Still using the location search filter on chrome to check your rankings?

Back in 2015 google dropped the change location search filter from search results on grounds that it was getting very little usage.

This filter option can still be found on your chrome browser buried deep in settings, here:

Under advanced search:

You can still narrow your results and find pages published in a particular region.

But as a user will you take that pain? How many chrome users are even aware of this feature? A regular joe will not even bother changing these settings to a specific region for two main reasons:

It’s hard to locate.
It narrows the scope to a specific country searches should focus on.

So basically the majority of users because of these reasons keep settings default “any region” on their browser.

Many SEO professionals previously used to check rankings specific to the region by passing additional parameters “tbs=ctr:countryXX , XX = some country code” and “&cr=countryXX” at the end of search URL, even we at Rankwatch also offered this feature to our customers.

But this is an obsolete way of rank tracking now since the users keep their settings as “any region” accurate rank tracking can be done only when we follow a similar approach.

Hence, we have removed this feature completely from any account that has requested it in the past. These new rollouts are complete now in your account and you will now have much more refined and accurate rankings.

This does not mean that you won’t be able to do location-specific tracking in Rankwatch. You can still go as hyperlocal as you wish on Rankwatch when it comes to rank tracking. Even on your search results at the very bottom, you will see that google tracks your location to show you more relevant location-specific results:

But when you take either defining a region on your browser or passing additional URL parameters to narrow down location-specific results approach to calculate your rankings it is not optimal now, since the users don’t care now to define the region in settings while performing the searches.

I hope this was helpful, and in case of any queries please feel free to drop a line on chat or email us [email protected]