How to take out international URL from google US index/hreflang help

[IceIcebaby]

Hi Moz Community,

Weird/confusing question so I'll try my best. The company I work for also has an Australian retail website. When you do a site:ourbrand.com search the second result that pops up is au.brand.com, which redirects to the actual brand.com.au website.

The Australian site owner removed this redirect per my bosses request and now it leads to a an unavailable webpage.

I'm confused as to best approach, is there a way to noindex the au.brand.com URL from US based searches? My only problem is that the au.brand.com URL is ranking higher than all of the actual US based sub-cat pages when using a site search.

Is this an appropriate place for an hreflang tag? Let me know how I can help clarify the issue.

Thanks,
-Reed

[IceIcebaby]

Hi Sheena, sorry I didn't respond sooner, I wasn't receiving any notifications.

Thank you very much for your answer though, this was extremely helpful and helped verify that what I was thinking was correct, with some added help from you.

I didn't think taking away the 301 was the best approach, but from a bosses standpoint he sees it as them getting clicks that shouldn't be theirs, I just have to do my best job of explaining why it's better for long term.

The hreflang is in place and I think the best approach would be to consolidate international domains to the .com ccTLD's

Thanks again, very helpful.
-Reed

[Sheena_Schleicher]

I'm working on a very similar scenario, where .com.au pages are ranking in Google US and .com pages are ranking in Google AU (above .com.au pages).

We are moving forward with the hreflang attribute since it was specifically introduced to help search engines serve the correct language or regional URL to searchers. In helping search engines index and serve the localized version of your content, “hreflang” also prevents duplicate content penalties by telling Google that each potential “duplicate” is actually an alternative for users who require an alternate language version. * We see this as a short-term goal, as we plan to eventually consolidate the ccTLDs to the .com site.

Here are some international SEO / hreflang resources that might help:

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
• http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights
• http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist
• Anything from Aleyda Solis &/or Gianluca Fiorelli
• http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool
• http://www.themediaflow.com/tool_hreflang.php

Also, since the AU subdomain pages were ranking well, I probably would have left the redirect in place rather than let it go to a 404. Then focus on mapping out the equivalents between the .com and .com.au sites. This is a very tedious project, but the last 2 links I shared above really help move things along once you have all the URL equivalents mapped out.

I hope this helps!