Your August 2019 Search Engine Bytes Digest
How can I tell if my site is being indexed internationally?
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Is there a way of gaining access to the Google Search Console in different countries, and will this work for a site that uses the same domain name and just switches the languages about, i.e. does not have a Turkish domain but a .com one?
Also, how you can you tell if a site has been indexed by the Google of that country? I could use an IP address cloaker to appear to be in Turkey, and then search for "some scraped text in the website" (using the " ") but is there a better way?
Answer:
For starters, Google Search Console is the same toolset regardless of the country the website is focused on or located in. That means the verification process is the same and you don't need to do anything special.
Next, Google (in general) uses the same crawlers worldwide; at least that's how you should think of it. The crawler that scans a site in the UK will be the same program that crawls a site in New York. In fact, a lot of the time you'll even see the same IP address.
Now, that's not always the case. There are things that are specific to regions - like regional crawlers, etc. but not something you can work with or make use of so it's not worth spending time on. The important take away is that Google uses the same index worldwide even though they show different search results in different countries.
So, for example, to see if your site has been indexed in Turkey just go to Google.com.tr and do a site:yourdomain.com search. You'll typically see the exact same URLs there that you would if you did same site:yourdomain.com search at Google.com
On a side note, I'd highly recommend you check out our recent article that's entirely focused on optimizing a multilingual website: