International SEO - auto geo-targetting
-
I read with interest the recent post on international SEO and the top level domain architecture approaches to local content:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview#jtc135670
The issue I have is a little more complex:
-
The business sells a wide variety of products (37) but one is by far and away the biggest and most popular. This means that due to the link profile of the various country sites and HQ site, search engines categorise the site according to this product (this is easily seen with the Google Adplanner) and the other product lines suffer as a result.
-
The current architecture is to have a .com site and then individual ccTLD country sites, again with all products on each site. This creates an issue as in most countries the brand is not strong (compared to the keyword names and search volumes of the products) and so it is not that effective in generating organic traffic. The .com hogs much of the inbound links and the country sites themselves are not that well optimised for a number of reasons.
A proposed solution has been to leverage the strength of the .com and the search volume for the product names, and to produce thematic sites based on each product:
productA.brand.com
productB.brand.com
productC.brand.comIn this way, the sites, content and link profiles are aligned around the more desirable products and we can expect improved organic search performance as a result (or at least ensure relevant traffic finds the relevant content fast).
In terms of providing localised content, the plan was to use content mirroring and to then assign each content mirror to a specific geo-location using the webmaster tools console (and other SE equivilents). This is shown I think in one of Rand's videos.
ProductA.brand.com/de/de Germany site for product A with unique German content
ProductA.brand.com/fr/fr French site for product A with unique French contentThis makes economic sense to me as to utilise the ccTLDs would result in hundreds of separate sites with all the licence and server considerations that entails. For example, for product A alone we would have to produce:
productA.brand.de
productA.brand.fr
productA.brand.cn
productA.brand.jp
ect ect ectThis just would not be sustainable in license/server costs alone across 37 products and 24 countries.
However, I saw in a recent presentation at SES London that (auto) geo-targeting is risky, often doesn't work well for SEO and can even be seen as cloaking.
I think the above strategy could still work, but perhaps we should avoid the use of auto-geotargetting altogether and hope the search engines alone do their job in getting users to the right content as we optimise the unique content for each country (and if they don't, ensure our desgn, UX and country selectors do the job instead).
SEO guru consensus is to use the ccTLD if you own it, but as described above, in the real world that just isn't possible or practical given the company's strategic position.
Which leads to the final question- we do own the brand ccTLDs- if they are directed back to the content mirror for the country on the .com, is there any SEO benefit in doing so aside from directing back any link juice associated with the domain)?
-
-
Hi Keri, Steve and Russ,
I'm glad to weigh in on this if Steve needs a little more help. In short, my opinion is going to be very close to Russ, but I'm going to articulate it in a different way:
You talk about building a product based strategy rather than branding. I'd have to say that building the brand is going to be more important.
The structure that Russ proposes allows you to leverage the authority of the whole site, rather than starting from scratch. And isn't that going to be better for your best product as well as those you have deemed secondary?
-
Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?
Thanks!
-
As an update (and perhaps by asking reminding me of something I once read), IP delivered content isn't the way forward. Spiders by definition originate with their own IP and would therefore be directed to content for that locale.
Strategically I think the solution works (from an SEO perspective the categorization element alone is important) but IP served content is not the way forward.
The core question is still brand vs product site then... arsebiscuits!
-
I guess another element to consider if using auto-detecting an IP and serving up content is how links are made into the new site.
One excerpt (from the 'Art of SEO no less) indicates that links from the target country will serve to identify the site as being targetted for that country. Makes perfect sense.
But- if you serve dynamic content, then an inbound link could conceivably just be made to the core domain rather then the absolute link with the country mirror parameters:
i.e.
link from German site --> productA.brand.com (and then the user gets re-directed to country mirror)
or
link from German site --> productA.brand.com/de/de (absolute link)
In the first example I'm not sure where the link juice would ultimately be attributed to.
-
Hi Russ and thanks for the reply.
That is basically the current model but the products themselves are then split further across business streams which is an issue and could be improved with your suggestion.
However, the real issue is the weakness of the brand in many countries (compared to the brand value and awareness of the main products which are not unique to the company). When this is coupled with one of 37 product lines being so much more well known then the others, each local site becomes 'categorized' according to this major product.
