Is .in domain affecting international traffic inflow to my site?
-
My holiday website http://seekandhide.in/ was completed and went live in Feb 2012.
Last month I got 83% traffic from India and 3-5% each from USA and UK. The rest is a mixed bag from other countries. This is largely the trend since the last 3-4 months. I want to attract more organic traffic from UK and rest of Europe. My SEO consultant says that with a .in domain that will be difficult.
My website currently features unique holiday properties in India that typically attract European tourists so I don't think it is a product issue. But both website visits and sales enquiries remain primarily Indian even though total number of visitors have increased gradually over the last 6 months..
My queries are
1. Is it only the .in domain that's affecting inflow of international traffic?
2. Is there anything that I can do to offset it?
3. I own seekandhide.co.uk too. Is there something I can do with that site without building a whole different website there? If I shift completely to .co.uk, I will have the same issue of being geographically limited and end up losing Indian traffic.
4. Is there something else that is not ok on the site that I am missing?
5. Advice that I get from a lot of consultants is to buy seekandhideindia.com but I plan to add international properties in a couple of years so that name would limit my appeal.
Thanks in advance!
Sudha
-
Alice
Thank you for the reply and it was very useful. I will talk to my SEO consultant about canonicals and geo-taregtting (through Webmaster) and see how we can implement it.
Best,
Sudha
-
Marko
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I agree that my SEO is not good enough currently. But that is precisely the reason I and so many other are here asking questions so that we can do better SEO with the SEOmoz community's inputs.
Rgds
Sudha
-
Hi Sudha,
In response to question 3, I would say that if you already own the .co.uk domain, and you're targeting audiences in the UK, it's definitely a good idea to take advantage of it.
Users often prefer to click on a familiar ccTLD because of the trust that they associate with them (consciously and subconsciously).
You wouldn't have to build a whole new website or stop using the .in site. If you use canonicals and geo-taregtting (through Webmaster), you'll avoid major problems with duplicate content.
Good luck!
-
Google's goal is to return the best and most relevant results to the user, regardless of the top-level domain. If their system determines that the best result is a page on a new gTLD, they'll return that page in search results.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1050724#gTLDs
You and many others that ask questions here are simply not doing enough good SEO (content, optimization, design, social, etc.). Focus on applying the practices outlined on SEOmoz by 100% and you'll be on a good way.
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
-
Is it compulsory to use hreflang attribute for Multilingual site? What if I do not use such tag?
Hello Everybody, My main site - abcd.co.uk and other sites are like this se.abcd.co.uk, fr.abcd.co.uk, es.abcd.co.uk etc Now if I donot use hreflang for Multilingual site then google will consider it as subdomain or duplicate site? But content of the sites are in different language. Thanks!
International SEO | | wright3350 -
Correct site internationalization strategy
Hi, I'm working on the internationalization of a large website; the company wants to reach around 100 countries. I read this Google doc: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en in order to design the strategy. The strategy is the following: For each market, I'll define a domain or subdomain with the next settings: Leave the mysitename.com for the biggest market in which it has been working for years, and define the geographic target in Google search console. Reserve the ccTLD domains for other markets In the markets where I'm not able to reserve the ccTLD domains, I'll use subdomains for the .com site, for example us.mysitename.com, and I'll define in Google search console the geographic target for this domain. Each domain will only be in the preferred language of each country (but the user will be able to change the language via cookies). The content will be similar in all markets of the same language, for example, in the .co.uk and in .us the texts will be the same, but the product selections will be specific for each market. Each URL will link to the same link in other countries via direct link and also via hreflang. The point of this is that all the link relevance that any of them gets, will be transmitted to all other sites. My questions are: Do you think that there are any possible problems with this strategy? Is it possible that I'll have problems with duplicate content? (like I said before, all domains will be assigned to a specific geographic target) Each site will have around 2.000.000 of URLs. Do you think that this could generate problems? It's possible that only primary and other important locations will have URLs with high quality external links and a decent TrustRank. Any other consideration or related experience with a similar process will be very appreciated as well. Sorry for all these questions, but I want to be really sure with this plan, since the company's growth is linked to this internationalization process. Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | robertorg0 -
How to best set up international XML site map?
