International SEO
-
We want to expand to a few new regions internationally. My question is if we register sites in different geographies and upload our exact site to these web addresses (exact duplicates) so our web addresses will then be
www.mysite.co.uk (current site)
www.mysite.com (new intended site)
www.mysite.com.au (new intended site)
and add rel=“canonical” linking elements to prevent duplicate content issues.Will our content production on our current site www.mysite.co.uk retain its value within all the other sites.
Is this the best way to do it? Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks for this response. Will migrating to a generic site let's say .com :
-
affect the current rank of my current site
-
perhaps turn off users outside the U.S. who might jump to conclusion that it is a U.S. based site
Is it perhaps better to host the blog only on a separate generic .com site and having localised micro sites sans blog in other geographies?
-
-
Hi!
The short answer to your question is: No.
The long answer is this below.
If you create new website in different ccTlds, but which are exact duplicates of the "mother" one, that is a problem.
On the other hand, though, if you use the rel="canonical", you are going to have them never being visible in the SERPs, because you are telling Google to not consider them because of the canonicalization you have set up.
As others have pointed out, you should be safe from the duplicated content issues using the hreflang annotations.
Said that, I too suggest you to localize as much as you can the different English versions and making crawlable and evident every possible local signal (eg: currency, phone numbers, local offices addresses).
Finally, though, IMHO you should not go for a multi-country international SEO, but creating a generic Global website targeting the English speaking market, giving the opportunity to visitors to change currency if they want and creating "local pages" in the about us section if you have local offices (those will be also used as Landing for Local Search).
Having a generic site (hence migrating from .co.uk to .com) will ensure also from the "blog" problem (i.e.: one generic blog for all site? What will be the one to use as content marketing platform? Or a blog for each website, with all the complication of having also "local" writers, local link builders...)
If you, then, decide to expand also to Spanish, French or any other language market, you can create a subfolder multilingual strategy.
-
That post is quite wrong IMHO, because it completely omits and forgets the psychology of the local audiences.
Apart that Country Code Level Domain Names still have a very strong influence in how Google consider a website in terms of geo-targeting, it is quite proved that, for instance, if a Spanish is asked to choose a domain .es or a generic .com (and he doesn't know the brands of both domains), he will choose the .es.
The same happens in France, Italy or anywhere else but the United States.
Even more, if you target Russia and you don't do it with a .ru domain name, in Yandex you will have a long way for ranking well.
Said that, the choice between subfolders and ccTlds should not be based on how better is for SEO, but how logic is for the International Business strategy.
-
Hi there
I definitely agree about looking into hreflang attributes to add to your site. You can also help Bing crawlers by adding language tags on your website variations.
Don't forget that you can country target each site variation to their specific regions through Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. I highly suggest utilizing this.
Moz also has a couple of great resources to look into for more information and tips:
International SEO (Moz)
The International SEO Checklist (Moz)Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
...using ccTLDs might not be worth it compared with using a folder
That's be the route I would be investigating first.
-Andy
-
I agree with Andy above that it's extremely important to markup your sites with href lang, however I would also go further and say to localize the different forms of English. Would be best to use British English on .co.uk and .com.au domains, whereas American English for .com. An added benefit of having separate ccTLDs like .co.uk and .com.au would be that users view your website and company as being UK-based, Australian-based etc., so it might be confusing for visitors if they are seeing American English used everywhere; localizing the content should also mean a better conversion rate!
Additionally, there was a good recent blog post by Liam Curley on the YouMoz blog arguing that using ccTLDs might not be worth it compared with using a folder - https://moz.com/ugc/why-cctlds-should-not-be-an-automatic-choice-for-international-websites. Food for thought!
-
The best way to handle international content, is to make use of HREFLANG. I wouldn't use a canonical tag though as Google suggest this isn't needed (read here) "Update:** to simplify implementation, we no longer recommend using rel=canonical.**"
Have a look at the following resources for explanations on how to do this:
https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en-Andy
-
Thanks so much for your response John
I'm also particularly interested if the content produced in our main site www.mysite.co.uk will be effective in our www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com.au sites considering that google prioritises local content. Will it be as if we posted the content directly in these urls?
thanks again in advance
-
There has been many thesis's written on this subject. A great start is google webmaster:-
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.il/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html The next stop would be Matt Cutts himself on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo - or if like me start with the video first!
If you ensure compliance with google recommendations - duplication will not be an issue.
Any queries let me know.
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
-
Internal anchor text
Hello, I am wondering how to deal with internal anchor text. I read here and there that it shouldn't be too optimised but I also read that this is how google understands what my page is aout. I have breadcrumbs with my main keyword in the anchor text and can't change that it is automatic. In other words if i have 10 breadcrumb going to my top page with the keyword can I be penalised ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Using hreflang for international pages - is this how you do it?
