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Category: International SEO

Discussions around international SEO tactics.

  • android_lyon


    Hello, I would like your expert opinion I have a site in spanish for Spain and Mexico As domain name, I have .es and .mx This is the same site. We do not have any redirects. From .mx to .es for example. >> your opinion?
    if I declare targeting in Spain in Google Webmaster tools (in settings) and in another profile with in Mexico, we have a duplicate content? Thank you for your feedback. Sorry for my english, i'm french 😉

    | android_lyon
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  • Mobies


    I'm trying to find solid information on Google's criteria on showing a "mini Google search box" within sitelinks? Example: if you type-in "wikipedia" on Google.com, a mini search box appears within the site links. This is for organic listing not paid listing. The Google Support page on Sitelinks does not state any info on the mini google search box. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

    | Mobies
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  • ricalebro


    I recently took on a client who had a 6 month old site, and had not done any seo or link building. All links so far have been natural, I can't see anything dodgy that would cause a problem. It's fairly niche so just sorting out the page titles and a bit of on site stuff got them ranking on page 1 & 2 in the UK and US for most of their keywords. However their main keyword which is just the name of the product (lets say xxx and xxxs ) does not appear anywhere in the US search, despite ranking #10 in the UK and all related terms ('what is xxx', 'how to use xxx', 'benfits of xxx' etc) having similar rank on both. They didn't have any analytics installed before I took over so I can't see any historical changes in traffic from different keywords. Any ideas why one single keyword would not show up at all just on Google US when everything else is ok?

    | ricalebro
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  • lcourse


    I have an English website with USD prices and US phone.
    Via currency dropdown visitors in Ireland can choose EUR as currency, visitors from Denmark Danish crown etc and via GEO IP I also serve local contact phone numbers. So I though it made sense to define this with the alternate tags, but now after several months google still does not pickup these pages in local searches. Did anybody have success with getting a website just with currency parameter ranked locally using the alternate tag? Does it help to have also static links (not only dropdown links) to currency versions on the page? Any other thing that could help to have google pick these up? Below my code sample:

    | lcourse
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  • jimmy0225


    I currently own a domain that is hosting by yahoo!  However, they have no blog and they are not "responsive" to smart and mobile phones.  I am looking to go from Yahoo! Hosting to maybe hostagor and looking to go from static to CMS for seo purposes. My fear is of loosing SERP's as I do rank good for some majotr local keywords. Any opinions? James

    | jimmy0225
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  • MartijnHoving82


    Hi Mozzers, I have a question about the rel="alternate" hreflang tag, with an example. When I use two subfolders for two different countries/languages, for instance www.domain.com/nl-nl/ and www.domain.com/nl-en/ (for the English version) and I want to use the rel="alternate" hreflang tag, do I need to follow the ISO standards concerning Uppercase country code and Lowercase language code (en-NL)? Or is it okay to use the Lowercase country and language code (en-nl), since we also use this in the URL of the Subfolder. What does Google prefer? Thanks in advance.

    | MartijnHoving82
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  • Gordon_Hall


    The title says it all. Is there anywhere I can find domains that are recently expired and back on the market? I'm thinking if the domain name is a good enough match and has had a reasonable authority that it may be worth buying and using in the correct environment...

    | Gordon_Hall
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  • lokito


    Hi, my client offers courses that whilst based in Manchester, England are mainly attended by people in countries such as Georgia, Libya and Nigeria etc. The people that attend the courses are fluent in English. We're looking at performing country-specific SEO and I have a few queries. The plan so far: Obtain TLD's in each target country. These TLD's would be hosted on the same server as the core site based in England. Option 1: Each TLD would be a microsite with content specific to the country including geo-signals, in English. Option 2: Each TLD would 301 redirect to the core site, i.e. example.sa redirects to example.com/sa/ and this country-specific section would have relevant geo-signals. So I have 3 questions at this point: 1. Most-all of the tips I have seen about country-specific SEO assume that the content should be translated to the native tongue although in this case, the audience are fluent English speaks. Does this make a difference? Is it okay to use English and still be able to rank in country-specific search engines? 2. Between options 1 & option 2 - which would be the optimum setup? 3. Last question, if we obtain the TLD's I hear that it's not necessary to also host that TLD in the target country, is this right? Thanks.

