When I first launched my site I targeted traffic from Google because it is the predominant search engine and with that can come a lot of traffic. As you progress your online marketing efforts you should ensure that all the search engines can find, crawl, and index your sites. This gives you a wider reach and can drive more traffic. I have been doing a lot more with Bing lately because I actually like their search engine (not as much as Google but I like it) and because soon Yahoo! will be using the Bing search. Bing offers its own webmaster tools that while not at all as useful or easy to use as Google Webmaster Tools still gives you a good picture of what Bing sees on your site and any problems you may have. My search visibility has been fairly low on Bing for geo targeted searches which I have put a lot of work into. Compared to Google and Yahoo! it is only about 20%. So I found that one of the big issues I had was Bing thought that my site was located in the UK. This does not help when I am targeting users in the U.S. and specifically Minneapolis/St. Paul. I was a bit confused by this but after some research I found that because I am using Joomla! my default language pack was English UK. While this is fine for design and working with the site it puts some html code into my pages that makes it appear as though it is a UK site.
Here is a screenshot of what Bing was telling me about my site
Luckily this is a fairly easy fix if you are the Joomla admin or know how to install modules for Joomla. Just go to the this link which is Joomla extension page and select the English US package. Install the module and select it as your default and you should be good to go once Bing crawls your site again. To make sure that your site is now set correctly go to your site right click and select view source and look for this html tag above the head section <html xmlns=. At the end it should now read xml:lang=”en-us” lang=”en-us”> not xml:lang=”en-us” lang=”en-gb”>. See the picture below for clarification. That is all you need to do to get Bing to realize your site is in the U.S. not the U.K. Just for clarity I haven’t had this problem with other CMS like WordPress but be careful when installing different themes and such as they may affect this setting.
Bing Region Fix
5 Responses to Bing Says My Region is GB, but it’s not
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Avery Quirindongo
April 3, 2010 at 8:46 amYour comment sounds so much like something I’d say that I’m smiling bigger than usual. Welcome to the conversation.
Mr. Juegos
April 27, 2010 at 9:25 amGood point, same happens with spanish, lang=”es-es”, lang=”es-ar” etc
dustin
April 27, 2010 at 4:19 pmI don’t know why bing would use that as the determining factor in location when the others use ip of your web host. Hopeully they change that.
Hit Song Lyrics
April 29, 2010 at 3:51 pmThanks for sharing, I found this article, while searching for some free downloads and ran across this website, interesting comments and good points made.
Paul
October 3, 2010 at 3:20 pmYes thanks, this information was useful, I have the same problem. And honestly I think guessing your target region from your hosted IP does nok at all make sense, but maybe thats just me?
Regards
Paul