Managing international sites
-
Hi all,
I am trying to figure out the best way to manage our international sites. We have two locations, 1 in the UK and 1 in the USA. I currently use GEOIP to identify the location of the browser and redirect them using a cookie to index.php?country=uk or index.php?country=usa. Once the cookie is set I use a 301 redirect to send them to index.php, so that Google doesnt see each url as duplicate content, which Webmaster tools was complaining about.
This has been working wonderfully for about a year. It means I have a single php language include file and depending on the browser location I will display $ or £ and change the odd ise to ize, etc.
Problem I am starting to notice is that we are starting to rank better and better in the USA search result. I am guessing this is because the crawlers must be based out of the USA. This is great, but my concern is that I am losing rank in the UK, which is currently where most of our business is done out of...
So I have done my research and because I have a .net will go for a /uk/ or /us/ sub folder and create two separate webmaster tools site and set them up to target each geographic location. Is this okay? http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#2
HERE IS THE PROBLEM: I don't was to have to run two separate website with two separate sets of copy. Also, I dont want to lose all the rank data on urls like: http://www.mysite.net/great-rank-result.html now becomes http://www.mysite.net/uk/great-rank-result.html. On top of this I will have two pages, the one just mentioned and now adding http://www.mysite.net/us/great-rank-result.html, which I presume would be seen as duplicate copy? (Y/n)
Can I use rel canonical to overcome this? How can I don't this without actually running the two pages. Could you actually have 1 site in the root folder and just use the same GEOIP techology to do a smart MOD REWRITE adding either UK or US to the url therefore being able to create two webmaster accounts targeting each geographic location?
Any advise is most welcome.
-
I would canonicalise the index.php and non index.php versions to avoid duplicate content here and ensure that the weight is combined into one version.
You may find that your rankings have changes as a result of this redirect process based on IP.
As far as I can see, any links that point to your homepage go through this process:
link -> www.mysite.com
--301--> www.mysite.net/index.php?country=usa/uk
--301--> www.mysite.net/index.php
This is going to send the links on a chain of 301's eventually ending up with duplicate content, which isn't best practise. Hopefully someone else can chip in on this one and advise if this is the case and potential solutions.
-
If you already have http://www.mysite.net/great-rank-result.html and it is ranking good, i would use that as the US version and don't create/redirect to http://www.mysite.net/us/great-rank-result.html. In other words US is the default. If you redirect you are losing page juice for no reason.
This can be tricky what you are trying to do because they are both in the English language and cultural variations aren't enough to create uniqueness. You should include UK and/or United Kingdom in your title tag and meta descriptions so that your tags are all unique! Also sends the signal to Google about the region. That content should be at least once on every page and custom footers and headers created of course for the UK template. If you have a UK office location use list it in the UK, same with the US and use microformats.
In most cases if you target the country correctly Google will get it right, but it's not guaranteed and results could get filtered (it's not a penalty) and if you come across this you would probably need to rewrite content which may or may not be an option depending on the size of your site and value of your business in that region.
Please thumbs up or mark as a good answer if this helps you out thanks
-
I guess so. It will either push it into /us/ or /uk/
-
Does this mean that Google will no longer see www.mysite.net then?
With www.mysite.net and www.mysite.net/index.php being different URLs this may mean that there is duplicate content between these two pages.
-
So Google was seeing my www.mysite.net/index.php?country=usa and www.mysite.net/index.php?country=uk as two separate pages and reporting it as duplicate content. So I have 1) created a canonical as www.mysite.net/index.php and do a redirect from www.mysite.net/index.php?country=usa/uk to www.mysite.net/index.php once the cookie has been set. This seems to have solved that problem.
-
It would seem that the best solution is the URL structure that you have suggested, but with unique content. I know you don't want to do this but you will run into duplication issues if you don't.
If I understand correctly, the search engines will only see the index.php with the US language on it? You don't have canonical issues do you? i.e. when you say you redirect them to index.php, do you mean the root (www.domain.net) or the actual index URL (www.domain.net/index.php)? - ideally these two should be the same thing.
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
-
SEO Audit for site redesign
I'm in the process of preparing my company's ecommerce site for a redesign - largely to move to a responsive design and improve issues with UI and some much-needed features. This is a very small ecommerce business (Less than $300K annually), and we have settled on Magento Community Edition for our platform. We understand it to be very "SEO" friendly, and its similar to our current platform - it gives us a lot of flexibility in design, and it appears scalable. While I am aware of our current sites shortcomings (from an SEO standpoint), I was wondering if I should employ an SEO person/company to do a pre/post redesign audit. I looked at the MOZ checklist, and ran my site through Hubspot and WooRanks free tools, and am aware of what they are reporting as SEO items to be fixed. As I am so small, I was wondering if an SEO audit in addition to what I already know might be overkill? Any thoughts/suggestions are welcome.
Web Design | | Artfx1 -
Anyone using CloudFlare on multiple sites?
We are considering using CloudFlare as a CDN for a large group of sites. The fees are $5 to $200 depending on many factors. We tried the free trial on one site and were impressed with the results. I am wondering if any of you have any longer term experience with this and performance metrics, etc.
Web Design | | RobertFisher1 -
How does adding ecommerce to a site affect SEO? What are the negative and what are the positives?
We are thinking of adding ecommerce to our website as a service to our customers. We generate most of our leads through online quote requests but heard that it may be beneficial to our SEO if we add ecommerce for a few products. Is this true? Does anyone have tips on best and worst SEO ecommerce practices?