    | lokito
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  • AymanH


    Hello Seomoz people ! I've been struggling for some time now with an international website project. It's gonna be an:international website with joomla. To sum up: We have an international company The company has 13 subsidiaries worldwide (same products, different names) The company doesn't have enough resources to get 13 independent websites Some subsidiaries work in one country / one language, some others on a region (several countries, several languages) Thanks to your community we decided to: Get a main website company.com Get subsidiaries folders (middle east, oceania and south america will be easier to link to their subsidiary) .com/asia .com/middle-east .com/oceania .com/south-america .com/uk .com/usa .com/fr .com/es .com/de .com/ma .com/dz .com/it We also need to: Get some websites in different languages .com/asia-cn .com/asia-en etc. Now how do we do to manage: Regional websites (the first 4th on the upper list) Google allows to affect a website to a country not region Will they compete with the .com ? How do we set up them for google ? How do we avoid duplicate content and keep local ranking .com/asia-en/services1.html will have the exact same content that_.com/services1.html_ If we use canonical from _.com/asia-en/services1.htm_l to _.com/services1.html , d_oes that mean /asia will not rank in asia ? Hope you can help us to figure us the best solution for this good project ! Thanks a lot. Florian

    | AymanH
    1
  • rayvensoft


    Canadian client with a suite number in a shopping center. Does it matter if the NAP is the way it's displayed on Google Maps? Canada Post (or in the US, USPS)? Or does it only matter that all the citations are as similar as possible to one another? Canada Post says: 400-3033 IMMEL ST
    ABBOTSFORD BC  V2S 6S2 But if I look that up on maps.google.com, it defaults to: 3033 Immel St Abbotsford, BC V2S 4L3, CanadaAnd the client does not appear in the list of about 20+ businesses at this address.Which should I use for Places (and I assume any other citation)?

    | rayvensoft
    1
  • reisefm


    Hi Mozzers, I have a wordpress installation and work on a hotel website in three different languages: English, German, Spanish. In order to manage each language as a regional or global website, I started to give the website the names like: de.hotelnamen.com, es.hotelname.com (Hotel is in Costa Rica, maybe cr.hotelname.com is even better???) and hotelname.com. The possibility of WPML to manage my multilingual blog is good and the Yoast plugin gives me the sitemaps I want for each language. Because it is a hotel I have to have a global page which should serve the world if they try to find the hotel, right? That's why i put hotelname.com as a global page in English and registered the sitemaps and page on my webmaster account in countries as "not listed". For de.hotelname.com I choose Germany on another webmaster account and for es.hotelname.com Costa Rica (the country in which the Hotel is located). Unfortunately, after three month I don't receive good results with that methode. The hotelname.com adress is always the page which comes up in all search engines. I my tactic wrong? Where is my mistake? I would like to have hotelname.com in the rankings of all search engines beside of google Germany because for the German market I have the German version. Same in Costa Rica. Thanks for some ideas...

    | reisefm
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  • Liamis


    We have a German website at (http://de.pa.com) and we can't get the search engines to index the site in German language.  For some reason the GoogleBot, BingBot, etc are crawling de.pa.com and displaying English text on the SERP.  I've tried testing via web-sniffer.net and Google Webmaster tools which both are crawling de.pa.com in English. We know the page titles/meta descriptions are in English which we are updating to German, but I'm curious to why search engines are indexing our German site and displaying on the SERP as English text when the entire content of the site is in German. Thank you, Brian

    | Liamis
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  • seoseoseos


    Hi all, we have a website with 2 domains name to point to it: -hacerfamilia.es -hacerfamilia.com We used to take .es like the default domain, so the .com redirected to the .es with a 301 header. But now we decided to change to .com because it is more international. So default domain would be .com. We made a multiple redirect to .es to .com with a simple htaccess rule, with a 301 header. The hosting it is the same, and the address too, for the two domains. Should we take any other steps? Thank you.

    | seoseoseos
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  • NileCruises


    Our website www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk has slowly slipped down the page one ranking of Google.co.uk for our main search terms after several years at number one. I've looked closely at our site as much as a "non-techie" can do but wondered if anyone could recommend a good SEO company/individual that could take an overview and then help us try and climb back up the page one rankings. As a small business I dont' have tons of money to spend but I realise the importance of good SEO and I am prepared to spend as much as is required within reason. I thought members of SEOMoz were more likely to be able to recommend good SEO companies rather than me trawl around the web trying to find a company or individual that might suit our needs. I hope this is a suitable question for this forum but apologise in advance if it isn't. Colin

    | NileCruises
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  • DocdataCommerce


