Region support and multi-regional sites | HCL Digital Experience
Global companies might choose to publish content, and offer products or services specifically for certain regions. While today a language can be detected, there is no technical solution available to detect a region.
In this context you need to distinguish between the various regions; in this context the term 'region' is sometimes used synonymous with 'country'.
As was described for language identification
in the topic about language support by Portal Search, Internet search
engines also find that location or region specific metadata is not
reliable enough to use it for region detection. Consequently crawlers
expect the URL to carry region specific information. The most obvious
is that the top-level domain name carries the country code and thereby
the region information. For example, a domain name such as XYZ-Co.fr
or XYZ-Co.co.jp
strongly
indicates that the company resides or operates either in France or
Japan.
If top-level domain names are used, no further action
is required to allow region identification of that website. However,
for more generic domain names such as .com
or .eu
,
additional steps are required for enablement. In such cases you need
to encode the region information in the URL, and pair it with tools
provided by Internet search engines, such as Google Webmaster Tools
for Geographic Targeting.