Targeting multiple geo locations with single site
-
I am working on a project for three countries , i have geotargeted the the root directory to one location , and 2 sub directories to the other 2 locations, its been more than a month but i dont see google acknowledging the same for the 2 sub directories while its has updated for root domain. Additional can you please share some tips for ranking a domain in gulf countries like UAE , saudi etc . because the regular stuff like directory submission doesnt seem to be working.
Would really appreciate ya suggestions & ideas
Thanks
-
Using hreflang is ideal for your situation with all your sites are in English. You may wish have have one site as a the default english language site and the other two targeted to specific countries (in this example UK and US).
Here's example of hreflang implementation to place in the head of your pages.
I would tread very carefully if using canonical with hreflang as Google no longer recommends it, although it doesn't rule it out comepletely either! Take a look at [this link](http://www.ingenuitydigital.co.uk/News/google-no-longer-recommends-relcanonical-hreflang-tags-1820.aspx) to find out more.
-
Subdirectories for all locations are in the same language i.e English so , in this hreflang tag applicable for this .Will this also eliminate the content duplicacy issue as I tried rel= canonical tag , But I believe doing so stop indexing of the canonicalized pages , which I do not want .Thanks.....
-
Have you created a site map for each of your sub-directories and set a geographic target for each in GWT? In addition, depending on your content, and if you are duplicating it across the three countries, this may be an opportunity to make use of hreflang in order that you can tell Google which pages are alternatives of one another in order that the correct ones in served in SERPs.
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
-
Are sites that "smell of SEO" being demoted?
I'm working with a site owner who recently hired an SEO to work on just one particular type of keyword. It seems like the more work the SEO did, the lower the keyword gradually dropped. Granted, the "work" is pretty low quality - anchor texted bookmarks, comments and low quality articles. We're doing an experiment where we are going to disavow those links and see if the previous rankings return. Another site that I am consulting with has a lot of good natural links and then some anchor texted links, but from decent sources - some guest posts (on good sites - not a spammy site that exists only for guest posts) and some places where decent websites have agreed to link to the site. The anchor texted links do not make up very much of the overall anchor text. There is good diversity and lots of brand and url anchored links. It seems like the more the SEO does for this site, the more the rankings drop. And it's not all about anchor text. The SEO placed a link in a relevant directory, using the url as anchor...rankings dropped a little. They obtained an expired domain with relevant and very natural links and 301'd it to the new domain...rankings dropped several places. And so on. Occasionally the rankings will pop up a little, but overall it's a downward spiral. Check out this post by Gary Taylor. He did an experiment where he took an established site that was ranking well and threw some spammy links at it. To quote the article, 'every day goes by my ranking for the term “domains” is getting harder to maintain.' He recently tweeted that he has been removing and disavowing links and the rankings are returning. I was looking at searches for real estate related terms in different cities. In some cities, the top sites are ones that have ZERO obvious SEO done to them. There are sites ranking on page 3 that have been SEO'd, and not all of them have poor SEO. Many are what I would consider really well done. Some of the sites ranking on page 1 have under 10 links. There was one with 2 followed links and they were not from super authoritative sites! To complicate matters though, if you look at searches like "Toronto Real Estate Agents" some of the top sites have lots of keyword anchor texted links. Perhaps this should be a blog post rather than a Q&A, but I would love to hear some of your thoughts. My personal thought is that Google's main goal with Penguin and the unnatural links warnings is to make it so that not only is it not profitable to try to manipulate the SERPS, but that every time you try to do so, you potentially do your rankings harm. I used to say that Penguin could only affect a site on the date of a Penguin refresh, but I am thinking now that Google has managed to roll Penguin into the algorithm to some extent so that it can demote the majority of any work that smells of SEO. Thoughts?
Link Building | | MarieHaynes0 -
Why should I pay attention to sites that rank well in Bing?
If Google has the most market share, why would I use Bing to find backlinks. This question relates to Raven Tools using backlinks found on Bing for their Domain Research tool? Wouldn't that make their tool inferior to one that uses Google? Thanks, Sam
Link Building | | PGD20110 -
Linking to sites that link to porn or casinos, my site getting penalized?
I have some link exchanges with some sites to get web traffic but when i ran the bad neighborhood link checker, i found that one site links to some casinos and another site has one link to a porn site. Is this getting me penalized? should i remove the links to these sites? Thanks, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Where to put reciprocal links on my site?
I am starting a link bulding campaign and want to know where to put the reciprocal links on my site. Do i create a new specific Link Page? or do i place them on the pages that i want ranked higher? This is my first question on SEOMoz. Please be kind....:) Thanks
Link Building | | aidanlawlor1 -
How do you search blogs by targeted demo or language?
I need to make a list of blogs popular with 2 0something men who are bi-lingual (spanish/english) Any suggestions? Tried to use Open Site Explorer (it wasn't working) Thanks!
Link Building | | wpsoule0 -
Quality Article written, but on many sites.. Duplicate issue?
As part of a re-design of our site including the integration of our previously separate blog, we are using some of our quality articles regarding our industry to get backlinks to our site. Fortunately in our niche industry it is possible to find many out-dated articles, broken links, and just low-quality article content. So my question is.. if we have one article that would potentially allow us to get not just backlinks, but that actual article copied in full onto the other site, are there concerns about duplicate content and the link being useless? --Should I be changing the article a bit every time? --Should I ask them to only copy the first few sentences and link back to us to read more? - Other options? Cheers all
Link Building | | WebNooby0 -
Advice for brand new site
Dear All I have been an SEO for several years now, and have just laucnhed a new site www.householdsaver.co.uk its in its early stages as I expect to add a community option where people post deals and offers they have found, share them with friends etc My question is really are all the old seo practices still worth doing? Things like directory sites, blog comments, articles sites, social bookmarking etc.... (I have already built up twitter users on the account before the site went live) With Moz's trust factor is it best to go for highrank trust sites first or... I guess you could say that I am suffering from what do I do first and is it all still worth doing and what are the early pit falls to think about..? ie too many links too soon and from to high or to low trusted sites? Any comments from anyone who have put a new site live in the past couple of years would be appricated. Thanks James
Link Building | | JamesT2