    I'm trying to wrap my head around various options when it comes to international SEO, specifically how to rank well in countries that share a language, and the risk of duplicate content in these cases. We have a chance to start from scratch because we're switching to a new e-commerce platform, and we were looking into using hreflang. Let's assume an example of a .com webshop that targets both Austria and Germany. One option is to include both language and region in the URL, and mark these as such using hreflang: webshop.com/de-de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
    webshop.com/de-at/german-language-content  (with hreflang de-at) Another option would be to only include the language in the URL, not the region, and let Google figure out the rest: webshop.com/de/german-language-content (with hreflang de) Which would be better? The risk of inserting a country, of course, is that you're introducing duplicate content, especially since for webshops there are usually only minor differences in content (pricing, currency, a word here and there). If hreflang is an effective means to make sure that visitors from each country get the correct URL from the search engines, I don't see any reason not to use this way. But if search engines get it wrong, users will end up in the wrong page and will have to switch country, which could result in conversion loss. Also, if you only use language in the URL, is it useful at all to use hreflang? Aren't engines perfectly able to recognize language already? I don't mention ccTLDs here because most of the time we're required to use a .com domain owned by our customer. But if we did, would that be much better? And would it still be useful to use hreflang then? webshop.de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
    webshop.at/german-language-content (with hreflang de-at) Michel Hendriks
    Docdata Commerce

    | DocdataCommerce
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  • Maxoulala


    Bonjour! If with rel="alternate" hreflang="x" we can indicate to Google that an URL have translated equivalents of a page, are the links metrics splited between all pages or Google considers all the pages as only one? Thanks! Maxime

    | Maxoulala
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  • dennis.globalsign


    Hi there, We're trying to solve a problem with one of our domains, we have a .eu CCTLD and we're trying to implement hreflang tags. On our US and UK sites, we use "en-us" and "en-gb", but it's not clear how to approach this european problem, as there is not a "en-eu" tag. The site is in English, but serves several European countries speaking different languages. What's the best hreflang code to use in this situation? Any help much appreciated, Thanks!

    | dennis.globalsign
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  • JonathanLeplang


    Hello, I live in Belgium and in this country you've 3 languages : french, dutch and german. I've customers from many countries : France, Nederlands,... and for my website in ".be" (we'll say www.mysite.be for example) I've choosen the french language. My question is can I've the same content on my site : www.mysite.be and www.mysite.fr without duplicate content or should I forgot using www.mysite.fr to avoid the D.C. problem? And with my site : www.mysite.be should I've more difficult to rank in France for example? Thank you for your answer, Jonathan

    | JonathanLeplang
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  • StevieCC


    I read with interest the recent post on international SEO and the top level domain architecture approaches to local content: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview#jtc135670 The issue I have is a little more complex: The business sells a wide variety of products (37) but one is by far and away the biggest and most popular.  This means that due to the link profile of the various country sites and HQ site, search engines categorise the site according to this product (this is easily seen with the Google Adplanner) and the other product lines suffer as a result. The current architecture is to have a .com site and then individual ccTLD country sites, again with all products on each site.  This creates an issue as in most countries the brand is not strong (compared to the keyword names and search volumes of the products) and so it is not that effective in generating organic traffic.  The .com hogs much of the inbound links and the country sites themselves are not that well optimised for a number of reasons. A proposed solution has been to leverage the strength of the .com and the  search volume for the product names, and to produce thematic sites based on each product: productA.brand.com
    productB.brand.com
    productC.brand.com In this way, the sites, content and link profiles are aligned around the more desirable products and we can expect improved organic search performance as a result (or at least ensure relevant traffic finds the relevant content fast). In terms of providing localised content, the plan was to use content mirroring and to then assign each content mirror to a specific geo-location using the webmaster tools console (and other SE equivilents).  This is shown I think in one of Rand's videos. ProductA.brand.com/de/de  Germany site for product A with unique German content
    ProductA.brand.com/fr/fr   French site for product A with unique French content This makes economic sense to me as to utilise the ccTLDs would result in hundreds of separate sites with all the licence and server considerations that entails.  For example, for product A alone we would have to produce: productA.brand.de
    productA.brand.fr
    productA.brand.cn
    productA.brand.jp
    ect ect ect This just would not be sustainable in license/server costs alone across 37 products and 24 countries. However, I saw in a recent presentation at SES London that (auto) geo-targeting is risky, often doesn't work well for SEO and can even be seen as cloaking. I think the above strategy could still work, but perhaps we should avoid the use of auto-geotargetting altogether and hope the search engines alone do their job in getting users to the right content as we optimise the unique content for each country (and if they don't, ensure our desgn, UX and country selectors do the job instead). SEO guru consensus is to use the ccTLD if you own it, but as described above, in the real world that just isn't possible or practical given the company's strategic position. Which leads to the final question- we do own the brand ccTLDs- if they are directed back to the content mirror for the country on the .com, is there any SEO benefit in doing so aside from directing back any link juice associated with the domain)?