Web Design | | TeguarMarketing0 -
What's the point of an EU site?
Buongiorno from 18 degrees C Wetherby UK 🙂 On this site http://www.milwaukeetool.eu/ the client wants to hold on to the EU site despite there being multiple standalone country sittes e.g. http://www.milwaukeetool.fr & http://www.milwaukeetool.co.uk Why would you ever need an EU site? I mean who ever searches for an EU site? If the client holds on to the eu site despite my position it's a waiste of time from a search perspective is the folowing the best appeasment? When a user enters the eu url or redirects to country the detected, eg I'm in Paris I enter www.milwaukeetool.eu it redirects to http://www.milwaukeetool.fr. My felling this would be the most pragmatic thing to do? Any ideas please,
Web Design | | Nightwing
Cioa,
David0 -
Will changing content managment systems affect rankings?
We're considering changing our content management system. This would probably change our url structure (keep root domain name, but specific product pages and what not would have different full urls). Will our rankings be affected if we use different urls for current pages? I know we can do 401 redirects, but anything else I should consider? Thanks, Dan
Web Design | | dcostigan0 -
404 page not found after site migration
Hi, A question from our developer. We have an issue in Google Webmaster Tools. A few months ago we killed off one of our e-commerce sites and set up another to replace it. The new site uses different software on a different domain. I set up a mass 301 redirect that would redirect any URLs to the new domain, so domain-one.com/product would redirect to domain-two.com/product. As it turns out, the new site doesn’t use the same URLs for products as the old one did, so I deleted the mass 301 redirect. We’re getting a lot of URLs showing up as 404 not found in Webmaster tools. These URLs used to exist on the old site and be linked to from the old sitemap. Even URLs that are showing up as 404 recently say that they are linked to in the old sitemap. The old sitemap no longer exists and has been returning a 404 error for some time now. Normally I would set up 301 redirects for each one and mark them as fixed, but there are almost quarter of a million URLs that are returning 404 errors, and rising. I’m sure there are some genuine problems that need sorting out in that list, but I just can’t see them under the mass of errors for pages that have been redirected from the old site. Because of this, I’m reluctant to set up a robots file that disallows all of the 404 URLs. The old site is no longer in the index. Searching google for site:domain-one.com returns no results. Ideally, I’d like anything that was linked from the old sitemap to be removed from webmaster tools and for Google to stop attempting to crawl those pages. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | PASSLtd0 -
What is a really great bounce rate for a product or service site? What does Good look like?
I am really curious about a result I have never seen before. Our bounce rate went down a lot on a new site. So, what is good??? Recently, we took on a project with a company that offers a product they install for consumers and who had been in business for 15 plus years. The company is successful, has good customer base of those who have been made very happy, etc. It is not a repeat sale type of product, etc. One and done. Their site when we began talking was roughly a year old and was not well constructed but not terrible. Most of the issues were around I frames, use of older coding, poor SEO, etc. There was not really a way to "redesign" and we built a new site. This became a true collaboration in a B2B environment as the owner pushed us like crazy. Not the bad kind of push, the one that makes you say to your team, "Let's find a way!" The result, IMO, was a gorgeous site. But, as you know, those are a dime a dozen. But, to get to the point, when we took over the account they had a bounce rate of around 45%. I did not see this as either good or bad, but a fact and for this industry probably not bad at all. In all honesty, I was not looking at that as a first metric I wanted to move, but it was obviously at or near the top for all the reasons we know. So, this site is a local business, not an everyday product and gets about 2500 to 3000 uniques per month. If we compare to May of 2011/2012: 2011 2012 Total Visitors 1852 3,298 Uniques 1609 2,740 Pageviews 5,634 23,203 Pages/visit 3.04 7.04 Avg Duration 2.05 3.20 Yes, I am leaving off what we are getting, yes, I am leaving off the site. Please don't hate me. I am really wanting to see what others see with site changes and bounce rates first and will disclose. So, what's a great bounce rate? How do you know?
Web Design | | RobertFisher0 -
Multiple Sites, multiple locations similar / duplicate content
I am working with a business that wants to rank in local searches around the country for the same service. So they have websites such as OURSITE-chicago.com and OURSITE-seattle.com -- All of these sites are selling the same services, but with small variations in each state due to different legal standards in the state. The current strategy is to put up similar "local" websites with all the same content. So the bottom line is that we have a few different sites with the same content. The business wants to go national and is planning a different website for each location. In my opinion the duplicate content is a real problem. Unfortunately the nature of the service makes it so that there aren't many ways to say the same thing on each site 50 times without duplicate content. Rewriting content for each state seems like a daunting task when you have 70+ pages per site. So, from an SEO standpoint we have considered: Using the canonocalization tag on all but the central site... I think this would hurt all of the websites SERPs because none will have unique content. Having a central site with directories OURSITE.com/chicago -- but this creates a problem because we need to link back to the relevant content in the main site and ALSO have the unique "Chicago" content easily accessable to Chicago users while having Seattle users able to access their Seattle data. The best way we thought to do this was using a frame with a universal menu and a unique state based menu... Also not a good option because of frames will also hurt SEO. Rewrite all the same content 50 times. You can see why none of these are desirable options. But I know that plenty of websites have "state maps" on their main site. Is there a way to accomplish this in a way that doesn't make our copywriter want to kill us?
Web Design | | SysAdmin190