In July, 2006 Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz entered a post in his blog about a topic I struggle with frequently in my position at HP - how and why search engines should handle international content.  Because I work for a global enterprise company managing SEO, I am faced with the challenge of the way search engines handle HP’s international content.

The issue is that when you visit a Google version targeted for a specific country (e.g. Google Mexico) and you  perform a search looking for content from a specific company, the results may not return what you might expect.  Sometimes you get content from that company but from a web site targeted at another country (like Spain) because the language is Spanish.  Somehow, that site is deemed more relevant by the algorithm even when similar (not duplicate) content is offered by that same company for their customers in Mexico. 

Additionally, if the searcher selects to search for pages specifically in that country but your content isn’t physically hosted there (with a local IP) and you don’t use country domains, then none of your site’s content will appear because it will not be in the engine’s index for that country.  This issue is not exclusive to HP but for many companies doing business in multiple countries but hosting content centrally and not using country domains.

Rand’s article was on the mark. The “why” is easy in my opinion - because the search engines want to provide the best customer experience. The best customer experience means providing the most relevant content to the searcher. However, that is oftentimes not the case when someone searches for content from web sites in their country.  The “how” is the more challenging part as it will require more robust capabilities by the engines to determine a site’s target country.  The question is, can the site owners help give the engines this information by page to help them determine target country?