Looking at the link profile of a particular country site (or checking it on the Google Adplanner) you see that the site categories (i.e. how the site is viewed by search engines) are based around this one product and this hinders performance for the other products served on the domain.
This is why we want to create individual domains/sites (on sub-domains) for each product, so the content and link profile will be dedicated to each individual product. In other words, a product rather then brand based site.
The worry with auto-geotargetting and serving up content based on IP via content mirrors is that this could be seen as cloaking and may affect search performance.
Although, that said, IBM seem to do a good job of serving localised content and using their ccTLD portfolio (ibm.de --> ibm.com/de/de ). The only thing is they are so clearly a brand first site and don't need to rely on search to generate traffic.
I hope that is a bit clearer- this is a nightmare topic to articulate!
-
Perhaps I have misread, but what is the problem with doing...
brand.ccTLD/productA/
Where all ccTLD's point to the same server and the only thing different between the two is that when language differences are in place, it grabs from a separate database table and language-file based on the ccTLD. This would allow you to keep just 1 server, still have keyword-optimized content, etc.
You wouldn't be able to really build off of the domain authority, but separating into sub-domains will essentially segregate the authority as well.
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
-
Question regarding international SEO
Hi there, I have a question regarding international SEO and the APAC region in particular. We currently have a website extension .com and offer our content in English. However, we notice that our website hardly ranks in Google in the APAC region, while one of the main languages in that region is also English. I figure one way would be to set up .com/sg/ (or .com/au/ or .com/nz/), but then the content would still be in English. So wouldn't that be counted as duplicate content? Does anyone have experience in improving website rankings for various English-speaking countries, without creating duplicate content? Thanks in advance for your help!
International SEO | | Billywig0 -
Targeting/Optimising for US English in addition to British English (hreflang tags)
Hi, I wonder if anyone can help? We have an e-commerce website based in the UK. We sell to customers worldwide. After the UK, the US is our second biggest market. We are English language only (written in British English), we do not have any geo-targeted language versions of our website. However, we are successful in selling to customers around the world on a regular basis. We have developers working on a new site due to launch in Winter 2021. This will include a properly managed site migration from our .net to a .com domain and associated redirects etc. Management are keen to increase sales / conversions to the US before the new site launches. They have requested that we create a US optimised version of the site. Maintaining broadly the same content, but dynamically replacing keywords: Example (clothing is not really what we sell): Replacing references to “trainers” with “sneakers”
International SEO | | IronBeetle
Replacing references ‘jumpers with “sweaters”
Replacing UK phone number with a US phone number It seems the wrong time to implement a major overhaul of URL structure, considering the planned migration from .net to .com in the not too distant future. For example I’m not keen to move British English content on to https://www.example.com/en-gb Would this be a viable solution: 1. hreflang non-us visitors directed to the existing URL structure (including en-gb customers): https://www.example.com/
2. hreflang US Language version of the site: https://www.example.com/en-us/ As the UK is our biggest market It is really important that we don’t negatively affect sales. We have extremely good visibility in SERPS for a wide range of high value/well converting keywords. In terms of hreflang tags would something like this work? Do we need need to make reference to en-gb being on https://www.example.com/ ? This seems a bit of a ‘half-way-house’. I recognise that there are also issues around the URL structure, which is optimised for British English/international English keywords rather than US English e.g. https://www.example.com/clothing/trainers Vs. https://example.com/clothing/sneakers Any advice / insight / guidance would be welcome. Thanks.0 -
An International SEO Conundrum
Hello all, I'm looking for opinions on this. Imagine there is a website example.com in English and the company 'Example' wanted to translate some of the pages (not not all) in to Russian. So they set up example.com/ru and translate the key pages into Russian. But half of the pages on.com/ru are left in English and there are no plans to translate them. How would you handle the pages in Engish on .com/ru? My thoughts are that they should: Canonicalise to the same versions on .com, and... Remove RU hreflang tags from the pages on .com/ru which are in English Otherwise, users searching in English with Russian browser settings could land on a page in English but then navigate to a translated page in Russian (+the menu navigation items will be in Russian) = bad UX. Not to mention they would be telling Google a page is in Russain but Google would be crawling English. So IMO, the best option is to use canonicals for this so that the .com version of the page is indexed. Then when a user lands after searching in English they will always be served English pages within that session. If English speakers/searchers land on the .com/ru page that would lead to a website half in one lang and half in another. I'm aware that Google recommends not using rel="canonical" across country or language versions of your site, but I believe they are making that recommendation based on an assumption that all pages are going to be translated to another language. In this case, there is no intention to do that, ever. Thanks for your thoughts and opinions. Cheers, Gill.
