Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Factors that affect Google.com vs .ca
-
Though my company is based in Canada, we have a .com URL, we're hosted on servers in the U.S., and most of our customers are in the U.S. Our marketing efforts are focused on the U.S. Heck, we even drop the "u" in "colour" and "favour"!
Nonetheless we rank very well in Google.ca, and rather poorly on Google.com.
One hypothesis is that we have more backlinks from .ca domains than .com, but I don't believe that to be true. For sure, the highest quality links we have come from .coms like NYTimes.com.
Any suggestions on how we can improve the .com rankings, other than keeping on with the link building?
-
Thanks for letting us know how things worked out Aspirant.
Andy
-
Final verdict:
I took the plunge. Even though our product is geography agnostic, I changed our Webmaster Tools setting to "U.S."
Sure enough, we immediately saw some improvements in the google.COM rankings. Not much of an impact on .CA, and any loss here was definitely made up in the new .COM traffic.
I'll be doing a deeper dive into the data later.
Thanks everyone.
-
Hey Rob,
I have a bit of exp with this - had a Canadian based site that wanted to target the states. We were ranking well for .CA and not so good in .COM. I actually did this in WMT for a site - set geo-targetting to USA - and after a week or so started noticing a huge jump in .COm for a lot of keywords. What was great was that the rankings in .CA stayed consistent.
The only drop I noticed was in the .CA (Canada Only) searches. These completely dropped off the map. But normal searches in google.ca were fine.Don't know if this will always happen, but this is my experience.
-
I had exactly the same with a spanish site of mine .es for a long time i was first in google.com but knowhere to be found in google.es . Everybody kept telling me that this was not because i had a lot of .com link and none where .es But when time passed without any link changes the keywords aked well in google.es . So is it maybe the case the some countries are just a few months behind?
-
I have noticed that getting links from the appropriate TLD extension really determines where you rank on each google serps for the individual country.
you can search for sites related to yours for the specific TLD by putting inurl:.com in google along with your keywords.
the same thing works for all other extensions.
this makes finding .edu link opportunities a breeze for example
Besides link building you will want to make sure on webmaster tools you have set your targeted country to the country you want to rank best for. For example I have a site about college students which I've set to target the US since Canada mostly calls post secondary education University and College so the audience is split much more.
Hope this helps.
-
Sorry, I meant David Mihm -- oops!
-
I suspect having the settings in WMT set for the USA "might" hurt your performance in other areas, however the small company website (that gets 90% of its business from the USA) I mentioned in my prior response has the setting set to USA and it ranks #3 for it's main search term in both .ca and .com. Having claimed a Local Places account might also be an issue. I'd suggest you contact either Todd Mihm (http://www.davidmihm.com/blog) or Mike Blumenthal (http://blumenthals.com/blog) for an answer to that question.
-
Thanks for the answer. A couple of questions come to mind:
Won't setting our Google Webmaster Tools to United States hurt our performance in other parts of the world? So far I've made a point of ensuring that Webmaster Tools has us as not geo-specific ("Target users in: unlisted", on the Site Configuration > Settings screen of Webmaster Tools).
Also (on the advice of another SEO advisor) we verified our Google Places location, so is there a risk of sending mixed signals to Google and getting hurt by that?
-
The competition is usually stronger in the USA (.com) arena than in Canada (.ca). I have a little company site (with little work done in the way of SEO) that ranks #3 in both .ca and .com for "wheelchair trays". You may want to adjust your settings on Google WebMasterTools to ensure your site is set to United States rather than Canada. As David Kauzlaric has mentioned, you will definitely benefit from having more links from US based sites - I'd focus on that as a first step.
-
Still no breakthroughs on this issue. Our performance keeps improving on .ca and .com, which is obviously good, but our ranking on .com is always very, very far behind our .ca performance.
It's still a mystery to me, given that most of the inbound links are from U.S.-based, .com websites.
The only answer that works in my mind is that .ca uses a different algorithm. But I'm still very interested in hearing other thoughts!