    | StevieCC
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  • ojwilliams8


    Many of the massive sites (like Amazon) are using both .com and .co.uk. For smaller sites, is this a good way to rank highly on Google.com and .co.uk? Is there a way to do this without duplicating content or diluting link juice?

    | ojwilliams8
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  • jombay


    Take a look at freelancer.com and freelancer.in. Both have the same content. I check for rel=canonical and freelancer.in has one to itself. Not to the .com version. Both the sites are indexed in Google as well. Do you think high authority sites like freelancer can get away with duplicate content?

    | jombay
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  • DocdataCommerce


    We have made the decision to start using a new ecommerce platform, which means we will have to migrate our existing webshops. Some of our new customers will be launched on the new platform straight away. Some limitations we used to have when it comes to URL structure have mostly been lifted, so I've been thinking what the perfect URL would be in terms of SEO. Since we mostly work for pan European customers, the multi regional and multi lingual aspect is a very important one, as it's important to rank well in all countries. I've always figured that even though it would be good to integrate country into the URL somehow to indicate to the engines that this content is meant for a certain country (either by using local TLDs or indicating using Webmaster Tools that a certain subdirectory or subdomain is targeting a country specifically), there are multiple countries with the same language (for instance, they speak French in France but also in Belgium), which could cause duplicate content issues: www.webshop.com/be/fr/french-product-name
    www.webshop.com/fr/fr/french-product-name I guess it won't matter much whether you use fr.webshop.com, www.webshop.com/fr or www.webshop.fr, it's mostly the decision IF you want to include country somehow. What do you all think, is this important? Or is the multi lingual component enough for pages to rank well in several countries? For instance, if we were to use the language component only: www.webshop.com/fr/french-product-name Would this have the potential to rank well in both the French speaking part of Belgium, as well as France? Michel

    | DocdataCommerce
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  • ILM_Marketing


    Hi All.  I have a client looking to expand their industrial services to southeast Asia (Vietnam and Indonesia specifically right now).  Does anyone know of an SEO/Online Marketing firm local to that region that may be able to help them network with businesses and industries there? I've gone through the SEOmoz member database and reached out to a couple people with agencies in that area but never heard back from them. I personally thought a local firm would be more beneficial to the client but I'm also open to suggestions on ways that we might be able to help them market their services online from the US. Thanks so much! Megan

    | ILM_Marketing
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  • reisefm


    Hi, i am looking to register a domain name for an island in the english/spanish spoken part of America. The names for xxxxisland.com are already registered but xxxxisla.com is free. Does it has any effect on my SEO when i use a shorter version of island respectively the spanish name for island? Thanks

    | reisefm
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  • iain


    I understand that the relative importance of domain extensions - .com is better than .biz, etc. - is a bit of a myth. I also believe that using a ccTLD is likely to affect rankings for that site outwith that country. But, is the opposite true? Will giving a site a ccTLD help improve its SEO in that country? If you have a global organisation, is it better to establish a series of country specific sites - ccTLD - or to purchase the country specific domains and point them to the.com (if only to stop cyber-squatting)? What if the company wanted to establish regional microsites that feature content about products only available within that region? Many thanks, Iain

    | iain
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  • daracreative


    Hey guys, I was hoping somebody might be help with my current dilema. We have a international website due to go live soon which has changed its brand name. The organisation whom we are working for want to leave the old site live for around 6 months after the new site goes live. The reason for keeping the site live is for users to be able to access many of the resources which will not be transferred over in time for when the new site goes live.The plan is to have a message on old site letting visitors know we have moved site. I'm concerned about this approach in terms of loosing some of the domain authority if the sites bounce rate starts increase due to people clicking over to the new site. Then in 6 months time when we finally redirect to the new site we might loose out on some of the domain authority. Is this something to be concerned about?The site currently has PR of 7 and Domain Authority score of 70.Cheers,Rob

    | daracreative
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  • EcommerceSite


    Going through our webmaster tools setting I noticed someone had checked Target Users and selected United States. Most of our business is in the US but we still do some internationally. If I uncheck it will I lose rankings in the US?

