Redirection based on country and impact on rankings
-
I have a website that ranks number 1 in google.co.uk for its main key term and ranks number 4 in google.com.au.
However i would rather that visitors in australia see domain.com.au rather than domain.co.uk.
Is there a way to achieve this using some clever 301s without impacting the rankings in australia and so that the .com.au starts to rank in place of the .co.uk
OR
Would you advise launching a .com.au version of the site hosted separately with unique / re-written content on it.?
-
Hi Hannah,
Thanks for this this was what i was looking for in terms of advice. I was only a bit skeptical about having an australian site that ranks as well as a uk site on page one. and if they are both giving out the same info how useful would this be.
The linkbuilding shouldnt be too difficult.
Thanks for your help!
Prav
-
Sorry! Misunderstood you
Yes, you could launch a .com.au but even if you have created Australian content I'd probably still be inclined to implement rel-alternate-hreflang annotations in your sitemaps; as the content will still likely be very similar.
The only issue with this is that your new domain won't have much in the way of link equity so it still might not rank without some link building effort on your part.
A further alternative would be to get yourself a generic domain like a .com and split into subfolders - /uk and /au. You'd then only have one site to build links to rather than two...
However the process of migrating from your .co.uk to your .com (and the potential to lose rankings whilst the search engines figure out what you're doing) might make this option unattractive.
I guess I'm saying launching the .com.au is probably quicker, cleaner and less risky but be aware you'll probably need to do some link building too.
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
Thanks for this hanna, its the homepage ranking for the same term in both UK and Oz.
i have been told that when the Ozzzies see a .co.uk they are less likely to click on the result.
if i launched a .com.au version of the site with unique content but deliveroing the same info do you think this would be an issue?
-
Hello there,
I'd suggest that employing redirects is unlikely to result in the .com.au site ranking instead of the .co.uk version - essentially all you're doing is pushing any Australian visitors who come to you over to the Australian version of the site.
In order to try get the appropriate versions of the site ranking you might try implementing rel-alternate-hreflang annotations in your sitemaps - see http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865
I'd also recommend including things like local bricks and mortar addresses, local telephone numbers, displaying local currency etc to help the search engines understand which locations you're trying to target.
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
You could use IP re-directs, but they are notoriously innacurate especially if people are using proxies.
Obviously showing a .co.uk in Australia is not the best, but it is ranking high. One idea if the domains are the same and have the same content is to only target UK in webmaster tools with the uk domain and .com.au for Australia. This may not solve it though and may impact rankings.
Your best bet would be to do the Geo redirects. I wouldn't think there would be that many issues as you don't have hundreds of different countries.
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
-
Is there a tool to see all redirects?
I'm thinking this is a silly question, but I've never had to deal with it I thought I'd ask. Ok is there a tool out there that will show all the redirects to a domain. I'm working on a project that I keep stumbling on urls that redirect to the site I'm studying. They don't show up in Open Site or ahrefs as linking domains, but they keep popping up on me. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | BCutrer0 -
Redirect to new domain.... (which is penalised)
Hey - how's things? I have a client who wants to redirect his main domain to a new one.... there are a couple of problems I see and thought I'd ask on moz. 1 - The new domain has been incorrectly parked on the old domain with no redirection in place... when you do "site:domain.com" in Google, there are no serps for the new domain (the old domain still ranks well), it doesn't seem to rank anywhere and doesn't return any results in OSE. Is it wise to redirect to this domain or will rankings drop on both? 2 - The new domain uses .mobi as its suffix and will be replacing a .com - but is much more related to the business keyword wise. Is using mobi a problem. Overall the SEO on the site is abysmal and I will be reworking everything - so there will be lots of changes going on at the same time. I'm just wondering if it is worth redirecting the new domain at all, or trying to get brand new domain and use that.... or just to stick with the original aged domain... I think that is my only concerns at the moment
Technical SEO | | agua0 -
Sitemap and crawl impact
If I have two links in the sitemap (for example: page1.html and page2.html) but the web-site contains more pages (page1.html, page2.html and page3.html) is this a sign for Google to not to crawl other pages? I.e. Will Google index page3.html? Consider that any page can be accessed.
Technical SEO | | ditoroin0 -
Is page rank lost through a 301 redirect?
Hi everyone. I'd really appreciate your help with this one 🙂 I've just watched Matt Cutt's video 'what percentage of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect?' and I am confused. I had taken this to mean that a re-direct would always lose you page rank, but watching it again I am not so sure. He says that the amount of page rank lost through a 301 redirect is the same as any other link. Does this mean that no page rank at all is lost during site migrations? Or is it the case that first page rank would be lost from the original link and then more page rank would be lost from any subsequent redirects? watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw
Technical SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
301 Redirect with index.asp
I am very new to all of this so forgive the newbie questions I will get better. Ok so after starting a campaign I see that I have many issues including where some pages are being deemed as duplicate content. 1. The report says the http://lucid8.com has duplicate content on 2 other pages 2. When I look at them it shows that http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates. 3. Really these are the exactly the same page because the default page that is opened for www.lucid8.com http://www.lucid8.com etc always opens the index.asp page. 4. Now I read that I should do permanent redirects and how to do this via IIS and I tried to do a redirect from index.asp to www.lucid8.com but that does not work because www.lucid8.com is pointing to index.asp and so we end up in a circle. So the question is how do I get rid of these duplicate page references without causing problems. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TroyW0 -
How can I use a keyword based domain to rank for my existing site?
Hi everyone, From my understanding if your keywords are in your domain name it can help you rank for the keyword. My site www.pixelchefs.com was affected from the latest Google Algorithm changes, as I used my main site as a testing ground for all my back linking. Our site was a single page with Jquery slide, late February the same time with the Google algo changes we uploaded our new site, larger site with lots of pages and info. Result of that was that home page has PR3 and all other pages PR0. Well I don't really depend on Google for any work as most of my work comes from referrals.......but While searching for names for my private page I came across the domain name www.DesignOrlando.com, The specific keyword gets 22,210 view per month according to Google analytics and also contains part of the keyword for all the keywords I am after. I want to use the domain name for my main site but i am not sure what is the best way to forward the domain so Google can start reading my site as DesignOrlando.com Any Suggestions will be very appreciated.
Technical SEO | | alex_pixelchefs0 -
Setup 301 Redirects
I have been asked to transfer a clients old domain over to a new domain with a new site. All of the inbound links basically go to the homepage, and the few links that dont go to the homepage on the old site, might as well be redirected to the homepage on the new site. I'm wondering is there a "catch all" sort of redirect such as www.oldsite.com/* redirects to newsite.com. So any redirects we havent set up will automatically go to the new site homepage? And secondly, whats the easiest way to the redirects up? Can I just add it as a parked domain or addon domain in cpanel, and do the redirects in there? Or does it needs its own hosting for the old domain with its own htaccess file? Any help appreciated! 🙂
Technical SEO | | timscullin0 -
Redirects
Hello, My question is: how important is it to wait for the a redirect to get seen and cached before you take down the old page? More in depth: my old platform has seriously limited my ability to add sitemaps and make edits to htacces. I just want to change nameservers (which will delete everything on there) and upload the htaccess is that alright? Another way of saying it: when redirecting a page, is it necessary for google to see the old page before it is deleted? Thanks Tyler
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0