten training article, we’d want to use the title How to Train a Kitten in order to attract the most viewers to our article (because that keyword receives the highest number of searches out of all the keyword phrases anyone has ever type into google over the past year).

We want you to enjoy the most traffic possible and hope this tip is of benefit to your future blogging endeavours.

PS/ If you need a tool to quickly and easily track the position of your website, article, blog, post, video, image, document or any other media in the search engines, then you should take a look at SERPtracker – a Windows application written to track, record and graph the ranking or one or more links for one or more keywords. Very power but very very simple to use. The finest SERP tracking software tool around.