Multi-National Website Demarcation in Organic Search
-
We launched our business in the UK many years ago using a .com domain and have built up good link equity back to our www site. Last year, we launched the same business in the US and host the US site on a "us." sub domain. We have used Google Webmaster Tools to demarcate the two websites so that the www site is set to target the UK and the "us." sub domain is set to target the US.
Our organic search results from Google UK for the UK business are fine but when our US customers Google brand terms the www UK site takes precedence in organic search. To complicate this further, the sitelinks within the search results include a mixture of pages from the www UK site and the "us." US site. Google clearly has some difficulty understanding that the two sites are for two different geographic audiences.
We have a good relationship with Google and they have indicated (with appropriate disclaimers) that we might consider aligning the URL structures for both sites to reduce the precedence that the www site currently receives. The www home page will become an International portal and the UK and US URL structures will be aligned. We have two options:
- Change both sites to subdomains so that we have "uk.xxxxx.com" and "us.xxxxx.com" linked to an International portal at the www subdomain
- Use sub folders so that we have "www.xxxxx.com/uk/" and "www.xxxxx.com/us/" again linked from the www subdomain
We're comfortable with use of 301 redirects and canonicals to change the structure in a search engine friendly way but cannot agree internally whether sub domains or sub folders is the way to go. Unfortunately we're to far down the line to seperate by tld.
Anyone have a strong opinion on the best approach?
Thanks,
Jeremy
-
Hi Jeremy...
Have you implemented hreflang tag on your website ? This tag helps Google in showing appropriate page in targeted country.
If you want know more about this issue please go through below link:
_http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust _
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
-
My Website Not Showing In Google English Search Results
My website is not visible on Google English. Selecting the language of Google in Hindi, Spanish, etc., my pages are visible in search results.
International SEO | | Jude_Wix0 -
Changing the language of the website meta title and description?
Hello, Moz community! I'm planning to change the language of my website title and description from English to rank better for queries on the local language. Do you think this would increase the local language ranking? And in case I need to switch back to English, let's say in 2021, would it be difficult to regain the current rankings? Please let me know if you have any thoughts on this. Thank you!
International SEO | | vhubert2 -
Internationalise all or just part of website?
Hi We are a UK company looking to expand our sales into the US market. We will be setting up a US office. Our (.com) site has a number of main sections relating to different products and services - but only two of these sections will be selling products to the US. /service1 - UK only
International SEO | | AbsolutelyN
/products1 - UK and US - different product names/descriptions for different markets
/service3 - UK and US - not much difference for uk/us pages So the query is do we fully internationalise the site with sub folders /us & /gb and make all content on the site have a different language version. Or do we only give an alternate language version for the two areas that need it? Perhaps /products1/us & /products1/uk We also have top rankings and are concerned about changing the urls. Is one option to keep the existing urls as the 'default' language? The default perhaps being US as it is a .com domain. If not then how do you redirect a url that going forward splits into US or GB sub directories? Another option is to have the current .com become US only and create a .co.uk site. We are in a position to easily do this but research suggests subdirectories is the better way forwards due to aggregated link authority. Many thanks for any thoughts,
Tristan0 -
Transfer a website from WP to Joomla
Hello guy's, We have a WP website and we are moving soon to a new site that will be in Joomla.
International SEO | | WayneRooney
Our website is very big and we are ranking with more then 400 keys in all the tshirts industry in the UK.
The new website will be with the same url's and the same domain so we will not lose any of the ranking.
Within this domain we have the blogs as well and a lot of pages. I'd like to get some tips about how to make the transition as smooth as we can to avoid problems with Google ? We have more then 700 visitor a day so we can not take any risks regarding to this. Any help is welcome !!!0 -
Two versions of a website with different languages - Best way to do it?
I'm working on a website for a Swedish artist and her page is in Swedish, everything is in Swedish on the site, even though it's not a lot of text on the site. We would like to have the site in English too, or another version of the site in English on a separate domain, what's the best way to proceed from here? The domain name is a .se (swedish domain), would it be better to create a another domain and host the english version of the site on a .com domain? Or will we bump into problems with duplicate content if we create a replica of the swedish site in english. We're using wordpress and I know that there's translation plugins out there, is that a good option? I'm a bit clueless on how to proceed and would love some help or guidance here.
International SEO | | Fisken0 -
Will website with tag hreflang pass link juice to other country/language version of website?
For example, I have a website XXX.com and I made hreflang tags to other country/language versions of website: ru.XXX.com (for Russia/Russian) XXX.com.ua (for Ukraine/Russian) ua.XXX.com (for Ukraine/Ukraine) Then I will acquire links to XXX.com. The question is: will XXX.com pass link juice to websites ru.XXX.com, XXX.com.ua and ua.XXX.com. Will these websites rank in their countries if I will acquire links ONLY to XXX.com? I looked at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en, but haven't found what google think about that. Thank you in advance. I will appreciate your help.
International SEO | | Kabanchik0 -
Best URL structure for Multinational/Multilingual websites
Hi I am wondering what the best URL format to use is when a website targets several countries, in several languages. (without owning the local domains, only a .com, and ideally to use sub-folders rather than sub-domains.) As an example, to target a hotel in Sweden (Google.se) are there any MUST-HAVE indicators in the URL to target the relevant countries? Such as hotelsite.com**/se/**hotel-name. Would this represent the language? Or is it the location of the product? To clarify a bit, I would like to target around 10 countries, with the product pages each having 2 languages (the local language + english). I'm considering using the following format: hotelsite.com/en/hotel-name (for english) and hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name (for swedish content of that same product) and then using rel=”alternate” hreflang=”se-SV” markup to target the /se/ page for Sweden (Google.se) and rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” for UK? And to also geotarget those in Webmaster tools using those /se/ folders etc. Would this be sufficient? Or does there need to be an indicator of both the location, AND the language in the URLs? I mean would the URL's need to be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name/se-SV (for swedish) or can it just be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name? Any thoughts on best practice would be greatly appreciated.
International SEO | | pikka0 -
Multilingual newspaper website
Hello all. This is my first post to seomoz. My group is in the process of creating a website for a newspaper client which will have stories in two languages Spanish and English. Basically visitors will receive the Spanish version and have an option to read the story in english. I have never optimized a website for multi-languages/foreign languages. The newspaper is located in the USA so I'm not sure how this is going to work, which is were you come in. They would like to show up in both Google.com and Spanish versions of Google. My questions are: Do I need to worry about ranking for both versions? How should I go about optimizing the website for multiple languages? How do I need to configure my pages to be indexed so duplication is not an issue? (Canonical URL Tag?) Do I need to use special tags besides the news Google news tags for index, etc? I have more questions but as you can see I'm looking for a starting point on how I should apply my knowledge of english only websites to a website that has the same content just in different languages. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
International SEO | | cubictulsa0