Happy Halloween to our spooktacular webmasters!

Written by Maile Ohye

With apologizes to Vic Mizzy, we've written short verse to the tune of the "Addams Family" theme (please use your imagination):

We may be hobbyists or just geeky,
Building websites and acting cheeky,
Javascript redirects we won't make sneaky,
Our webmaster fam-i-ly!

Happy Halloween everyone! Feel free to join the discussion and share your Halloween stories and costumes.


Magnum P.I., Punk Rocker, Rubik's Cube, Mr. T., and Rainbow Brite
a.k.a. Several members of our Webmaster Tools team: Dennis Geels, Jonathan Simon, Sean Harding, Nish Thakkar, and Amanda Camp


Panda and Lolcat
Or just Evan Tang and Matt Cutts?


7 Indexing Engineers and 1 Burrito


Cheese Wysz, Internet Repairman, Community Chest, Internet Pirate (don't tell the RIAA)
Helpful members of the Webmaster Help Group: Wysz, MattD, Nathan Johns (nathanj) , and Bergy


Count++
Webspam Engineer Shashi Thakur (in the same outfit he wore to Searchnomics)


Hawaiian Surfer Dude and Firefox
Members of Webmaster Central's communications team: Reid Yokoyama and Mariya Moeva


Napolean Dynamite and Raiderfan
Shyam Jayaraman (speaking at SES Chicago, hopefully doing the dance) and me

Better geographic choices for webmasters

Written by Amanda Camp, Webmaster Tools and Trystan Upstill, International Search Quality Team

Starting today Google Webmaster Tools helps you better control the country association of your content on a per-domain, per-subdomain, or per-directory level. The information you give us will help us determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improves our search results for geographic queries.

We currently only allow you to associate your site with a single country and location. If your site is relevant to an even more specific area, such as a particular state or region, feel free to tell us that. Or let us know if your site isn't relevant to any particular geographic location at all. If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, we'll continue to make geographic associations largely based on the top-level domain (e.g. .co.uk or .ca) and the IP of the webserver from which the context was served.

For example, if we wanted to associate www.google.com with Hungary:


But you don't want www.google.com/webmasters/tools" associated with any country...


This feature is restricted for sites with a country code top level domain, as we'll always associate that site with the country domain. (For example, google.ru will always be the version of Google associated with Russia.)


Note that in the same way that Google may show your business address if you register your brick-and-mortar business with the Google Local Business Center, we may show the information that you give us publicly.

This feature was largely initiated by your feedback, so thanks for the great suggestion. Google is always committed towards helping more sites and users get better and more relevant results. This is a new step as we continue to think about how to improve searches around the world.

We encourage you to tell us what you think in the Webmaster Tools section of our discussion group.