International SEO
-
Okay, so I have read through the following link in respect to International SEO (https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo), and I believe that the way forward it a ccTLD.
My thought was to have .com, .co.uk and .eu.
Currently my site is .com, but receives most of its traffic from UK sources. I'm concerned that when I switch over to ccTLDs, the .co.uk in particular, that my UK traffic could dry up. Switching from .com to .co.uk and then using the .com to target the US market makes sense, but I would like to know others opinions on the potential dangers of doing this.
Also, are ccTLDs kept on the same hosting or would they require individual hosting? The link doesn't cover this question.
-
You can try by approaching the top brands in your niche to get the high quality and authority link insertion for your website SEO. There are many website examples that doing the same for guest posts.
-
Perfect candidate for geo-targeting! You can keep them on one domain though if you're interested. You can do subfolders and geo-target each, but not sure if that works with your setup. Regardless, if you do the .com, and want that to be US only, make sure to claim that domain in GSC and Bing WMT as the US. .com is a general TLD, so it doesn't auto-geo-target. ccTLDs like .co.uk do automatically take care of this.
Keep in mind that in best practices, if you have two pages with the same content across two domains, usually the SEs will pick one, the older stronger one. Try to find a way to differentiate the content that is the same across the two sites. You can also use hreflang between the two sites to help the association, but that is really meant for translated content only. However, people have seen it help.
To ensure people are getting to the right content, I recommend detecting the user's location by IP and ASKING if they live in the US, UK or others you might geo-target. Then set a cookie. They will always get to the right content. Google will crawl from the US, ignore the JS for the most part, and will index everything.
Think about the .com and subfolder idea, that might be better for you.
-
Hi Kate,
Thanks for the reply.
We have a warehouse in the UK and USA and the products sold on each site vary, so we need to keep them seperate. We want our efforts to be pushed towards SEO best practice, that is to say that the hosting we want regionally and also to merge the brands together (they're currently under two different brand/domain names).
The site we have operating in the US currently isn't doing great and is taking a lot of effort in terms of SEO, effort we could be putting towards the .com. If we bring the US site under the flag of the .com our hope is that it will benefit from the .com's authority and receive a boost (we would also 301 redirect all traffic from the previous domain as not to lose any juice).
-
Hi Moon boots!
First be aware of the .eu TLD, it isn't a geo-targeted TLD as the EU isn't a country. Keep that in mind, you can't target regions, just countries.
Can I ask why you want to go down the route of ccTLDs? Does your content need to be different in each country? There is no problem with keeping everything on a .com, but let me know if there are external factors at play here.
Where you host the TLDs doesn't matter much. The localization is a signal, but not a huge one. If you can give us some insight into your situation, we can help better. Thanks!
-
Any follow up?
-
Also, if I am using hreflag tags, am I still able to have both sites on different servers with their own localised IPs? This is necessary for SEO.
-
Thank you for the response, Nigel. A few follow up questions:
Using the lang tag in a link, i.e. www.website.com/?lang=en, isn't that a detractor for SEO? I was under the impression that the route to the product should be as short as possible for SEO, i.e. www.website.com/product, as opposed to www.website.com/?lang=en/product. Or will google ignore the ?lang in terms of SEO?
-
Hi spacecollective
As long as you tag the sites correctly then you will not have a problem.
Add Hreflang tags to the pages. They can be identical pages on the same server in if you wish but this is how I would do it. As long as they are separated like this.
website.com for the US
website.com/en for the UKAny other country would then have its own directory.
This avoids you having to mess with the various country TLDs like .co.uk or any other you'd wish to set up.
Then add Hreflang tags to tell Google which country is targetted and the relationship between each one.
https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
(The first part en is the language and the second, the country)
The combination of search console and Hreflang tags is enough for Google to know that there is no duplication.
You would move UK users on to the gb version and US users would see the .com. It would all resolve pretty quickly as you are telling Google the alternative country versions in the Hreflang tag.
I hope this helps
Nigel
Carousel Projects
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 corporate SEO - menu and preferences
Hi all, for internationalization we have used subfolders structure (e.g. domain.com/us/) and since we have approx 150 countries to cover, then country selector is quite a link-base, especially if pages itself can have even several hundreds of internal links as well. Currently, all links to other countries are set as rel="nofollow" and I'm planning to change them to "follow" to distribute a juice. Do you please have an experience with such internal links voluminous websites and this follow/nofollow settings? Also we are having and issue with other countries outperforming local search. So for example in US, searching for kind of "Brand America" keyword, our UK branch outperforms US. Hreflangs are set in the sitemaps and each branch (country) is set in search console correctly as well. Since there are some issues with sitemaps (e.g. not actual links, or links returning 404), I assume that google is not using these sitemaps therefore hreflang information is lost as well. Am I correct ? thank you in advance, Tom
International SEO | | execom990 -
Splitting a site into 2 international sites
Hi all, I have a client that currently has a .com domain that ranks in both the US and the UK for various search terms. They have identified a need to provide different information for UK and US visitors which will require 2 versions of all pages. If we set up a .co.uk domain and keep the .com obviously that will be a brand new UK site which will have zero rankings. Any suggestions as to the best way to introduce this second version of the content without losing UK rankings? Thanks
International SEO | | danfrost0 -
International SEO errors
Hello, In a muddle here. A website has a .co.uk and a .com version. They want to target the UK market and the USA market respectively. The content for the UK version has been localised for the UK audience (e.g. spellings etc) but the content is the same in both sites. There are errors in .co.uk version in webmaster tools : International Targeting | Language > 'en' - no return tags__URLs for your site and alternate URLs in 'en' that do not have return tags.**Q 1) What does this mean?**I can see that both the .com and .co.uk version has only this in place:**2) Should they actually have respectively?**3) Do they also need rel=canonical from the .co.uk to the .comAny help would be appreciated.
