Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Localized Domain Issue - Can I use Search Console to solve this?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO

328

Trevor-O last edited by

Struggling through trying to resolve a complicated search issue - would appreciate any community input or suggestions.

The Background Info

We have several brand sites and each one has both a .ca and .com domain. For some reason, our website platform was created in a way that hundreds of pages on the .com domain have an equivalent page on the .ca domain, which are all 301'ed to the appropriate .com pages. Example below for clarity:

www.domain.ca/gadget/brand - 301 Redirected to: www.domain.com/gadget/brand

www.domain.ca/gadget/en/brandcanada = Proper .ca Canadian URL (where en is the language - fr exists as well)

The Problem

Because these .com pages exist under the .ca domain as well, they have started to outrank the correct .ca pages on Google. This has led to Canadian customers finding incorrect information, pricing, and reviews for these products - causing all sorts of customer service issues and therefore affecting our sales.

I am being told that to properly fix the issue, and remove the incorrect URLs under the .ca domain would be prohibitively expensive in terms of resources, so I'm left trying to fix this via means available to me (i.e. anything but a change to how the platform is currently setup).

The Attempted Fix

I've submitted proper sitemaps for the .ca brand sites, and we have also created a robots.txt file to be accessed only when the site is crawled through the .ca domain. In that robots.txt, we have Disallowed crawling of any /gadget/brand/ URLs for the .ca domain. This was done a week ago and I am still seeing the .com URL show up in search results.

The Question

Should I be submitting any www.brand.ca/gadget/brand/ URLs to be temporarily removed from Google? Because of the 301 redirect in place from www.brand.ca/gadget/brand to www.brand.com/gadget/brand, I am hesitant to do so, as I do not want the .com URL removed. Will Google simply remove the .ca URL and not follow the 301 redirect to remove that URL as well?

Any additional insight or feedback would be awesome as well.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Have issues about expired domain? How to work on it? How to redirect?

Using expired domains to redirect on your site? For this you need to first Active your expired domainsand put two to three articles After google will got it that its now active and so google start crawling after that you need to put same articles that you created on expired site on your new site with same urls Now make a wild card redirect to exact urls or posts you created on your site
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LyleTLai

0
Using a Sub Domain as a Main Domain?

Hi, I'm working on a site at the moment and the sub domain is acting as the main domain. This occurred when the site was redesigned and built on a sub domain for testing but it was never moved to the main domain when it went live (a couple of years ago). So little or no pages are live on domain.com but all on sub.domain.com. It's a large company but they have very poor rankings. Would you recommend that they move the sub domain back into the root folder? Does this involve renaming/re-pointing URLs? Thanks Louise
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MVIreland

1
Malicious Software Warnings in Search Console

google search console said my site failed due to malicious software being hosted. the files creating the problems are behind a username and login gate and are user submitted. the host url is also a subdomain of the main site. unfortunately, catching all malicious files is an unwinable cat and mouse. What is he best seo strategy for this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | woolbert

0
Website can't break into Google Top100 for main keywords, considering 301 Redirect to a new domain

A little background on our case. Our website, ex: http://ourwebsite.com was officially live in December 2015 but it wasn't On-Site optimized and we haven't done any Off-site SEO to it. In April we decided to do a small redesign and we did it an online development server. Unfortunately, the developers didn't disallow crawlers and the website got indexed while we were developing it on the development server. The development version that got indexed in Google was http://dev.web.com/ourwebsite We learned that it got indexed when we migrated the new redesigned website to the initial domain. When we did the migration we decided to add www and now it looks like: http://www.ourwebsite.com Meanwhile, we deleted the development version from the development server and submitted "Remove outdated content" from the development server's Search Console. This was back in early May. It took about 15-20 days for the development version to get de-indexed and around 30 days for the original website (http://www.ourwebsite.com) to get indexed. Since then we have started our SEO campaign with Press Releases, Outreach to bloggers for Guest and Sponsored Posts etc. The website currently has 55 Backlinks from 44 Referring domains (ahrefs: UR25, DR37) moz DA:6 PA:1 with various anchor text. We are tracking our main keywords and our brand keyword in the SERPs and for our brand keyword we are position #10 in Google, but for the rest of the main (money) keywords we are not in the Top 100 results in Google. It is very frustrating to see no movement in the rankings for the past couple of months and our bosses are demanding rankings and traffic. We are currently exploring the option of using another similar domain of ours and doing a complete 301 Redirect from the original http://www.ourwebsite.com to http://www.ournewebsite.com Does this sound like a good option to you? If we do the 301 Redirect, will the link-juice be passed from the backlinks that we already have from the referring domains to the new domain? Or because the site seems "stuck," would it not pass any power to the new domain? Also, please share any other suggestions that we might use to at least break into the Top 100 results in Google? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielGorsky

0
301 Pandalized Domain to Authority Domain?

Hello, If I redirect a Panda penalized domain (DA 65, bad link profile) to another authority domain (DA 35, clean link profile), will it still carry a penalty? I've heard cases where a panda penalized domain moved to a brand new domain carried the penalty.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mashoid

0
What's the best way to check Google search results for all pages NOT linking to a domain?

I need to do a bit of link reclamation for some brand terms. From the little bit of searching I've done, there appear to be several thousand pages that meet the criteria, but I can already tell it's going to be impossible or extremely inefficient to save them all manually. Ideally, I need an exported list of all the pages mentioning brand terms not linking to my domain, and then I'll import them into BuzzStream for a link campaign. Anybody have any ideas about how to do that? Thanks! Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonMorrow

0
7 years old domain sandboxed for 8 months, wait or make a domain change?

Hello folks The questions is, if a domain, 7 years old being sandboxed due to "notice of unnatural links to website" does it make sense to make a domain change (301 permanent redirect and make a "domain change" under google webmaster tools) to another, aged(!) domain name?
Website being sandboxed for over 8 months already and there is no chance to do anything with those "unnatural" links to website... Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ferray

0
Use of the Canonical Tag, Both Internally and Cross Domain

I've seen the cross domain canonical not work at all in my test cases. And an interesting point was brought to my attention today. That point was that in order for the canonical tag to work, the page that you are referencing needs to have the exact same content. And that this was the whole point of the canonical tag, not for it to be used as a 301 but for it to consolidate pages with the same content. I want to know if this is true. Does the page you reference with a canonical tag have to have the same exact content? And what have been your experiences with using the canonical tag referencing another page on a different domain that has the same exact subject matter but not the exact duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GearyLSF37

2