International Site Merge
-
Hello,
I've never had to deal with an international site before, let alone a site merge.
These are two large sites, we've got a few smaller old sites that are currently redirecting to the main site (UK). We are looking at moving all the sites to the .com domain. We are also currently not using SSL (on the main pages, we are on the checkout). We also have a m.domain.com site. Are there any good guides on what needs to be done?
My current strategy would be:
- Convert site to SSL.
- Mobile site and desktop site must be on the same domain.
- Start link building to the .com domain now (weaker link profile currently)
What's the best way of handling the domains and languages? We're currently using a .tv site for the UK and .com for the US.
I was thinking, and please correct me if i'm wrong, that we move the US site from domain.com to domain.com/us/ and the domain.tv to domain.com/en/
Would I then reference these by the following:
What would we then do with the canonicals? Would they just reference their "local" version?
Any advice or articles to read would really be appreciated.
-
Hi Thomas,
If a page doesn't have an equivalent on the other country version then you don't need to specify hreflangs really, you can just specify the one of the page that exist if you want, to keep the consistency, although if you see: the goal of the hreflang is to specify Google which is the "best" URL to show in their results when a search is done and there are many that could be relevant as they target the same queries, but should be targeted to different audiences, since in this case there will be only one, then it's not necessary to do it.
Thanks,
Aleyda
-
Hi Aleyda,
The reason we want to merge to one domain is because the higher ups want to, so that's what is happening.
Anyway, thank you for your in depth reply unfortunately having suggested that the site merge and https goes live at the same time development won't be able to achieve that.
I do only have one question left really, if a page doesn't have an equivalent on one site. What does the rel alternate have to be, is it left blank or does it go to the main language url?
Thanks,
Tom
-
Hi Thomas,
Why do you want to merge them on a single domain? If you want to consolidate everything on a single .com domain -which is recommended in case you don't want complexity and capitalize your authority better, while targeting international markets effectively-, then it would be to:
-
Migrate by 301-redirecting your current domains to their relevant country directories that you will enable in your .com, and that should be geolocalized independently each one through the Google Search Console (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en) to their specific countries: .com/gb/ to the UK and .com/us/ to the US, so each one of them can effectively be geo-targeted. Since you have an independent mobile site on an "m" subdomain this case you also have to do the same for them: m.yourbrand.com/gb/ geolocalized to the UK and m.yourbrand.com/us/ geolocalized to the US.
-
Use hreflang annotations (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en) to specify for each one of the site pages their language and country alternatives, for example:
-
Since you will be moving domains anyway, I'll directly migrate to the new .com site already using SSL, instead of splitting these two migrations by migrating to the .com first and then doing a migration towards the https version of the .com a few months after, the direct migration towards the https version will add maybe a bit more of complexity and additional validations to make, but since you're migrating anyway many of them you'd need to follow and do anyway.
-
Finally, be aware that after any change of a Web structure, specially from one domain to another (and if this other doesn't have a highly authoritative link profile yet) will always have a short-term negative effect, so is important that you start an SEO process not only to make sure you follow best practices when migrating but to validate afterwards and grow the new domains results based on what has been found on a technical, content and link profile audit and the desired results: Optimizing the new Web structure, Optimizing or creating content, optimizing or creating links, etc.
I hope this helps!