Thanks,
Rob
-
Hi Rob,
Have you seen any changes with your rankings on Google.ca and Google.com? Do you have any other questions or comments you can add to help others that may be in a similar situation?
Here's hoping you got to enjoy two long weekends in a row from both countries!
-
Agree.
We did a link building campaign for a german website (dot de) and most of the links were from .com websites. They started to rank very well on google.com and google.de had only minor impacts. Is clear that the links should be from the same country zone if you want to rank in that particular area.
You should focus on links from .com domain - but that should be easier then building links from .ca.
You should also get a google maps account with your US location - if you have one. That alone should bring up your results in the US.
-
It's a pretty well known fact that non-US versions of Google are not using the same algorithm and therefore are "behind". This could be the case where you are employing methods that a couple years ago were effective and are working well for .CA but on .COM not as well.
The biggest thing you can do is work on high quality content and build links. Remember, linking is somewhere around 70% of the algorithm alone. Work on getting more .COM authoritative links from sites like NYT, USAToday, etc...
Also, if a good portion of your links are from .CA, that very well could affect it too!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does google ignore ? in url?
Hi Guys, Have a site which ends ?v=6cc98ba2045f for all its URLs. Example: https://domain.com/products/cashmere/robes/?v=6cc98ba2045f Just wondering does Google ignore what is after the ?. Also any ideas what that is? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarolynSC0 -
M.ExampleSite vs mobile.ExampleSite vs ExampleSite.com
Hi, I have a call with a potential client tomorrow where all I know is that they are wigged-out about canonicalization, indexing and architecture for their three sites: m.ExampleSite.com mobile.ExampleSite.com ExampleSite.com The sites are pretty large... 350k for the mobiles and 5 million for the main site. They're a retailer with endless products. They're main site is not mobile-responsive, which is evidently why they have the m and mobile sites. Why two, I don't know. This is how they currently hand this: What would you suggest they do about this? The most comprehensive fix would be making the main site mobile responsive and 301 the old mobile sub domains to the main site. That's probably too much work for them. So, what more would you suggest and why? Your thoughts? Best... Mike P.S., Beneath my hand-drawn portrait avatar above it says "Staff" at this moment, which I am not. Some kind of bug I guess.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Here's an example: I get a 404 error for this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all But a search for qjamba restaurant coupons gives a clear result as does this: site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all What is going on? How can this page be indexed but not in the Google cache? I should make clear that the page is not showing up with any kind of error in webmaster tools, and Google has been crawling pages just fine. This particular page was fetched by Google yesterday with no problems, and even crawled again twice today by Google Yet, no cache.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood2 -
Switching from .co to com?
I have a site that does pretty well on a .co domain, but would like to switch to over .com (we own the .com already). If we were to transfer .com and 301 redirect all the .co pages over to their .com version, would we suffer at all? What would you guys recommend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StickyWebz0 -
Location.href vs href?
I just got off a Google Hangout with John Mueller and was left a little confused about his response to my question. If I have an internal link in a div like widgetwill it have the same SEO impact as widget John said that as you are unable to attribute a nofollow in an onclick event it would be treated as a naked link and would not pass pagerank but still be crawled. Can anyone confirm that I understood it correctly? If so should all my links that have such an onclickevent also have an html ahref in the too? Such as widget Many times it is more useful for the customer to click on any area of a large div and not just the link to get to the destination intended? Clarification on this subject would be very useful, there is nothing easily found online to confirm this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Google is displaying wrong address
I have a client whose Google Places listing is not showing correctly. We have control of the page, and have the address verified by postcard. Yet when we view the listing it shows a totally different address that is miles away and on a totally different street. We have relogged into manage the business listing and all of the info is correct. We dragged the marker and submitted it to them that they had things wrong and left a note with the right address. Why would this happen and how can we fix it? Right now they rank highly but with a blatantly wrong address.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
.com and .edu difference
Hello, Can anyone tell me how big is the difference between a PR5 .com and a PR5 .edu Double, triple? How big? Cornel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornel_Ilea0