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
-
International SEO Options?
Hi we currently have a site which is a example.com domain in the Australian market (we have geo-targeted to Australia within search console). We are looking to expand to United States. I have added the potential options down below, just wondering which one you guys think would be best from a SEO and practical standpoint? Or if there are other options i should consider? Option 1 The Australian domain is strong so this option takes this into consideration. Keep example.com (Australian) Add on: Sub-Directory for US Which would be: example.com/us/ In Search Console set the sub-folder to target US and also setup hreflang tags. Setup the US site on the sub-directory. Option 2 Add sub-folders for both Aus and US example/au/ (Australian)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jaynamarino
example/us/ (United States) Setup hreflang targeting. Cons
Need to set up redirects for the current site to new location which is .com/au/ might also see drop in performance due to redirects. Cheers.0 -
Looking for Adult SEO company
Hi guys and girls, I am looking for a company that is willing to work with us to improve our SEO. Our website is www.reallovesexdolls.com and we keep on going all the way UP to fall rock bottom hard again (like waves in the ocean). It's really weird, we never invested much in link building and such. We are so busy with other things that it would be nice to outsource this task. You can contact us by phone, or by email. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MartinePeters0 -
Where do we focus from an SEO perspective?
I run a digital business development consulting company. Our core has always been centered around consulting with client to develop strategy and then working with a set of vendors in a variety of different services types to implement the strategy. I'm struggling right now to determine the best approach for our own SEO. Our website is http://phase2solutions.net. What suggestions would you have on the approach here? Feel free to share your service as well as the tactical end is something we are looking to outsource. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phase2solutions0 -
Internal Links - Dofollow or Nofollow and why?
Hey there Mozzers, I am a question about internal links. If I am writing a article about something and want to link to another one of my articles inside my blog, do i have to make that link nofollow or dofollow? If possible tell me why also. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
SEO Behind a paywall.
Good Morning! Does anybody have any experience with SEO behind a paywall. If we have a portion of a website that is going to be locked, will google still be able to access all of that regardless of paying? If not is there any way to circumvent that? Any thoughts are greatly appreciated! MOZel Tov!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Seo site architecture - how deep?
Hello Moz community! We are building out a site for a web hosting/web design company. I am wondering if we should just have home/categories/pages or if we should have home/categories/sub-categories/pages. I am am not sure if by adding the additional level we can create a bunch of mini-hubs within the categories. For example: Home/Web hosting/Business Web Hosting/Small Business Web Hosting I don't know if these mini-hubs within the category are a good idea or if I should keep it as flat as possible? Any thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YouAndWhatArmy0 -
Where Does Blogging Fit Into SEO
I read an article yesterday that said blogging comes under the heading of social media, which is at the top of the so called SEO pyramid. I have taken this to mean less time should be spent in social media compared to other areas of SEO. Yet content creation was at the bottom of the pyramid (more time allocation here). Isn't blogging part of content creation? I would have thought there is a limit to what can be done for service/product & landing pages. Whereas blogs are a great way to produce more unique content for a website. Any clarification would be appreciated. Thanks - Christina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
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