Factors that affect Google.com vs .ca
-
Though my company is based in Canada, we have a .com URL, we're hosted on servers in the U.S., and most of our customers are in the U.S. Our marketing efforts are focused on the U.S. Heck, we even drop the "u" in "colour" and "favour"!
Nonetheless we rank very well in Google.ca, and rather poorly on Google.com.
One hypothesis is that we have more backlinks from .ca domains than .com, but I don't believe that to be true. For sure, the highest quality links we have come from .coms like NYTimes.com.
Any suggestions on how we can improve the .com rankings, other than keeping on with the link building?
-
Thanks for letting us know how things worked out Aspirant.
Andy
-
Final verdict:
I took the plunge. Even though our product is geography agnostic, I changed our Webmaster Tools setting to "U.S."
Sure enough, we immediately saw some improvements in the google.COM rankings. Not much of an impact on .CA, and any loss here was definitely made up in the new .COM traffic.
I'll be doing a deeper dive into the data later.
Thanks everyone.
-
Hey Rob,
I have a bit of exp with this - had a Canadian based site that wanted to target the states. We were ranking well for .CA and not so good in .COM. I actually did this in WMT for a site - set geo-targetting to USA - and after a week or so started noticing a huge jump in .COm for a lot of keywords. What was great was that the rankings in .CA stayed consistent.
The only drop I noticed was in the .CA (Canada Only) searches. These completely dropped off the map. But normal searches in google.ca were fine.Don't know if this will always happen, but this is my experience.
-
I had exactly the same with a spanish site of mine .es for a long time i was first in google.com but knowhere to be found in google.es . Everybody kept telling me that this was not because i had a lot of .com link and none where .es But when time passed without any link changes the keywords aked well in google.es . So is it maybe the case the some countries are just a few months behind?
-
I have noticed that getting links from the appropriate TLD extension really determines where you rank on each google serps for the individual country.
you can search for sites related to yours for the specific TLD by putting inurl:.com in google along with your keywords.
the same thing works for all other extensions.
this makes finding .edu link opportunities a breeze for example
Besides link building you will want to make sure on webmaster tools you have set your targeted country to the country you want to rank best for. For example I have a site about college students which I've set to target the US since Canada mostly calls post secondary education University and College so the audience is split much more.
Hope this helps.
-
Sorry, I meant David Mihm -- oops!
-
I suspect having the settings in WMT set for the USA "might" hurt your performance in other areas, however the small company website (that gets 90% of its business from the USA) I mentioned in my prior response has the setting set to USA and it ranks #3 for it's main search term in both .ca and .com. Having claimed a Local Places account might also be an issue. I'd suggest you contact either Todd Mihm (http://www.davidmihm.com/blog) or Mike Blumenthal (http://blumenthals.com/blog) for an answer to that question.
-
Thanks for the answer. A couple of questions come to mind:
Won't setting our Google Webmaster Tools to United States hurt our performance in other parts of the world? So far I've made a point of ensuring that Webmaster Tools has us as not geo-specific ("Target users in: unlisted", on the Site Configuration > Settings screen of Webmaster Tools).
Also (on the advice of another SEO advisor) we verified our Google Places location, so is there a risk of sending mixed signals to Google and getting hurt by that?
-
The competition is usually stronger in the USA (.com) arena than in Canada (.ca). I have a little company site (with little work done in the way of SEO) that ranks #3 in both .ca and .com for "wheelchair trays". You may want to adjust your settings on Google WebMasterTools to ensure your site is set to United States rather than Canada. As David Kauzlaric has mentioned, you will definitely benefit from having more links from US based sites - I'd focus on that as a first step.
-
Still no breakthroughs on this issue. Our performance keeps improving on .ca and .com, which is obviously good, but our ranking on .com is always very, very far behind our .ca performance.
It's still a mystery to me, given that most of the inbound links are from U.S.-based, .com websites.
The only answer that works in my mind is that .ca uses a different algorithm. But I'm still very interested in hearing other thoughts!
Thanks,
Rob
-
Hi Rob,
Have you seen any changes with your rankings on Google.ca and Google.com? Do you have any other questions or comments you can add to help others that may be in a similar situation?
Here's hoping you got to enjoy two long weekends in a row from both countries!
-
Agree.
We did a link building campaign for a german website (dot de) and most of the links were from .com websites. They started to rank very well on google.com and google.de had only minor impacts. Is clear that the links should be from the same country zone if you want to rank in that particular area.
You should focus on links from .com domain - but that should be easier then building links from .ca.
