Something’s puzzling me.
The ISO-3166-1 country code list is not a static thing. New countries and territories appear on the list. Others disappear.
In the 20 or so years I’ve been dealing with these things professionally there are many examples. The Aaland Islands (AX) for example, and South Sudan (SS) have appeared. Yugoslavia (YU) and the German Democratic Republic (DD) have disappeared. Guernsey and Jersey (GG and JE) were added to the list in 2006.
Yet many e-commerce websites I see have drop-down lists for “Country” in their address entry fields are missing many of the recent additions to the list.
Leaving aside the fact, that in some circumstances the list is just the wrong thing to use (for example airlines using the list to classify passport details — the ISO list is NOT the same as a list of nationalities), why would any website developer intentionally choose to use a seriously outdated list, when the current list, and announcements as to changes is easily accessible these days from ISO itself who even publish a change-tracking page.
This has real serious economic effects on individuals. Guernsey and Jersey residents often end up paying a surcharge of 20% on goods ordered over the web as a direct result of this
Now, maybe I’m being picky, but I think if you advertise yourselves as specialists in search engineering you ought to know what the correct ISO list contains.
After all, a website’s location and target audience does form part of the myriad inputs to Google’s magical PageRank algorithm, don’t they?
I was on the point of ordering a particular SEO firms service (I won’t mention them to spare their blushes, but I can see their name as I write this).
But when I got to the address form, guess what — the drop down list didn’t include an option for the particular country/territory the organisation I was planning to order the service for. So guess what — that particular SEO firm lost a sale.
Is YOUR site up-t0-date?
PS: By the way, although I just checked that everything that should be there on our own webforms, is, to prove it, here’s a little challenge, which will help us in our own quality control.
Now there’ve been some fairly recent changes to the ISO list — and the first person who identifies an instance of a missing country code in any of the webforms on WWW.CHANNELISLES.NET will win a CHANNELISLES.NET USB key (Note: this is a great little device — it’s got masses of storage, it’s in the shape of a real key, and fits on your keyring with your house keys so you always have it with you).
We’ll also offer another USB key for the person who submits the website (any website, anywhere in the world) that has the a drop-down list with the most missing entries.
In both cases we’ll use the latest version of ISO-3166-1 to compare.
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