Geo Meta Tags

Checks for geographic meta tags for local targeting

What the geo.placename meta tag is, and whether you still need it

geo.placename is a <meta> tag naming the city or locality a page is about. It travels with three others: geo.region (an ISO 3166-2 country and subdivision code), geo.position (latitude;longitude), and ICBM (the same coordinates, comma separated, named after an old joke about missile targeting). A complete set on a location page looks like this:

<meta name="geo.region" content="US-CA" />
<meta name="geo.placename" content="San Francisco" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="37.7749;-122.4194" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="37.7749, -122.4194" />

None of them is a web standard. The geo.* family was proposed in an IETF Internet-Draft that expired in 2008 and never became an RFC, and all four names sit in the WHATWG meta extensions registry marked “Proposal”. They are a convention that stuck, not a specification any consumer is obliged to honor.

Google is explicit that it does not honor them. Its guidance on managing multi-regional and multilingual sites says Google “ignores locational meta tags (like geo.position or distribution) or geotargeting HTML attributes”. Adding geo.placename will not move a page in local search. LocalBusiness structured data, a consistent NAP, and a Google Business Profile will.

They are still worth the four lines on a location page. They are machine readable and cost nothing to serve, so a directory crawler or an in-house tool can lift a coordinate without parsing JSON-LD, and keeping them in step with your LocalBusiness schema is a free consistency check: if the meta tag names one city and the JSON-LD names another, one of them is wrong.

What this rule checks

squirrelscan looks for the four tags by name and passes the page as soon as it finds at least one, reporting which ones are present. It does not validate the values, so a stale city name, a bad ISO code, or coordinates in the wrong hemisphere all pass. ICBM is matched with that exact uppercase spelling. Severity is info and weight is 2/10, the lowest tier squirrelscan scores, because a missing geo.placename is not what holds a page back in local search.

The rule is also gated on the site profile: it is skipped, with a visible reason, when a confident profile says the site is not a local business, so a global SaaS product or a blog is never marked down for it.

Solution

Geo meta tags help indicate your business location for local search. Add: geo.region (country-state code), geo.placename (city name), geo.position (latitude;longitude), and ICBM meta tag. These supplement LocalBusiness schema. Most useful for location-specific landing pages.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["local/geo-meta"]

Disable all Local SEO rules

[rules]
disable = ["local/*"]

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["local/geo-meta"]
disable = ["*"]