    | EcommerceSite
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  • loopyal


    Yesterday, I changed all of my front page structure from tables to divs. I think this has improved page load time, but I am in Australia, so it is hard to tell. Using Firefox with Firebug tells me the load time here is between 4 to 6 seconds. One of my editors is in Houston, and she says 2 seconds. I'm hoping you can help me, it will take less than a minute. Can you load the front page and tell me how long it takes - and where you are - Country/State Also, if you click to a story, how long does that take? http://newsblaze.com I am working on the story page template too, but it will take longer to get right, because it also is the same for 3 other areas, so I have to be more careful. It would also be nice to get a before and after snapshot from various places. The reason I care about shaving off a second or two is that I've been told google may now care about loading speed, and they are rejecting my new adsense account because of poor user experience on my site, and I have no idea what they mean by that, so I'm clutching at straws.

    | loopyal
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  • Paul78


    Hi there, I was ranking pretty well for highly competitive keywords without actually doing any link building please see graph attached, so I thought I have an opportunity here in getting to page 1 for these keywords, the plan was to write fresh & original content for these pages, because hey Google loves fresh content, right? Well it seems NOT, after one week of these pages been re-written (21st Feb 2012), all of these pages dropped all together, please note: all the pages were under the same directory: /health/flu/keyword-1 /health/flu/keyword-2 and so on... I have compared both pages as I have back ups of the old content On Average there are more words on each of the new pages compared to previous pages Lower bounce rate by at least 30% (Via Adwords) More time on site by at least 2 minutes (Via Adwords) More page visits (Via Adwords) Lower keyword density, on average 4% (new pages) compared to 9% (old content) across all pages So since the end of February, these pages are still not ranked for these keywords, the funny thing is, these keyword are on page 1 of Bing. Another NOTE: We launched an irish version of the website, using the exact same content, I have done all the checks via webmaster tools making sure it's pointing to Ireland, I have also got hreflang tags on both website (just in case) If anyone can help with this that would be very much appreciated. Thanks usD8G.gif

    | Paul78
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  • Plorex


    I'm starting a new SEO project whereby I'll be targeting UK search engines only such as Google.co.uk, (I'm from the states) and I'm gathering all the information I can get on this topic Obviously, I got a CO.UK TLD, and hosting/IP is UK based, but can anyone shed light on other techniques that has worked for you, Besides of the above here is some advice I picked up so far; Regional directory listings,
    Inbound and outbound inks from/to UK based websites,
    Geographic targeting in Google webmaster tools,
    British slang... What else is there?
    Much appreciated

    | Plorex
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  • greenfoxone


    Does the location of my Domain Registrar affect SEO? For example, if my hosting company is in the U.S., but the domain registrar is overseas. Also, is it better to have both services be met by one company?

    | greenfoxone
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  • Hurf


    Hi, I have a small number of exact match domains, both country specific TLDs and also the Generic TLD dot com and dot net. They are: ExactMatch**.Com**
    ExactMatch**.Net** ExactMatch**.Co.Uk**
    ExactMatch**.Ca**
    ExactMatch**.Co.Nz**
    ExactMatch**.Co.Za** We have already successfully launched our UK site using the exact match .co.uk and this is currently number 2 in the UK SERPS for the Google, Yahoo and Bing. They are/will be niche specific classified ad sites, which are Geographically targeted by country (to Engish speakers in the main) and each region is likely to have a minumum of 2,000 unique listings submitted over the course of a year of so. My question (FINALLY) is this: Am I better to build one large global site (will grow to approx. 12,000 listings) using EXACTMATCH.Com with .com - targeting US users and then geo-targeted sub directories (ExactMatch.Com/Nz etc)  - each sub dir targeted to the matching geographic area in webmaster tools, or use the ccTLDs and host each site in the country with perhaps (each site growing to approx 2,000 listings) I could use the ccTLDs just for marketing/branding  onlyand redirect these to the specific sub directory of the .com site? I am aware that there is one main ccTLD that I cannot get .Com.Au (as I am not a resident of Australia - and it is already in use.) so I was wondering if the single site with .Com/AU/ etc might help me better target that country? If I use each ccTLD as separate sites I suppose I could use the largely redundant .net to target Australia? Your thoughts and advice would be most welcome. Thanks! An additional bit of intormation (or two) the .com is circa 2004. The product advertised is a reasonably bulky (perhaps 6kgs boxed) physical product and therefore the seller is unlikely to want to ship globally - will this make them shy away from a global site - even one divided into global sub sections? FYI Seller can specify in their listing Will Ship To ....... I would be open to looking at using the front page of the .Com site as a page which visitors select the country they wish to buy/sell on.  (IF it is the general consensus that it is better to create one large site.) Consider also please how the end user is likely to percieve the benefits to them of one LARGE SITE versus TARGETED SITE - I know the .Com would be divided into geographic sub directories, but I am not sure if they won't see an additinal benefit to the ccTLD - Does this add a degree of reassurance and relevance that a .com/ccTLD cannot provide? I suppose I am biased by the fact that ebay use ccTLDs? Thanks again - and please forgive my tone which may suggest I am playing devil's advocate here. I am very torn on this issue.