My client is trying to achieve a global presence in select countries, and then track traffic from their international pages in Google Analytics. The content for the international pages is pretty much the same as for USA pages, but the form and a few other details are different due to how product licensing has to be set up. I don’t want to risk losing ranking for existing USA pages due to issues like duplicate content etc. What is the best way to approach this? This is my first foray into this and I’ve been scanning the MOZ topics but a number of the conversations are going over my head,so suggestions will need to be pretty simple 🙂 Is it a case of adding hreflang code to each page and creating different URLs for tracking. For example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caro-O
URL for USA: https://company.com/en-US/products/product-name/
URL for Canada: https://company.com/en-ca/products/product-name /
URL for German Language Content: https://company.com/de/products/product-name /
URL for rest of the world: https://company.com/en/products/product-name /1 -
International Subdomain Headache
My client set up a separate domain for their international clients, then set up separate subdomains for each country where they're active (so, for example, the original site is xx.com and the global is xxworldwide.com, with subdomains like mx.xxxworldwide.com). They auto-translated a large amount of content and put the translations on those international sites. The idea was to draw in native speakers. Now, I don't think this is a great practice, obviously, and I'm worried that it could hurt their original site (the xxx.com in the example above). My concern is that Google will see through the translated text, since it was handled with Google Translate, and penalize both sites. I don't think the canonical tag applies here, since Google recommends a no-follow for autotranslated text, but I've also never dealt with this type of situation before. Anyways, if you made it through all of that, congratulations. My question is whether xxx.com is getting any negative effects other than a potential loss of link juice -- and whether there's any legitimate way to present auto-translated text with a few minor changes without incurring a penalty.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ask44435230 -
How do you Hire someone for SEO?
What questions do you ask when hiring an SEO person? What is the most important thing in selecting a company for SEO? Should they be able to make recommendations on changes in your website for seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Realtor1010 -
Is this link SEO-Friendly?
Hi Mozzers, Was wondering if someone could tell me if this link is SEO-friendly? class = "sl">name="sc" type="checkbox" value="1449"><a <span="">href</a> <a <span="">="</a>http://www.example.com/" onclick = "Javascript: return dosc(2);">src="imsd/coff.gif" id="cbsc2"/>Keyword It has some Javascript that makes the link work like a filter. Cheers, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Optimal URLs for SEO and UX
We are considering restructuring the URL scheme on one of the websites we maintain. We have a few options. Currently news article URLs are as follows:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
http://domain.com/news/1234/article-title-name/ Download section URLs are as follows:
http://domain.com/downloads/files/1234/file-title-of-download-here/ Forum URLS:
http://forum.domain.com/forum/topic/1234/title-of-forum-topic-here/ We feel that these are a bit too long for both SEO and user experience. We want to remove as many directories from the URLs as possible. From experience, what do you recommend changing for the example URLs above? We have some ideas below...and we need to keep the ID in the URLs...however I know this is a little frustrating. Some ideas we have for news articles:
http://domain.com/news/article-title-shorter-1234
http://domain.com/article-title-shorter-n1234 Some ideas for the download pages:
http://domain.com/downloads/file-title-shorter-d1234
http://domain.com/downloads/files/file-title-shorter-1234
http://domain.com/file-title-shorter-d1234 Some ideas for the forum URLs:
http://forum.domain.com/topic-title-shorter-t1234
http://forum.domain.com/topic/topic-title-shorter-1234 What do you think of these suggestions? Any other URL ideas? Recommended URL length? The purpose of is question was to find the perfect URLs for the site we are working on; your thoughts, suggestions and tips are very much appreciated.0 -
Are dropdown menus bad for SEO
I have an ecommerce shop here: http://m00.biz/UHuGGC I've added a submenu for each major category and subcategory of items for sale. There are over 60 categories on that submenu. I've heard that loading this (and the number of links) before the content is very bad for SEO. Some will place the menu below the content and use absolute positioning to put the menu where it currently is now. It's a bit ridiculous in doing things backwards and wondering if search engines really don't understand. So the question is twofold: (1) Are the links better in a bottom loading sidemenu where they are now? (2) Given the number of links (about 80 in total with all categories and subcategories), is it bad to have the sidemenu show the subcategories which, in this instance, are somewhat important? Should I just go for the drilldown, e.g. show only categories and then show subcategories after? Truth is that users probably would prefer the dropdown with all the categories and second level subcategories, despite the link number and placement.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | attorney1 -
Subdomains and SEO - Should we redirect to subfolder?
A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0