Why Geo Meta Tags?

Many of you may not have heard of Geo Meta Tags. They have been used for Geographic identification for various online media like websites, RSS feeds and videos for a number of years now and they consist of latitude, longitude, distance, placement (city) and region (state).

Example Geo Meta Tags:

meta name="ICBM" content="30.167958, -27.133185"
meta name="geo.position" content="30.167958;-27.133185"
meta name="geo.placename" content="Atlanta"
meta name="geo.region" content="GA"


Many people have de-emphasized the value of these tags, but we feel these tags have an important role and have built a tool that makes it automatic for our dealer customers to optimize their websites geographically.

Benefits of Geo Tags
One of the reasons many believe these tags are not significant is that a number of Google spokespeople have reportedly come out and said that Google does not utilize these tags. Matt Cuts was reported to have said this, but this was not the case. Matt’s quote was actually “…it is not something that we look at closely…” Not looking at something and not looking at it closely are two completely different outcomes. You can watch Matt’s video discussion on this topic here -

Even though they might not place a significant amount of weight or importance on Geo Tags, Google will read the geo information and utilize it as one more reference point for a businesses’ location.

More importantly, Bing representatives have confirmed that Bing does in fact utilize these Geo Tags. The following is a direct quote from one of their representatives on the Bing forum:
“Bing automatically assigns the hosting IP as the location of one’s business, unless directed otherwise with a geo-location/language Meta tag. So, instruct it with the proper geo-location/language Meta tag that defines your actual target location.

After implementing the tag, it normally takes about two (2) or three (3) crawls for its index to update the change.”