Welcome back for another round of Webmaster Videos!
And surprise surprise, I have hair again! I let it grow out most of April and we're recording these videos in May.
So it's a little shorter, but it's not quite completely bald.
Anyway let's jump right in with the most popular question, it comes from Dave Davis in Dublin,
Ireland. Dave asks: "Hi Matt. AdWords allows, (and it's pretty accurate) location-targeting.
Why can't you guys allow multiplecountry targeting in Webmaster Tools instead of just one? It would solve an age-old problem for webmasters targeting multiple countries."
It's a great question Dave. Um, I can see at least a couple possible answers to that.
The answer that I would give you first andforemost is that I always worry whenever you give someone the option to say, "I'm relevant to country A, Country B, Country C, Country
D", all the way down to Country Z, that at some point, they say, "You know what? YeI'm relevant to all those countries. I'm relevant
to Chad, I'm relevant to Chile. Tag, you know show me for every single country.
And, so, at least in the beginning, whether we were talking about having Meta Tags to tell what country you were relevant for, or whether we were talking about targeting something
in Webmaster Tools, I at least was a little worried that people would say, "Yes! Clickevery single checkbox."
Because even on the spam report form, for example, we sometimes see people say, "Yes, I'm going to click every single box- Hidden Text, sure, Cloaking, why not, every single one." And that's not the highest-quality of information that you can possibly get.
So that's one big reason is, we wanted to explore, see how it looked, see what the qualityof the data looked like, before we started to release the ability where someone could say, "I'm relevant to every country!
Show me in Libya, show me ah, in every country in the world!" Uh, the other thing to bear in mind is that with AdWords you're paying for it now, so, a lot of the features that eventually sort of show up in, in webmaster tools, things like delegation, uh, showed up a lot earlier in AdWords, because since you're paying for AdWords, people expect a slightly higher quality of service.
So, it's definitely a good feature request.
Um, if we could find a way to do it where, um, it wouldn't take up a ton of engineering resources, um, it would improve the quality of the index, and the engineers had the cycles to do it, I would definitely support it, I'djust want to make sure that it wouldn't result in some sort of spam.
Um, but it is a good feature request, we'll put it on the queue, and thanks for suggesting it.