International SEO | | Cannetastic0 -
Redirected traffic and SEO problem
Hi all, I have a bit of a search engine predicament and I can't find the answer anywhere. It's a bit of a complicated one so please bear with me 🙂 ... I'm a Freelance Copywriter, I recently started the business, I've also recently moved to New Zealand. As such I'm looking for business back in the U.K. (As that's where my network is), but also locally, in NZ. I've purchased both the .co.uk and .co.nz domain names (http://www.inspirecontent.co.uk and http://www.inspirecontent.co.nz) The way that the domain provider / host has set these up is for one to redirect to another. Currently if someone visits www.inspirecontent.co.nz it redirects to the U.K. Site. That's less than ideal for me, because I dont want NZ traffic (i.e potential leads) to think I'm a U.K. Based business. my questions are as follows: 1. Will the redirect to the U.K. domain prevent me from appearing in NZ search (I.e if someone searches via google.co.nz) I'm really struggling to rank at the moment, I'm working on more content but if the redirect is a problem then I need to know about it so that I can find a work around. 2. Any suggestions on the best approach to the work around? It would be great if the URLs didn't change! So that you wind up from the U.K. on the U.K site, and if you're from NZ, you land on and stay on the NZ domain, but I'm not sure how to achieve that. One option, I think, would be to have two different websites, hosted separately, but I hear that duplicated content is bad for SEO? Thanks all in advance Kind regards
International SEO | | Andrea_howey0 -
Need help with search results for US site for a compnay that has many international sites
I am tasked with optimizing a US site for a company that has many international sites. Currently, if you search for just the main company name and don't include "USA" in your search, it won't even give you the US site on the SERP. It displays the Italian, French, etc etc sites - even though I'm searching on Google in the US with a preferred language of Engilsh. Unfortunately I don't have any control over the other sites, only the US one. Is there anything I can add to the US site (aside from setting the country code in GSC) so that when someone searches from within the USA, they get the US site and not all of the other ones? thanks!
International SEO | | SEOIntouch0 -
International SEO - Help Make Tuff Decisions
Hey Moz Friends, I need help making a tuff decision. I just finished watching Rands Video here: http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday My website is www.pti-world.com , I'm trying to rank for the term "walk through metal detectors" for other countries. I am currently on the 2nd page in many countries. So here is the big question: Lets say I work hard and get 20 links from U.K. Should I point them to my page that is currently on page 2 in the u.k. ? OR... will I see better rankings if I start a "new" website under a subdirectory and point those 20 links to that new page? We don't have a large budget for this. The companies that are currently ranking in the top positions are "NOT" geotargeting there website from what I can tell (they are using .com domains). What route would you recommend I take??
International SEO | | brandon070 -
Multi Language / target market site
What is the best way to deal with multiple languages and multiple target markets? Is it better to use directories or sub-domains: English.domain.com Portuguese.domain.com Or Domain.com Domain.com/Portuguese Also should I use language meta tags to help the different language versions rank in different geographic areas e.g. Are there any examples of where this has been done well?
International SEO | | RodneyRiley0 -
Australia specific SEO tips?
For those who are conducting SEO here in Australia: A lot of the info I read, and there is a lot, is generally from the States or UK it seems. Are there any things in particular I should look out for when doing SEO in Australia? Are there any SEO tips that are particular to Australia only? What directories are a must in Australia?
International SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions0