.com ranking over other ccTLD's that were created
-
We had a ecommerce website that used to function as the website for every other locale we had around the world. For example the French version was Domain.com/fr_FR/ or a German version in English would be Domain.com/en_DE/. Recently we moved all of our larger international locales to their corresponding ccTLD so no we have Domain.fr and Domain.de.(This happened about two months ago) The problem with this is that we are getting hardly any organic traffic and sales on these new TLD's. I am thinking this is because they are new but I am not positive. If you compare the traffic we used to see on the old domain versus the traffic we see on the new domain it is a lot less.
I am currently going through to make sure that all of the old pages are not up and the next thing I want to know is for the old pages would it be better to use a 301 re-direct or a rel=canonical to the new ccTLD to avoid duplicate content and those old pages from out ranking our new pages?
Also what are some other causes for our traffic being down so much? It just seems that there is a much bigger problem but I don't know what it could be.
-
TANKS!
-
Nice additions Robert! Cheers.
-
Great response. I would have given you exactly the same steps. You should follow John's advise:)
Link building to these individual ccTLD's will be the biggest obstacle to overcome, especially in short amounts of time (if that matters), but, if you have time and resources, this will help the geographic level of your brand on a global level. It's just too bad when you have to break up one master domain (pooled together), and go with individual domains for each country you are targeting.
Cheers, Rob
-
You want to use a 301 for the redirect to insure you get the juice from previous links. Here are two good articles from moz: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection and since you moved domains: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains
By using the 301 you are telling the engines that not only the location changed, but that any updated content, etc. will be found there.
When you do this, you can take a snapshot of the values (DA, PA, MozTrust, etc.) of both pages and follow along. We are starting to do that with any site changes and 301's to develop a timeline until Site A acquires what it will from Site B and will eventually do a paper on same.
Best.
-
The new domains have no domain authority yet, as they are new and likely have few backlinks, so it makes sense they'd rank poorly to start. Now you'll have to build links to these new domains individually. The nice thing about your set up before is that all of your domains pooled all of their domain authority within one domain. Hopefully having the different ccTLDs will pay off for you down the line.
This is a good time to 301 redirect your old pages to their new counterparts. That should help your new domains because the link juice from those pages will flow to your new domain. If you weren't redirecting those pages to begin with, that could be the cause of your rankings being so poor. In that case though, I would imagine the old site would be outranking the new ones?
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
-
Canonical's, Social Signals and Multi-Regional website.
Hi all, I have a website that is setup to target different countries by using subfolders. Example /aus/, /us/, /nz/. The homepage itself is just a landing page redirect to whichever country the user belongs to. Example somebody accesses https://domain/ and will be redirected to one of the country specific sub folders. The default subfolder is /us/, so all users will be redirected to it if their country has not been setup on the website. The content is mostly the same on each country site apart from localisation and in some case content specific to that country. I have set up each country sub folder as a separate site in Search Console and targeted /aus/ to AU users and /nz/ to NZ users. I've also left the /us/ version un-targeted to any specific geographical region. In addition to this I've also setup hreflang tags for each page on the site which links to the same content on the other country subfolder. I've target /aus/ and /nz/ to en-au and en-nz respectively and targeted /us/ to en-us and x-default as per various articles around the web. We generally advertise our links without a country code prefix, and the system will automatically redirect the user to the correct country when they hit that url. Example, somebody accesses https://domain/blog/my-post/, a 302 will be issues for https://domain/aus/blog/my-post/ or https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ etc.. The country-less links are advertised on Facebook and in all our marketing campaigns Overall, I feel our website is ranking quite poorly and I'm wondering if poor social signals are a part of it? We have a decent social following on Facebook (65k) and post regular blog posts to our Facebook page that tend to peek quite a bit of interest. I would have expected that this would contribute to our ranking at least somewhat? I am wondering whether the country-less link we advertise on Facebook would be causing Googlebot to ignore it as a social signal for the country specific pages on our website. Example Googlebot indexes https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ and looks for social signals for https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ specifically, however, it doesn't pick up anything because the campaign url we use is https://domain/blog/my-post/. If that is the case, I am wondering how I would fix that, to receive the appropriate social signals /us/blog/my-post/, /aus/blog/my-post/ & /nz/blog/my-post/. I am wondering if changing the canonical url to the country-less url of each page would improve my social signals and performance in the search engines overall. I would be interested to hear your feedback. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | destinyrescue0 -
Webpage has bombed outside of Top 50 for search term in one week. What's the cause?