    | Hurf
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  • IvanIrishRecruiter


    Does anyone have any experience on the change in the rankings (positive or negative) after a site implemented a content delivery network (CDN) like Akamai or Level 3?

    | IvanIrishRecruiter
    1
  • simonsw


    Hi I'm looking for ‘location search’ functionality to cover an extensive range of global locations  to help increase the visibility I have been looking  to use Google Places functionality, which has an extremely broad list of locations Would anyone have any experience in using Google places to power their websites internal search as well as if there is a cost to integrate it and other factors to be aware of? Thanks Simon

    | simonsw
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  • LukeHutchinson


    Hello all, I know that Matt Cutt's stated a while back that .co domains would become recognized by google as a gtld and was wondering how google views .im domains. I was looking at using a couple for work but have a generic name .im of my own that when checked in webmaster tools is locked to the isle of man in the geographical targeting option. I was wondering if anyone can advise me on this and if possible provide some feedback based on experience with .im domains. Thanks.

    | LukeHutchinson
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  • Philoups


    Hey all, Quite new to SEO although I tried to educate myself as much as I could. I just spent (really) a lot of time doing the onsite optimization of a few key pages of a website in 3 languages (in which I'm more or less conversational - with the help of Google Translate). I know content should not be misleading and feel natural. I think the result is natural but I'm not sure... I optimized as much as I could so as to reach an "A" grade as per SEOMoz tool for each page, for 1-4 keywords per page.  I feel sometimes I stretched a bit, but not sure what "stretching" is given my lack of experience. So I was wondering if some of you could tell me what they thought and if there was some obvious don'ts in my work. Here are a few key pages I have optimized: The homepage: http://goo.gl/00Fti The search results page: http://goo.gl/b1fxE The property page: http://goo.gl/t2GdY The destinations page: http://goo.gl/0Kc0l Note that the other versions of the page - Italian & Spanish - may be more awkward, so I welcome your opinions for these as well (dropdown on top of the page to change the language). Thanks!!

    | Philoups
    0
  • MatthewBarby


    Hi All, Looking for a bit of help here. We are quoting for a big SEO project on a Russian website and need high quality Russian link builders to work on building the links to the website. As well as this, we need to have a little look at the on-page content (but that will be more of just straight translation stuff, nothing big). If you're a Russian link builder and could help me here then get in touch. I only want ethical, white-hat and relevant links being built to the website so if that's not what you do, please don't waste my time 🙂 Also, this should really go without saying but I'll mention it anyway... you MUST speak Russian! Look forward to hearing from you. Matt matt@wowinternet.net

    | MatthewBarby
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  • lcourse


    We will be launching 60 new ccTLD country versions of an established core website.
    Quality, human translated content in 35 languages.
    We have a CSS dropdown menu with the 60 country flags and country/language name as anchor text. Formatted as deeplinks to the corresponding pages in the 60 country versions, that we planned to add on each page. How would you recommend to implement the interlinking between these 60 ccTLD? My concerns are: won't we dillute the link value of our links in the main page content too much with links to 60ccTLD on each page? may we trigger a google penalty as the new ccTLD have no other links yet and each page will have the same anchor text and links from exactly the same 60 domains. would you  place the country dropdown rather at the bottom of the page (e.g.  footer) to avoid that google will not crawl all links in main content page. Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated

    | lcourse
    1
  • doctorSIM


    Hi, What is the best way to target a language that has slight variations in it without actually targetting specific countries? Scenario: Ecommerce site that sells mobile phones in Spanish, initially created to target Spanish from Spain. We call a mobile phone a "movil" Now we want to target LatinAmerican users, which also use Spanish with variations, the most notable being mobile phone called "celular". We don't want to create specific sites via new ccTLDs, nor subdomains, no directories for each new country, and we want to avoid having two sites - one for spain, one for latinamerica- given that the only major difference is we say MOVIL in spain and CELULAR in LatinAmerica. What is Googles take if we simply decide to modify THAT specific keyword in each page where it is mentioned?  Either by: a) Server based. IP Detect. that is, render the page with either one or the other term b) Javascript based. i.e. Have BOTH terms on all pages but using Javascript show/hide according to user preferences. c) Display the keywords with different font sizes/emphasis, depending on the visitor. Any ideas?