Hi everyone, I've been searching about a problem, but haven't been able to find an answer. We would like to generate a XML site map for an international web shop. This shop has one domain for Dutch visitors (.nl) and another domain for visitors of other countries (Germany, France, Belgium etc.) (.com). The website on the 2 domains looks the same, has the same template and same pages, but as it is targeted to other countries, the pages are in different languages and the urls are also in different languages (see example below for a category bags). Example Netherlands:
International SEO | | DocdataCommerce
Dutch domain: www.client.nl
Example Dutch bags category page: www.client.nl/tassen Example France:
International domain: www.client.com
Example French bags category page: www.client.com/sacs When a visitor is on the Dutch domain (.nl) which shows the Dutch content, he can switch country to for example France in the country switch and then gets redirected to the other, international .com domain. Also the other way round. Now we want to generate a XML sitemap for these 2 domains. As it is the same site, but on 2 domains, development wants to make 1 sitemap, where we take the Dutch version with Dutch domain as basis and in the alternates we specify the other language versions on the other domain (see example below). <loc>http://www.client.nl/tassen</loc>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="fr"
href="http://www.client.com/sacs"
/></xhtml:link<br> Is this the best way to do this? Or would we need to make 2 site maps, as it are 2 domains?0 -
Homepage URL for multi-language site
Hi, We are setting up a new site, and currently considering the URL and folder structure of the site. We will have 2-3 different language versions, and we have decided to use sub folders for this. My question is regarding the homepage URL. We want the English language site (en) to be the default one, from where you can then change the language. Should I have a folder for each of the language versions (as described below)? www.mydomain.com/en
International SEO | | Awaraman
(this would be the default page where everyone would always come if they type www.mydomain.com to webrowser) www,mydomain.com/ru www.mydomain.com/es Or, would it be better for SEO to have www.mydomain.com as the default URL where we would have the English version of the site, and then have two other folders (as below) where we would have the 2 other language versions: www,mydomain.com/ru www.mydomain.com/es Thank you in advance, BR Sam0 -
International hreflang - will this handle duplicate content?
The title says it all - if i have duplicate content on my US and UK website, will adding the hreflang tag help google figure out that they are duplicate for a reason and avoid any penalties?
International SEO | | ALLee1 -
International SEO | URL Structure
I'm looking for advice/point of view for setting up international domains. I.e. sub-domains, ccTLD, etc. At the 10,000 ft. view - the client (international retail company) is trying to decide which type of URL structure to use in their new platform: Option 1: Root Domain ccTLD - www.brand.ca, www.brand.fr, etc. Option 2: Subdomains - fr.brand.com, ca.brand.com, au.brand.com Option 3: Subfolders - ]www.brand.com/ca/, ]www.brand.com/au/ Consider these scenarios/questions and use to help decide which URL structure makes sense: 1) I'm an Aussie in Australia and I do a Google search on Hank Myer Aron, which is a huge seller in the U.S. and also included at the Australia locale site. If we go with subfolders, am I likely to see the U.S. Aron page higher in my search results than the Australia Aron page? Or is the U.S. site not a factor in a search done outside the U.S.? If we use subfolders AND geo-detection, does this bump the ranking of the locale page? Do sites using ccTLDs always get ranked above those that don't? For example, if an Australian dealer selling Aron has URLs dealer.com.au/..., would their pages rank ahead of hankmyer.com/au/...? If we went the ccTLD route, would the Aron page at hankmyer.com.au take precedence over the U.S. page? (Again, assuming U.S. site is relevant in this scenario.) 2) I'm a Frenchman in France searching on Hank Myer Aron. If we use subfolders AND an alias URL that's translated to French (brand.com/fr/produits/sieges/sieges-aron), would we expect the page rank to be comparable to using the ccTLD and/or expect greater trust than just using subfolders without translated URLs? Do translated URLs have any mitigating affect on duplicate page content? Which URL strategy is best choice from a SEO standpont?
International SEO | | CrownPartners0 -
Delaying Redirection - Possible loss of Domain Authority?
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
International SEO | | daracreative0 -
Best domain for spanish language site targeting ALL spanish territories?
hi, we're have a strong .com domain and are looking to launch a site for spanish speakers (ie latin america + spain). we already have various subdirectories for some foreign language sites (eg. ourdomain.co.uk, us.ourdomain.com, ca.ourdomain.com, ourdomainchina.com, ourdomainindia.com etc) we already have a B2B site ourdomain.com-es which will remain the same. I'm thinking best practice would be to launch translated copy for the following: ourdomain.com/es ourdomain.com/cl ourdomain.com/mx ourdomain.com/pt etc etc firstly is this the best option? secondly, i'm really interested to hear whether there is a less time/resource intensive route that would give us visibility in ALL spanish speaking territories? Also - if we go with just one of the above (eg ourdomain.com/cl) how likely are we to get traction in other spanish speaking territories? any help much appreciated!
International SEO | | KevinDunne0