I've been monitoring the performance of some pages via the email Moz sends every week, and until this week two pages that I've managed to get ranking have ranked between 20 and 23 for the specific term. However, today on the email one of the pages for one search term has bombed out of the top 50 while the other page has remained unaffected. What could be the cause for this? I've looked at Google Webmasters for an indication of a penalty of some sort but there is nothing glaringly obvious. I've no messages on there, and I haven't bought a load of spam links at all. What else could I check?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mickburkesnr0 -
Does DMCA protection actually improve search rankings (assuming no one's stolen my content)
Hello Moz Community, I had a conversation with someone who claimed that implementing a DMCA protection badge, such as those offered at http://www.dmca.com/ for $10/mo, will improve a site's Google rankings. Is this true? I know that if my content is stolen it can hurt my rankings (or the stolen content can replace mine), but I'm asking if merely implementing the badge will help my rankings. Thanks! Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bill_at_Common_Form0 -
Are clean mobile URL's necessary?
Adding code to redirect/clean up ugly URL's slows down mobile site performance, so it is necessary if we are already using rel=alternate tags on our desktop/www pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | recbrands0 -
Created the content, yet we don't rank for it. Toxic website?
Hey everyone, I'm beginning to think our site is toxic i.e. it'll never rank properly again irrespective of what we do. I recently published some data (2 months ago) in an interactive visual called the "iPhone 5S Price Index". I outreached and got thousands of links from sites including Forbes, Gizmodo (various international versions), Washington Post, The Guardian, NY Times, etc etc. All of these results dominate the Google rankings, all with links pointing to us. YET, we're no where to be seen. What incentive are Google giving content creators, like me, to continue producing content that is obviously popular if we can't even rank for it? The traffic we received was fantastic. In one day the traffic was 40 times our average, which made me smile like a Cheshire Cat from ear-to-ear but we need to improve our rankings overall otherwise the value to us is lost. The traffic wasn't there to buy our service, they were there to see the graphic. Hopefully our brand exposure leads to future sales, but it's a pittance compared to our previous rankings income. I've had this type of success 3 times in the last few months on this site alone. Yet nothing changes. We suffered from a loss of rankings in September 2012, fighting ever since to get it back. Now I'm losing hope it is even possible. Does anyone know why our site wouldn't rank when we're undeniable the source that created the work? Also, why wouldn't the increase in domain authority (which has jumped about 10 points according to OSE) have a knock on effect for the rest of our keywords - or even let us appear within the top 100 for ones we obviously serve? We do Real Company Shit - and we're good at it. But I need these rankings back. It's driving me nuts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | purpleindigo0 -
Have you guys seen this yet: panguintool.com to help identify what hit the ranks
Have you guys seen this yet: panguintool.com Works with GA to show traffic superimposed with Panda/Penguin/other
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw
updates to help discover what hit the ranks. Looks interesting, requests access to your GA account.0 -
Would it be ok if my ccTLD (.au) has links pointing to my .com (main) site?
The main pages of my .au site are all in .au, but once you go to the inner pages, the users will be directed to my .com site. The .com will act as the content for the top pages of the .au. Would that be ok?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MicroSourcing_PRM0 -
Why is my site's 'Rich Snippets' information not being displayed in SERPs?
We added hRecipe microformats data to our site in April and then migrated to the Schema.org Recipe format in July, but our content is still not being displayed as Rich Snippets in search engine results. Our pages validate okay in the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool. Any idea why they are not being displayed in SERP's? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Techboy0