Because I'm still living like it's 2008, I run a website with a .in TLD. The website has nothing to do we India and does not target Indian users.Unfortunately, when I go to Google Webmaster Tools I see that Google have locked my geotargeting status to India:On the help pages, Google state that:Sites with country-coded top-level domains (such as .ie) are already associated with a geographic region, in this case Ireland. In this case, you won't be able to specify a geographic location.This seems implausibly inflexible, so I want to know if there are any sneaky ways of removing auto-geotargeting, or changing it to a more appropriate region?
I'm using a vanity country code top level domain (ccTLD), can I persuade Google to geotarget a different region?
google search console;top level domains;geotargeting;country specific;country codes
If you use a ccTLD like .in, you won't be able to set geotargeting to a different country in Webmaster Tools. For example, you generally wouldn't be able to geotarget users in France when using a .in domain name (we use a few other signals for geotargeting, but the ccTLD is a fairly strong signal, since it's something that users see as well). That said, it's no problem to create a global site on a ccTLD like that - they will show up in global search results normally. It's common for international companies (and websites) to be based in a specific country.So in short, if you want to geotarget users in a country other than India, then I'd recommend using a gTLD or the appropriate ccTLD instead. If your website is meant for users worldwide, then it's no problem to continue using that domain name. 