How can I penalise my own site in an international search?

[Benj25]

Perhaps penalise isn't the right word, but we have two ecommerce sites.

One at .com and one at .com.au.

For the com.au site we would like only that site to appear for our brand name search in google.com.au.

For the .com site we would like only that site to appear for our brand name search in google.com.

I've targeted each site in the respective country in Google Webmaster Tools and published the Australian and English address on the respective site.

What I'm concerned about is people on Google.com.au searching our brand and clicking through to the .com site.

Is there anything I can do to lower the ranking of my .com site in Google.com.au?

[David_ODonnell]

One of the examples scenarios Google gives is:

Your pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but the content has small regional variations. For example, you might have English-language content targeted at readers in the US, GB, and Ireland.

Tough call, you might have to do some research to see if this solution will help in your particular scenario.

[Benj25]

They aren't identical, they have a different design, text, almost everything.

They are similar. As in they are both book stores.

The .com.au has Australian wording / spelling, the .com has English spelling and wording.

Do we need to specify hreflang="en-au" if they are different sites?

[David_ODonnell]

Are the sites identical but just hosted on different domains to target different regions?

Is there any variation in the English used on each site, for example, do you have Australian English spelling on the .com.au and US (or other) English on the .com?

If yes, you might want to have a look into the rel="alternative" hreflang="x" meta tags.

Checkout: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

Especially the Example configuration: rel="alternate" hreflang="x" in action section

[Benj25]

Thanks Mat, that definitely sounds wise.

Penalise was definitely the wrong word, I more meant, what other signals can we put out to Google to say that this is the com.au site and we want this to appear above the com.

[matbennett]

I'd be ever so careful about doing anything to deliberately try to lower you ranking. It just sounds like an approach that could go horribly wrong.

You best bet might be to live with the fact that both will appear (or better still - enjoy and encourage it), but use the sites to achieve the end goal of getting users on to the correct site.

The usual way to do this would be to check the IP address of the user against a geoip database. I've used both the paid and free versions of the database available at maxmind.com for this.  That will allow you to identify users that are in Australia and direct them towards to .au site.

How you direct them is important. You could just automatically redirect those users to the new site.  Some people will say that this can look like cloaking and cause issues, but I don't believe that alone will do this. However it is often better to intercept those users with a message along the lines of "It looks like you are connecting from Australia - would you like to view our dedicated Australia website?" - then list the benefits and offer a choice there.

If you do that it would be good to set a custom variable in analytics to know when that message had been shown. That would allow you to measure how many people are following the suggestion.

Once you are happy it is working then you will probably end up encouraging both domains to appear as dominating the SERP for your brand is always useful.