    | doctorSIM
    0
  • gregelwell


    I have a new client from Australia who has a website on a .com.au domain. He has the same domain name registered for .com. Example: exampledomain.com.au, and exampledomain.com He started with the .com.au site for a product he offers in Australia. He's bringing the same product to the U.S. (it's a medical device product) and wants us to build a site for it and point to the .com. Right now, he has what appears is the same site showing on the .com as on the .com.au. So both domains are pointing to the same host, but there are separate sections or directories within the hosting account for each website - and the content is exactly the same. Would this be viewed as duplicate content by Google? What's the best way to structure or build the new site on the .com to get the best SEO in the USA, maintain the .au version and not have the websites compete or be viewed as having duplicate content? Thanks, Greg

    | gregelwell
    0
  • ba_seomoz


    Hello, I'm looking for some insight in an area that I don't have much experience in - hoping the community can help! We are a healthcare staffing company serving clients in the U.S. (www.bartonassociates.com). We are interested in attracting clients in Australia and New Zealand. I'm wondering if anyone as experience with best practices for doing so (both from an SEO and PPC perspective). Would it be best to purchase .au and .nz domains for these landing pages and link back to our US site for more information (or even recreate a modified version of our US site for .au and .nz).  My concern here is duplicate content issues, among other things. Or, would it be better to create Australia and New Zealand focused landing pages on our US site and drive PPC there?  My concern here is that we would never get organic traffic from Australia and New Zealand to our US site, in light of the competition.  Also, the messaging would be a bit mixed if targeting all three countries. Our core term is "locums" and "locum tenens". Greatly appreciate any insight from you guys. Thanks, Jason

    | ba_seomoz
    0
  • www.webuyanycar.com


    We launched our business in the UK many years ago using a .com domain and have built up good link equity back to our www site.  Last year, we launched the same business in the US and host the US site on a "us." sub domain.  We have used Google Webmaster Tools to demarcate the two websites so that the www site is set to target the UK and the "us." sub domain is set to target the US. Our organic search results from Google UK for the UK business are fine but when our US customers Google brand terms the www UK site takes precedence in organic search.  To complicate this further, the sitelinks within the search results include a mixture of pages from the www UK site and the "us." US site.  Google clearly has some difficulty understanding that the two sites are for two different geographic audiences. We have a good relationship with Google and they have indicated (with appropriate disclaimers) that we might consider aligning the URL structures for both sites to reduce the precedence that the www site currently receives.  The www home page will become an International portal and the UK and US URL structures will be aligned.  We have two options: Change both sites to subdomains so that we have "uk.xxxxx.com" and "us.xxxxx.com" linked to an International portal at the www subdomain Use sub folders so that we have "www.xxxxx.com/uk/" and "www.xxxxx.com/us/" again linked from the www subdomain We're comfortable with use of 301 redirects and canonicals to change the structure in a search engine friendly way but cannot agree internally whether sub domains or sub folders is the way to go.  Unfortunately we're to far down the line to seperate by tld. Anyone have a strong opinion on the best approach? Thanks, Jeremy

    | www.webuyanycar.com
    0
  • lans2787


    Hello people, I would like some help with this question... I am building 2 websites www.domain.com.ec  and www.domain.com , both on the same languages, and same content, but the domain.com.ec will show a different price for local ecommerce and focus to target Ecuador... the www.domain.com will sell on all the other spanish languages countries with a fob price... So my question ... is there any way to fail into the duplicate content on the google eyes? What could be the best way to do it? Using the multistore option, with different cctld could change anything? Thank you guys

    | lans2787
    0
  • detailedvision


    Hellooooo the Moz community ! (#superexcited, # firstpost) Here's my problem. I'm working for a client specialised in Corporate Relocation to London for French families. (I'm reworking the entire site from the ground up, so I can manoeuvre pretty easily) The thing is, these families will either be : Searching on Google FR but mostly in English (French as well) Searching on Google UK but mostly in French ! (and of course, English as well) To be honest, I'm really not sure what strategy I should go with. Should I just target each local market in its native language and google will pick up the right language if people are searching in the "opposite" language ? I'd love some tips to help get me started. Sadly, I don't have a lot of data yet. (Client didn't even have tracking up on their site before I came in). So far here's what I got (on very small number of visitors): Location: 50+% from UK / 20+% from France.
    Language : 60+% En / 35+% Fr Thank you. Tristan