You should also get a google maps account with your US location - if you have one. That alone should bring up your results in the US.
-
It's a pretty well known fact that non-US versions of Google are not using the same algorithm and therefore are "behind". This could be the case where you are employing methods that a couple years ago were effective and are working well for .CA but on .COM not as well.
The biggest thing you can do is work on high quality content and build links. Remember, linking is somewhere around 70% of the algorithm alone. Work on getting more .COM authoritative links from sites like NYT, USAToday, etc...
Also, if a good portion of your links are from .CA, that very well could affect it too!
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
-
SEO Value of Google+?
Hi Mozers, Does having a Google+ page really impact SEO? Thanks, Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater1 -
Does including your site in Google News (and Google) Alerts helps with SEO?
Based on the following article http://homebusiness.about.com/od/yourbusinesswebsite/a/google-alerts.htm in order to check if you are included you need to run site:domain.com and click the news search tab. If you are not there then... I ran the test on MOZ and got no results which surprised me. Next step according to :https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en#ts=3179198 is to submit your site for inclusion. Should I? Will it help? P.S.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
This is a followup question to the following: http://moz.com/community/q/what-makes-a-site-appear-in-google-alerts-and-does-it-mean-anything0 -
What are the ranking factors for "Google News"? How can we compete?
We have a few sport news websites that are picked up by Google News. Once in a blue moon, one of our articles ranks for a great keyword and shows in one of the 3 listings that Google News has in SERPS. Any tips on how we can we optimise more of our articles to compete in these 3 positions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | betnl0 -
Indexed Pages in Google, How do I find Out?
Is there a way to get a list of pages that google has indexed? Is there some software that can do this? I do not have access to webmaster tools, so hoping there is another way to do this. Would be great if I could also see if the indexed page is a 404 or other Thanks for your help, sorry if its basic question 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Google Penguin Penalty
Howdy Guys,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW
We have been battling our way the Google penguin penalty and have just received our 3 knocked back reconsideration request. I posted a find on here the other day about a simple change of page title made our site jump back up... In the meantime I've built 1 hight quality link back to our site and we have moved again from #50 to #46.Have Google ever removed a penalty without telling you?Should we ask for another reconsideration request?Thanks,
Scott0 -
How to Block Google Preview?
Hi, Our site is very good for Javascript-On users, however many pages are loaded via AJAX and are inaccessible with JS-off. I'm looking to make this content available with JS-off so Search Engines can access them, however we don't have the Dev time to make them 'pretty' for JS-off users. The idea is to make them accessible with JS-off, but when requested by a user with JS-on the user is forwarded to the 'pretty' AJAX version. The content (text, images, links, videos etc) is exactly the same but it's an enormous amount of effort to make the JS-off version 'pretty' and I can't justify the development time to do this. The problem is that Googlebot will index this page and show a preview of the ugly JS-off page in the preview on their results - which isn't good for the brand. Is there a way or meta code that can be used to stop the preview but still have it cached? My current options are to use the meta noarchive or "Cache-Control" content="no-cache" to ask Google to stop caching the page completely, but wanted to know if there was a better way of doing this? Any ideas guys and girls? Thanks FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Google Webmasters not Accurate
I recently updated all the Meta titles, descriptions and keywords on my website because in the past most were duplicate and/or written in the incorrect language. According to Webmaster Tools they have indexed our site post update, but we still have the same number of HTML issues. When I click to investigate the issues further it is clear they are reflecting the old Meta not the new stuff we just added. Should this fix itself the next time Google crawls my site or is there something else I should be doing about the issue? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Getting rid of a site in Google
Hi, I have two sites, lets call them site A and site B, both are sub domains of the same root domain. Because of a server config error, both got indexed by Google. Google reports millions of inbound links from Site B to Site A I want to get rid of Site B, because its duplicate content. First I tried to remove the site from webmaster tools, and blocking all content in the robots.txt for site B, this removed all content from the search results, but the links from site B to site A still stayed in place, and increased (even after 2 months) I also tried to change all the pages on Site B to 404 pages, but this did not work either I then removed the blocks, cleaned up the robots.txt and changed the server config on Site B so that everything redirects (301) to a landing page for Site B. But still the links in Webmaster Tools to site A from Site B is on the increase. What do you think is the best way to delete a site from google and to delete all the links it had to other sites so that there is NO history of this site? It seems that when you block it with robots.txt, the links and juice does not disappear, but only the blocked by robots.txt report on WMT increases Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JacoRoux0