International SEO | | AL123al0 -
International SEO Question with regards to Sub Folders in Webmaster Tools
So, we have a website in 18 or so different languages. bluewidgets.com/br bluewidgets.com/cn etc I have added each sub folder in Google Webmaster Tools and 'pointed' them to be at their respective geographic specific. However, the United States version of the website is sitting on the root domain. Is there any issue with me pointing the root domain at United States Google, considering there are 18 sub folders already pointed at different regions?
International SEO | | LukeyJamo0 -
Does changing host server between countries affect SEO if there is no content change?
My website is currently hosted with Go-daddy and the hosting server is in the USA on a Linux platform. The problem is, the response time for my Australian Customers, is too slow, as a result, I decided to move to another Go Daddy Hosting server in the Asia Pacific Region. This has been completed successfully, however I think there may be some impact on my rankings. Can you advise if there are any specific things that I must do, when I move to a different hosting server with the same company or an alternative company. Note: We are not changing domain names or content, purely just moving to a hosting server closer to where our customers are based. Looking forward to your response.
International SEO | | fdep0 -
The best SEO practice for a .hk domain
We are currently working on a project which involves 3 separate .com domains in relation to a UK company selling/renting residential, commercial and investment properties within the UK. We are now working on producing a .hk site for the overseas customers. Can anyone advise what the best practice is for a .hk domain and where best to start? Should the domain be hosted in that geographical location for example? We are relatively new to this so any advise would be greatly appreciated.
International SEO | | SoundinTheory0 -
International SEO - auto geo-targetting
I read with interest the recent post on international SEO and the top level domain architecture approaches to local content: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview#jtc135670 The issue I have is a little more complex: The business sells a wide variety of products (37) but one is by far and away the biggest and most popular. This means that due to the link profile of the various country sites and HQ site, search engines categorise the site according to this product (this is easily seen with the Google Adplanner) and the other product lines suffer as a result. The current architecture is to have a .com site and then individual ccTLD country sites, again with all products on each site. This creates an issue as in most countries the brand is not strong (compared to the keyword names and search volumes of the products) and so it is not that effective in generating organic traffic. The .com hogs much of the inbound links and the country sites themselves are not that well optimised for a number of reasons. A proposed solution has been to leverage the strength of the .com and the search volume for the product names, and to produce thematic sites based on each product: productA.brand.com
International SEO | | StevieCC
productB.brand.com
productC.brand.com In this way, the sites, content and link profiles are aligned around the more desirable products and we can expect improved organic search performance as a result (or at least ensure relevant traffic finds the relevant content fast). In terms of providing localised content, the plan was to use content mirroring and to then assign each content mirror to a specific geo-location using the webmaster tools console (and other SE equivilents). This is shown I think in one of Rand's videos. ProductA.brand.com/de/de Germany site for product A with unique German content
ProductA.brand.com/fr/fr French site for product A with unique French content This makes economic sense to me as to utilise the ccTLDs would result in hundreds of separate sites with all the licence and server considerations that entails. For example, for product A alone we would have to produce: productA.brand.de
productA.brand.fr
productA.brand.cn
productA.brand.jp
ect ect ect This just would not be sustainable in license/server costs alone across 37 products and 24 countries. However, I saw in a recent presentation at SES London that (auto) geo-targeting is risky, often doesn't work well for SEO and can even be seen as cloaking. I think the above strategy could still work, but perhaps we should avoid the use of auto-geotargetting altogether and hope the search engines alone do their job in getting users to the right content as we optimise the unique content for each country (and if they don't, ensure our desgn, UX and country selectors do the job instead). SEO guru consensus is to use the ccTLD if you own it, but as described above, in the real world that just isn't possible or practical given the company's strategic position. Which leads to the final question- we do own the brand ccTLDs- if they are directed back to the content mirror for the country on the .com, is there any SEO benefit in doing so aside from directing back any link juice associated with the domain)?0 -
Australia specific SEO tips?
For those who are conducting SEO here in Australia: A lot of the info I read, and there is a lot, is generally from the States or UK it seems. Are there any things in particular I should look out for when doing SEO in Australia? Are there any SEO tips that are particular to Australia only? What directories are a must in Australia?
International SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions0