Copying a Website For Better Rankings in a Specific Country
-
I've got a blog with some tools and business directories (https://www.webhostinghero.com). Actually my website is in English and is hosted in the US since its biggest source of traffic is from there. My second biggest traffic source is India. The issue is that while my website is really well optimized (in terms of speed), it is still slow for visitors from India.
So my question is: Would it be possible to have a copy of my website on a web server located in India and use a sub-domain (ie.: in.webhostinghero.com) to access it without being penalized by Google? Would that be considered duplicate content? What would be the HREF LANG tag set to for India (EN-US, EN-GB... EN-IN??)
I thought that having a sub-domain for a specific country could also help its rankings.
Thanks in advance for your inputs.
P.S. Sorry my english sucks.
-
As long as you use cross-domain rules, you will be absolutely fine - you are far from the only person who has a need or desire to do this
-Andy
-
Sorry the title was indeed misleading. I assumed that by making my website faster in India, it would help its ranking.
That said, what about using a country-based TLD domain instead of a subdomain? I do own webhostinghero.in
Would that help my rankings even though 95% of the content would be the same on the .com and .in with the appropriate href lang tags set?
-
Ahh OK you didn't say that - you only talked about speed.
One thing I can tell you is that a subdomain isn't going to help rankings - in fact, research has shown that a folder structure has been the best way to go, but doesn't sound like it might work as well.
At the end of the day, as long as you setup your HREF LANG correctly across domains, you will be fine and you won't get penalised.
Here is some required reading for international SEO:
https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights
https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077-Andy
-
Thank you but I'm not looking for help on how to make my current website faster. Like I've said, the website is really well optimized in terms of speed. Cloudflare is not an option. I tried it and it causes lots of issues with the site and it actually made it way slower than it actually is. I use Amazon Cloudfront as my CDN.
I want to make my website faster in India AND improve its ranking in this specific country. Using a CDN or Cloudflare won't do that.
-
Hi Stephane,
If all you are looking for is a speed boost, you could always use a CDN like Cloudflare to deliver content to your India visitors. No need to create another site
-Andy
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
-
Does anyone experienced to rank a KOREAN Keyword here?
Hi everyone just a quick question is it working if i rank a korean keyword in google search engine?Any tip and advice on how gain more keyword for this.
Local Website Optimization | | invechseo0 -
US rank worse than the UK
Hi, Can you please advise? We have been focusing on the UK traffic, but this year we are expanding to all English speaking countries, primarily focusing on the US market. Our SEO efforts are not equally fruitful in the US, but they are really good in the UK. Can you please suggest what seriously impacts rank these days? our main domain that we use in the UK is domain.com. The US version uses sub-directory domain.com/us. Is this a problem? we have about 3 times more traffic from the UK than the US, and we have only UK backlinks. Do they still impact SEO significantly? can our poor US rank be related simply to a larger market? Any ideas on how we can improve? Technical suggestions, page organisation etc, I'm open to any suggestions. Many thanks. Katarina
Local Website Optimization | | Katarina-Borovska0 -
Site Not Rankings After a Few Months
I have a client site that I am beating my head against the wall for right now. Three months into a 100% white hat campaign, we can't get him ranking in the top 150. Here's the cliffsnotes: Built a new wordpress website All on page SEO has been done and score an A+ for his primary kws Robots.txt is setup correctly .htaccess is setup correctly new domain multiple 95 DA, 50 PA links from reputable, national sites. Yext Local listings SSL, CDN, Speed optimized Has 19 pages indexed by Google Posting one blog a week for him Granted his primary keyword is a hyper competitive kw, but still, I've been doing this for 8 years and never seen a guy be stuck on the 16th page for so long for the sort of links we are building him. I'm genuinely stumped here and could use some help.
Local Website Optimization | | BrianJGomez0 -
How to approach SEO for a national website that has multiple chapter/location websites all under different URLs
We are currently working with a client who has one national site - let's call it CompanyName.net, and multiple, independent chapter sites listed under different URLs that are structured, for example, as CompanyNamechicago.org, and sometimes specific to neighborhoods, as in CompanyNamechicago.org/lakeview.org. The national umbrella site is .net, while all others are .orgs. These are not subdomains or subfolders, as far as we can tell. You can use a search function on the .net site to find a location near you and click to that specific local website. They are looking for help optimizing and increasing traffic to certain landing pages on the .net site...but similar landing pages also exist on a local level, which appear to be competing with the national site. (Example: there is a landing page on the national .net umbrella site for a "dog safety" campaign they are doing, but also that campaign has led to a landing page created independently on the local CompanyNameChicago.org website, which seems to get higher ranking due to a user looking for this info while located in Chicago.) We are wondering if our hands are tied here since they appear to be competing for traffic with all their localized sites, or if there are best practices to handle a situation like this. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | timfrick0 -
Local Ranking Power of a Multi-Keyword URL?
Here is a site that is sitting at number 1 on Google UK (local results) for a number of its keywords: http://www.scottishdentistry.com/ If you look at the links in the navigation many of them have urls such as this: http://www.scottishdentistry.com/glasgow-scotland-dentistry/glasgow-scotland-hygienists.html These have clearly been created to be keyword rich. For example, there is no publicly-available page at: http://www.scottishdentistry.com/glasgow-scotland-dentistry Do you think this tactic has helped with the site's rankings? Is it worth imitating? Or will it ultimately attract a penalty of some kind? Remember this is in the UK where Google seems to be slower at penalising dodgy tactics than in the US. Thanks everyone.
Local Website Optimization | | neilmac0 -
Drastic changes in keyword rankings on a daily basis
Anybody ever seen keyword rankings for a site change drastically from day to day? I've got a client, a local furniture store, whose local keywords (furniture + city) rank consistently well without much change, but when it comes to broader keyword rankings (like "furniture" or "furniture store") in their zip code, they'll go from ranking at the top of Google one day to not being ranked at all the next (at least according to Raven Tools). My best guess is that it's just a reflection of personalized results from Google, but such a dramatic change day in and day out makes me wonder.
Local Website Optimization | | ChaseMG0 -
How can I rank my .co.uk using content on my .com?
Hi, We currently have a .com site ranking second for our brand term in the .co.uk SERP. This is mainly because we don't own the exact match brand term which comes from not having a clue what we were doing when we set up the company. Would it be possible to out rank this term considering we the weighing that google puts towards exact matches in the URL? N.B - There are a few updates we could do to the homepage to make the on-page optimisation better and we have not actively done any link building yet which will obviously help. competitor SERP rank 1 - MOZ PA38 DA26 Our Site SERP rank 2 - MOZ PA43 DA32 Thanks Ben
Local Website Optimization | | benjmoz0 -
Rankings question
We have just taken on a client who is really struggling in the rankings, even for noncompetitive terms. Here is the URL: www.freshsmiles.co.uk they are targeting 'dentist york, dental implants york, teeth whitening york, orthdontist york' The content on the site seems very good (we have been working on ensuring that the content is duplicated and of good quality) They have also been doing blogs http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/blog/ We've installed webmaster tools and there are no manual spam action warnings and I have checked the inbound links to the website and they don't seem spammy. Any help would be much appreciated! thanks in advance Marcus
Local Website Optimization | | dentaldesign0