    | detailedvision
    0
  • PixelKicks


    I run an extremely popular news & community website at http://www.onedirection.net, but we're having a few ranking issues in Google.co.uk. The site gets most of its traffic from the USA which isnt a bad thing - but for our key term "one direction", we currently don't rank at all on Google.co.uk. The site is located on a server based in Manchester, UK, and we used to rank very well earlier this year - fluttering about in position 5-7 most of the time. However earlier this year, around July, we started to fall down to page 2 or 3, and at the start of this month we don't rank at all for "one direction" on Google.co.uk. On Google.com however we're very strong, always on page one. We're definitely indexed on .co.uk, just not for main search term - which I find a bit frustrating. All the content on our site is unique, and we write 2-4 stories every day. We have an active forum too, so a lot of our content is user-generated. We've never had any "unnatural link building" messages in Webmaster Tools, and our link profile looks fine to me. Do we just need more .co.uk links, or are we being penalised for something? (I can't imagine what though). It certainly seems that way though. Another site, "www.onedirection.co.uk" which is never updated and has a blatant ad for something completely unrelated on its homepage, ranks above us at the moment-  which I find quite frankly appalling as our site is pretty much regarded as the worlds most popular One Direction news and fan site. We've spent the last few months improving the page-load times of our site, and we've reduced any unneccesary internal linking on the site. Approx 2 months ago we launched a new forum on the site, 301'ing all the old forum links to the new one, so that could have had an impact on rankings - but we'd expect to see an impact on Google.com as well if this was an issue. We definitely feel that we should be ranking higher on Google.co.uk. Does anyone have any ideas what the iproblems could be? Cheers, Chris.

    | PixelKicks
    0
  • PinpointDesigns


    Hi All, I'm currently doing a lot of work for a UK client who has multiple sites outside the UK (all part of the same business). We're currently discussing the option of us handling all of his SEO for his German, French, Spanish and Italian sites too, but we only have access to one person in the office who can speak French and Spanish. They're currently booked up on other jobs that we can't really move them off, so I'm looking for options of outsourcing some of the content writing. My question is, does anyone know of any high quality content writing services that have writers available to write for the countries languages above? We're going to focus initially on their on-site strategy and building up their high quality content. At the moment, they don't have much relevant content on their website, so we're going to initially look at this. Moving forward, we'll be looking at their off-site strategy and trying to find areas to submit high quality articles, look at guest blogging and PR opportunities. Any tips anyone has on this side (in terms of outsourcing to native speakers) would be quite useful too! Many thanks,
    Lewis

    | PinpointDesigns
    0
  • GreatFire.org


    If I google "greatfire" I find the Chinese version of our website (zh.greatfire.org) before the English version (en.greatfire.org). This is not on the Chinese-language version of Google. Why is this? Our site even has a language indicator () and also hints of where the English version is (). The same thing happens if I google "freeweibo". I find https://freeweibo.com but not https://freeweibo.com/en/, even though we indicate that's the English version (). Any ideas?

    | GreatFire.org
    0
  • Talooma


    Will using CDN servers, where your website is synced (cached?) across multiple servers, have an effect on the SEO of your domain?

    | Talooma
    0
  • sedwards


    Hi Mozzers, We have a marketplace with 20k+ products, most of which are written in English. At the same time we support several different languages. This changes the chrome of the site (nav, footer, help text, buttons, everything we control) but leaves all the products in their original language. This resulted in all kinds of duplicate content (pages, titles, descriptions) being detected by SEOMoz and GWT. After doing some research we implemented the on page  rel="alternate" hreflang="x", seeing as our situation almost perfectly matched the first use case listed by Google on this page http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077. This ended up not helping at all. Google still reports duplicate titles and descriptions for thousands of products, months after setting this up. We are thinking about changing to the sitemap implementation rel="alternate" hreflang="X", but are not sure if this will work either. Other options we have considered include noindex or blocks with robots.txt when the product language is not the same as the site language. That way the feature is still open to users while removing the duplicate pages for Google. So I'm asking for input on best practice for getting Google to correctly recognize one product, with 6 different language views of that same product. Can anyone help? Examples: (Site in English, Product in English) http://website.com/products/product-72 (Site in Spanish, Product in English) http://website.com/es/products/product-72 (Site in German, Product in English) http://website.com/de/products/product-72 etc...

    | sedwards
    0
  • fdep


    My website is currently hosted with Go-daddy and the hosting server is in the USA on a Linux platform. The problem is, the response time for my Australian Customers, is too slow, as a result, I decided to move to another Go Daddy Hosting server in the Asia Pacific Region. This has been completed successfully, however I think there may be some impact on my rankings. Can you advise if there are any specific things that I must do, when I move to a different hosting server with the same company or an alternative company. Note: We are not changing domain names or content, purely just moving to a hosting server closer to where our customers are based. Looking forward to your response.

    | fdep
    0

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