Ranking in Different Countries - Ecommerce site
-
My client has a .com ecommere site with UK-based serves and he wants to target two other countries (both English speaking).
By the looks of it, he wouldn't want to create separate local TLDs targeting each country, I therefore wanted to suggest adding subdomains / subfolders geo-targeted to each country that they want to target, however, I'm worried that this will cause duplicate content issues...
What do you think would be the best solution? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!
-
Great advice, thanks very much for your help!
-
I'm personally a fan of the subdomain method, though many sites quite successfully use subfolders.
You can use rel="alternate" and hreflang to tell Google there's another country or language variant of content. Full documentation for that is at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Good luck
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
-
How do hreflang attributes affect ranking?
We have a site in English. We are considering translating the site into Dutch. If we use a hreflang attribute does that mean we have to create a duplicate page in Dutch for each English page, or does Google auto-translate? How would duplicate pages, even if they are in a different language, affect ranking?
International SEO | | Substance-create0 -
How to not appear in incorrect country
Hi! I have a problem with the results in Google. My website ranks, but all countries appear in the search for example from Argentina.
International SEO | | SEO-Mediabros
I have the correct hreflang tags. How can I "block" the results of other countries? This is the site and this is the search example. Thank you! 🙂1 -
Google Analytics Search Console for International Countries
Hi Moz Community, Our e-commerce site is trying to gauge the opportunity of certain queries for specific countries. I'm trying to use the search console data presented in GA to do this. I'm looking at the top queries filtered by each country and also the top landing pages for each country as well. The non filtered data for queries and landing pages is completely different than by country and some if it looks wrong. For instance, our most popular query by impressions shows 0 query impressions in the US once filtered by country. Our site is based in the US so this doesn't make any sense, the same is true for landing pages. Is the queries and landing page data in GA under search console a combination of all countries? Since our target is set to the USA in search console is this data technically US based? How is this data so off? Thanks for answering!
International SEO | | znotes0 -
Poor Google.co.uk ranking for a UK based .net, but great Google.com
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.
International SEO | | PixelKicks0 -
Impact of Japanese .jp site duplicate content?
Our main website is at http://www.traxnyc.com and we just launched a Japanese version of the site at http://www.traxnyc.jp domain. However all the images used on the .jp site are linked from the .com site. Would this hurt me in Google at all for hotlinking images? Also there is quite a bit of duplicate content on the .jp site at the moment: only a few things have been translated to Japanese and for the most part the layouts and words are exactly the same (in English). Would this hurt my Google rankings in the US at all? Thanks for all your help.
International SEO | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0 -
Country name displayed after domain name in google SERP
our online shop targets clients in the US and worldwide (same URL - no subdirectories - currency changes based on IP). when searching in google.ie or google.no for our site google displays in the SERPS "US" or "United States" after the URL for our site, but for most other US competitors it does not show the country in the SERPS. I deleted our google places listing 2 weeks ago, since I suspected it may be related, but no change so far. In google webmaster tools we have targeted the shop domain to United States, which may be another factor. Unfortunately we can not undo this setting since without it our google US ranking for the most relevant competitive keyword drops from position 8 to position 100+. Server location is in Germany which despite lots of US links and US contact info and USD currency appparently makes google think that the site is not targeting the US. Does anybody know what triggers the country name in the SERPS (google places or webmaster tools or other) and can give advice if there is any way to get rid of it.
International SEO | | lcourse0 -
How to replace my .co.uk site with my .com site in the US Google results
My customer and I are based in the UK. My customer's site, www.blindbolt.co.uk has been around for years. Last year we launched their American site, www.blindboltusa.com. Searching on google.com (tested both via proxy and using the gl=us querystring trick), a search for blind bolt on the US Google returns our www.blindbolt.co.uk site. We would like it to show our www.blindboltusa.com website in US searches. Webmaster tools has the Geographic Target set correctly for each site. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions please? Thanks.
International SEO | | OffSightIT0 -
What's the best strategy for checking international rankings?
Hi There- I am looking to optimize sites serving the UK and Austrailia markets. I feel like I have a good handle on how to go about doing that, but what I am fuzzy on is, what's the best way to monitor the SERPs for the keywords I am targeting. I know based on experience that if I just search google.com.au from here in the states, my results will be 'americanized' and may/probably won't accurately reflect what someone would see if they were search from Austrailia. Are there any good tools or tactics for seeing what searchers in the countries I am focusing on woudl see? Thanks! Jason
International SEO | | phantom0