The Google Webmaster Tools website allows website owners to register details of their own website to Google and includes several tools which allow you to further improve Google’s understanding of your website and its target audience.

One of these tools allows you to set up your geographic target when it is not obvious which region your website should be served to in Google’s search results.

Search engines generally operate within geographic regions so, depending on which country you are searching from, you will receive more relevant results. To gain the information on which country your website is targeted towards, the search engine generally look at details such as which country your website is hosted in, the location of websites that link to your website and most importantly which country your domain name is targeted towards. So if your domain name is a .co.uk then it is obvious to the search engines that you are targeting the UK, if your domain was a .de then obviously Germany. The problems arise when you have a .com (.net, .org etc.) domain, this is when search engine will look more towards the hosting location and incoming links to gain the geographical information.

But now Google Webmaster Tools allows you to override this information, if you have a .com or similar domain name, and choose which geographical location you are targeting. The advantages of this are that you do not have to change hosting locations or concentrate on gaining incoming links from other websites within your region. Plus there is also the option to change your geographic target location at a later date if necessary.

Again Google are leading the way when it comes to innovation within search engines and search results and hopefully the other big players such as Yahoo! and MSN will catch on and offer something similar soon.

A lot of companies who have a website often purchase variations on their domain name to catch visitors who may type in .co.uk instead of .com or may misspell or use a common abbreviation of the company name, whilst also preventing competitors from registering these domain names. Usually, rather than showing visitors a blank (or error) page, the company will park the domain name on their main domain to help point visitors to the company website.

A common mistake is to not 301 redirecting the parked domain name to the main domain name. The problem that arises is that the search engines now see two (or more depending on how many domain names are parked) websites with exactly the same content and will penalise individual pages from each domain which they see as the duplicate page. This will also detract weight from the rankings of the website as a whole. So by adding a 301 redirect from the parked domain to the main website you will not only prevent the previous explained scenario, you will also be telling the search engines that previous pages they have indexed from the parked domain have not disappeared but have moved to the equivalent page on the main website. This should prevent you from losing any rankings that may have been gained through the parked domains.

A common way to 301 redirect is to use a .htaccess file with the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.parkeddomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.maindomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This will redirect any of the parked domain name webpages to the main domain name equivalent, for example: http://www.parkeddomain.com/about-us.html would be redirected to http://www.maindomain.com/about-us.html and so on.