One global blog or a blog for each country?
-
We have a blog on each of our country sites, but the content on the English speaking sites is shared i.e. locally produced in US is mixed up with stuff produced in UK and vice versa.
I'm not concerned about duplicate content because we have taken the necessary measures to let the search engines know that we have a US site for the US and and UK site for the UK.
My question to you is whether we should develop the blog independently in each country or develop one blog to satisfy our global sites.
I believe a local blog for each country is better because the content would speak to the audience better and any reference points or product and price points would be 100% relevant to the audience.
-
We have set up each site in the same webmaster tools account and have also used the tool to select which market we wish to target with the site i.e. .com is set to US only and .com/uk is set to UK only.
If you land on the .com for the first time, it will show a lightbox (javascript enabled) that lets you choose which site you wish to view.
This lightbox has a no index, do follow robots tag included to ensure it passes all link juice.
As per my previous comment... I would go for a local TLD over a .com/uk or subdomain approach every day of the week, especially when you have different countries that speak the same language.
-
Unfortunately we are on a .com/uk however we own the .co.uk which carries a 301 redirect.
Given the choice, I would go with the .co.uk because the .com is an established site and this is proving challenging for the UK site to establish itself in the Google results pages i.e. the US site often outranks the UK site on Google UK.
-
Are you using different domains (.com .co.uk)? Or different folders (.com/uk)? Just out of interest sake.
-
Pro Q&A is now my browser home page so I'm around a lot
-
Thanks for the swift reply
-
Ralph,
You're correct in your thinking. Add in cultural reference differences, and it's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned. It's wise to keep them separate both for SEO and user experience.
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
-
Migrating to a tag-driven global website - Need opinions!
We currently have a global site that is set up this way: Subfolders to designate countries. Content in same language is re-published on other country websites. Since we are re-launching at the end of the year, we are doing away with re-publishing content on different country sites and will just maintain a single copy of our content (to be populated on different pages using content tags). We are planning on doing this so that there is no need to apply href-lang tags on our content. My questions: Is maintaining just a single instance of an article good for a global website? What are the possible complications that may come up from this approach? Since there is only one version of the article that is being indexed, is a rel-canonical tag even needed? Should href-lang tag still be applied to high level pages (homepage, etc) to ensure that the correct homepage shows up in the appropriate geography? This question is quite long, so any feedback will be helpful. Thanks!
International SEO | | marshdigitalmarketing0 -
Which will rank higher: Non-mobile friendly site in native language vs. mobile friendly global site in English?
Hi, we are currently implementing a mobile site, e.g. m.company.com. The global mobile site will only be available in English. We have local subsites of the desktop site, e.g. company.com/fr. The local subsites are not mobile friendly. If a user does a search for a brand term in France, **which site will rank higher in SERPs? **If it will be the global site, is there anything we can do (other than making them mobile friendly) to make the local sites rank higher? Would it be the mobile-friendly site, even though it is only in English, because the local site would be penalized for not being mobile friendly? Or would it be the local site, because Google will give priority to the fact that it's in French, which matches the language of the person searching?
International SEO | | jennifer.new0 -
Multiple Regional Domains - such as .co.uk / .de etc for one brand
Hello, We are in the process of building up our version 2 for our site, currently we have only one domain (i.e. xxxxx.com). Our target audience is distributed among various regions and speak different languages, we would like to know which will benefit us more: a) by having one root domain and then having folders based on automatic IP detection, for example the customer opening a website in Japan would see the domain as: www.xxxx.com/jp. B) or is it better to have different domains so in the above case it will be www.xxxx.co.jp. The content on the site will be different based on the regional demand, so of course the language will be Japanese and the content will also be aligned with the Japanese community. We plan to start with 5 different markets (UK/US/AU, Japan, China, Germany, Spanish speaking countries). We would appreciate if you can suggest us the best route to achieve the best results. Thank you, SK
International SEO | | sidkumar0 -
Country Specific Google Results
Does anyone have any stats (preferred) on users selecting Google results segmented to their country? For instance, users in the UK (France, Japan, etc.) selecting the "Pages from the UK" option to limit results to country based sites? Or if not hard stats, at least any international users care to comment? Cheers, Brian ~identity
International SEO | | identity0 -
Geotargeting two locations using root and /country
Hello, I am in the process of turning my UK targeted website into a global website in multiple languages. I will be using the new HREFLANG tag but I'm wondering about geotargeting. I've set this up in Webmaster Tools as: example.com = UK content
International SEO | | Seaward-Group
example.com/us = US content
example.com/de = German content
example.com/es = Spanish content
example.com/fr = French content
example.com/it = Italian content
example.com/nl = Dutch content Will the root UK content override the following sub directories that are set as a different location because its not /uk? Thank you.0 -
What’s the best way to convert ccTLD to global TLD?
We started out as a Canadian site targeting Canadian users. Now our site http://iCraft.ca has a lot of international buyers and sellers and .ca TLD doesn’t make sense anymore, as we are not performing well on Google.com We are doing a complete site redesign right now, which will address a lot of coding and content specific issues, but we suspect .ca domain will always hold us back in achieving good positions on Google.com. Since Google doesn’t allow ccTLDs to set geo-targeting, what are our options? a) Migrating to a brand new .com site and setting up 301 redirects for all links from iCraft.ca. Would we lose all rankings in this example and pretty much start building them from scratch? Or would PR be transferred page by page from one domain to another through 301 redirects? b) Setup a separate .com site with mirrored content to target global audience and keep .ca site to target Canada. Not sure if splitting PR for the same pages between 2 sites is a good idea. Also, how would you address duplicate content properly in our situation?
International SEO | | MarinaUX
In this video that I found here on forum http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo Matt Cutts says that it’s ok to have duplicate content on different ccTLDs, but he says - make sure you localize your content on those domains. What if you can’t? Most of the content on our site is meant for anyone, not just Canadian users. So, for the most part, we’d have exactly same content on .com site, as we have on .ca site. We could display prices in different currencies on product pages, but the rest of the content – blogs, forum etc. are not country-specific and can’t be localized easily. Also, it’s not clear from the video if all mirrored sites should sit on the same domain name for each country, like example.com and example.ca or is it ok to have example.com and icraft.ca? c) Is there a better option? Thanks for your help!0 -
What countries does Google crawl from? Is it only US or do they crawl from Europe and Asia, etc.?
Where does Google crawl the web from? Is it in the US only, or do they do it from a European base too? The reason for asking is for GeoIP redirection. For example, if a website is using GeoIP redirection to redirect all US traffic to a .com site and all EU traffic to a .co.uk site, will Google ever see the .co.uk site?
International SEO | | Envoke-Marketing2 -
SEO for different English spiking countries
Hi, I'm trying to target my SEO to several English spiking countries (Canada, UK, Australia, South Africa and so..) and I came across a big dilemma: should I tray to build a local version of my website for each country, or perhaps I should stay with my one .COM website and re-direct all the English-local-countries with 301 (if anyone will tray to go into the local domain)? The thing is that obviously the best practice to get high ranking is to be local, but what should I put in those sites and who can I avoid duplicate content and user confusion? On the other hand, do you think I can really get high ranking with one website for all those countries, and how? Thanks, Itay Drory.
International SEO | | RAN_SEO0