Thanks,
Aleyda
-
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 - Targeting US and UK markets
Hi folks, i have a client who is based in italy and they set up a site that sells travel experiences in the sout of Italy (the site currently sit on a server in Italy). The site has been set up as gTLDs: www.example.com They only want to target the US and the UK market to promote their travel experiences and the site has only the english version (the site does not currently offer an italian version). If they decide to go for the gTLDs and not actually change to a ccTLDs (which would be ideal from my point of view) how are the steps to be taken to set this up correctly on GSC? They currently only have one property registered on GSC: www.exapmple.com therefore i guess the next steps are: Add new property - www.example.com/uk and and set up geo targeting for UK Existing property - www.example.com/ set up geo targeting for US In case the client does not have the budget to optimise the content for american and british languages, would still make sense to have 2 separate property in GSC (example.com for US market and example.com/uk for UK market)? Few considerations: Add canonical tag to avoid duplicate content across the two versions of the site (in the event there is no budget to optimise the content for US and UK market)? Thank you all in advance for looking into this David
International SEO | | Davide19840 -
International targeting
I'm offering an international service to any country from any destination, The website main language is English and i have 4 other languages as subdirectories, https://beassistance.com https://beassistance.com/de/ https://beassistance.com/es/ https://beassistance.com/fr/ https://beassistance.com/ru/ I'm looking to target by language not country, Should i choose "unlisted" for all the subdirectories? my second question regards the meta tags , my current meta tag rel="alternate" hreflang="ru-ru" href="https://beassistance.com/ru/" /> And i'm thinking about using rel="alternate" hreflang="ru" href="https://beassistance.com/ru/" /> Is that best practice to target by the language? Update I already have Hreflang Sitemap <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" <br="">xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
International SEO | | MTBE
<url><loc>https://beassistance.com</loc>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="en"
href="https://beassistance.com"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="de"
href="https://beassistance.com/de/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="fr"
href="https://beassistance.com/fr/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="es"
href="https://beassistance.com/es/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="ru"
href="https://beassistance.com/ru/"
/></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></url></urlset> <url><loc>https://beassistance.com/de/</loc>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="en"
href="https://beassistance.com"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="de"
href="https://beassistance.com/de/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="fr"
href="https://beassistance.com/fr/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="es"
href="https://beassistance.com/es/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="ru"
href="https://beassistance.com/ru/"
/></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></url> <url><loc>https://beassistance.com/fr/</loc>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="en"
href="https://beassistance.com"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="de"
href="https://beassistance.com/de/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="fr"
href="https://beassistance.com/fr/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="es"
href="https://beassistance.com/es/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="ru"
href="https://beassistance.com/ru/"
/></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></url> <url><loc>https://beassistance.com/es/</loc>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="en"
href="https://beassistance.com"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="de"
href="https://beassistance.com/de/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="fr"
href="https://beassistance.com/fr/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="es"
href="https://beassistance.com/es/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="ru"
href="https://beassistance.com/ru/"
/></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></url> <url><loc>https://beassistance.com/ru/</loc>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="en"
href="https://beassistance.com"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="de"
href="https://beassistance.com/de/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="fr"
href="https://beassistance.com/fr/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="es"
href="https://beassistance.com/es/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="ru"
href="https://beassistance.com/ru/"
/></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br></url>1 -
Search visibility increase with international SEO
Hi Moz Community, I am wondering if there is any tool and/or any sort of standard increase in search visibility I can assume that we will have with our website if we expand to start targeting Spanish with our site. At the moment we receive about 6000-7000 visits a day with 75% of that coming from the US and UK. I am wondering is there any way to make a rough assumption on visibility that will increase by launching a new Spanish speaking website. It would be a subdirectory, not a subdomain or gTLD. I am struggling to find a concrete answer on this and i'd like to make a semi-accurate forecast of the traffic we can expect based on the increase in search visibility that our Spanish language site will provide us. Thanks
International SEO | | Brian_Dowd0 -
Web Site Migration - Time to Google indexing
Soon we will do a website migration .com.br to .com/pt-br. Wi will do this migration when we have with lower traffic. Trying to follow Google Guidelines, applying the 301 redirect, sitemap etc... I would like to know, how long time the Google generally will use to transfering the relevance of .com.br to .com/pt-br/ using redirect 301?
International SEO | | mobic0 -
Block access to site from everywhere but north america
I have a site that is being attacked very hard by bots, malware, etc. Most of it seems to be originating from Asia and Eastern Europe so I want to block off access to the site to everybody but people in North America. We do not ship out of the country anyways so it really does not need to be seen by people around the world. How can I set this up?
International SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Targeting International Markets on the Web
Hello Moz community, I have a popular news website that we are looking to target multiple countries (all English first). So I know (1) a hosting provided (ip address) in that country and (2) a target extension (.co.uk) will help us. Am I missing anything else that can help when targeting international markets? What I'm struggling with is the duplicate content. I can't copy the content over to the extension because of the bad practice of duplicate content. Is it possible to have the same content on both websites and let Google know that it lives at the .com extension? If so, would those websites containing duplicate content still rank? And we would want to target different languages later (for example Spanish). This would be different content because it is in a different language, correct? Thanks for your help Moz community! Cole
International SEO | | ColeLusby0 -
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
International SEO | | Sudha_Mathew0 -
International targeting
Hi I have a UK based website using a .com, we also own the .co.uk which points to the .com. We get IRO 40,000 UVs per month and we have good domain authority. I now want to launch the site in America however if I seperated the sites out and used the .co.uk for the UK and the .com for the US I would decimate my UK rankings. Am I able to target both the US and the UK under the one domain, or will the fact that I host in the UK ultimately impact on any rankings I may achieve in the US?
International SEO | | danielparry0