Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Cant find good information on webmaster tools geographic target and have some questions about it.

International SEO

678

EcommerceSite last edited by

Going through our webmaster tools setting I noticed someone had checked Target Users and selected United States. Most of our business is in the US but we still do some internationally. If I uncheck it will I lose rankings in the US?
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
Andropenis_Australia last edited by

I would say most likely yes. US sites still show internationally so if your main target audience is in the U.S I would keep that as the target rather than risk anything. All the best.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

href lang questions - please help

international seo hreflang

Hi I have a few questions about href lang implementation and I was hoping for some guidance / opinions. An international website is using mostly a folder structure, but for some locations it might have standalone sub-domains. Some folders are there to target locations and languages, with others just targeting languages. See the list below: domain.com/es-mx [Language: Spanish - Location: Mexico]
domain.com/pt-br [Language: Portuguese - Location: Brazil]
domain.com/ja-jp [Language: Japanese - Location: Japan]
domain.com/en-jp [Language: English - Location: Japan]
domain.com/fr-ca [Language: French - Location: Canada]
domain.com/en-ca [Language: English - Location: Canada]
domain.com/en-ie [Language: English - Location: Ireland]
domain.com/ar [Language: Arabic]
domain.com/ph [Language: Tagalog]
domain.com/it [Language: Italian]
domain.com/tr [Language: Turkish]
domain.com/kr [Language: Korean]
domain.com/fr [Language: French]
domain.com/ru [Language: Russian]
domain.com/vn [Language: Vietnamese] domain.in/en [Language: English - Location Indian]
domain.in/hi [Language: Hindi - Location Indian] My questions are: Is href lang sitemap equally as good as the href lang meta tag in terms of effectiveness. I know that the sitemap is easier to maintain and upkeep but i don't know which one is better as google recommends both. How do you mix your listings when some are targeting language and country and others are just targeting language speakers (not tied to any specific country). So take for example in the list above: there would be a general site for french speakers and then one for french speakers in Canada. Thanks for your advise in advance.
International SEO | | MarkCanning

0
Redirection Question - Can Anyone Help?

Hi Community, I have 2 job boards. Job board A is a .co.uk domain. Job board B is uk.com domain. Job board A displays jobs in the UK but has an international jobs section. Job board B focuses entirely on international jobs. To cut a long story short we are shutting down Job board B as we are going to just be using Job board A in future. In terms of redirection, would it be best to: 1. 301 redirect job board B domain to Job board A. (www.jobboardb.uk.com -> www.jobboarda.co.uk) or 2. 301 redirect job board b to the international jobs section on job board a (as this is the most relevant place for the user to go I am thinking to go with option 2, but I read somewhere that it wasn't best practice. Any help is much appreciated.
International SEO | | SO_UK

0
Country subfolders showing as sitelinks in Google, country targeting for home page no longer working

Hi There, Just wondering if you can help. Our site has 3 region versions (General .com, /ie/ for Ireland and /gb/ for UK), each submitted to Google Webmaster Tools as seperate sites with hreflang tags in the head section of all pages. Google was showing the correct results for a few weeks, but I resubmitted the home pages with slight text changes last week and something strange happened, though it may have been coincidental timing. When we search for the brand name in google.ie or google.co.uk, the .com now shows as the main site, where the sitelinks still show the correct country versions. However, the country subdirectories are now appearing as sitelinks, which is likely causing the problem. I have demoted these on GWT, but unsure as to whether that will work and it seems to take a while for sitelink demotion to work. Has anyone had anything similar happen? I thought perhaps it was a markup issue breaking the head section so that Google can no longer see the hreflangs pointing to each other as alternates. I checked the source code in w3 validator and it doesn't show any errors. Anyway, any help would be much appreciated - and thanks to anyone who gets back, it's a tricky type of issue to troubleshoot. Thanks, Ro
International SEO | | romh

0
Geotargeting in Webmaster Tools - Is there an expected ranking benefit in the geotargeted region ?

Hi Is there an expected ranking benefit from geotargeting regional focused subfolders or domain mapped TLDs' in the target countries ? Or does it just prevent these pages from showing up in other regions search results ? For example i have a client with a main .com site targeting english worldwide generally, then a /tr subfolder in turkish to target Turkey. Then another subfolder /de targeting german in germany (but the de has also been domain mapped to .de top level domain too). Im leaving the main .com site non geotargeted since its job is to achieve english language results wherever possible and wandering whether to geotarget the turkish subfolder & german tld The Turkish regional subfolder & the German tld are achieving some ranking results already in their target countries googles, but also getting traffic from other countries too (which im happy to get, dont really want to stop this traffic unless there really is a local region ranking benefit for the main target country by gwt geotargeting). So should I use GWT international targeting tool or not ? Since the tld site is clearly on a german domain with german language pages and the Turkish subfolder /tr site is in Turkish the i presume Googles got no probs working this out which is demonstrated by the regional & language ranking results So I presume if achieving results in target countries already then no real need to set international taregt in GWT especially if it may stop traffic from other regions too. BUT if its likely to improve those rankings further in the main target countries googles significantly then i would happily cut off or reduce the other region traffic in favour of higher rankings and hence targeted traffic from the main target country .All Best Dan
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence

0
Targeting International Markets on the Web

Hello Moz community, I have a popular news website that we are looking to target multiple countries (all English first). So I know (1) a hosting provided (ip address) in that country and (2) a target extension (.co.uk) will help us. Am I missing anything else that can help when targeting international markets? What I'm struggling with is the duplicate content. I can't copy the content over to the extension because of the bad practice of duplicate content. Is it possible to have the same content on both websites and let Google know that it lives at the .com extension? If so, would those websites containing duplicate content still rank? And we would want to target different languages later (for example Spanish). This would be different content because it is in a different language, correct? Thanks for your help Moz community! Cole
International SEO | | ColeLusby

0
External URLs in hreflang sitemap questions

I'm currently putting together an international sitemap for a website that has an set up like the following: example.com/us
example.com/au
example.com/ca
example.co.uk
example.se I'm planning on including the hreflang tags within sitemaps for each domain, to make sure google serves up the right version. However, I'm a bit sceptical about including the non .com domains within the .com sitemap - and the other way round for .co.uk and .se sitemaps. The way I've been doing it follows the following example: <url><loc>http://www.example.com/us/</loc></url> Putting in the .co.uk and .se domains within the .com sitemap just doesn't feel right - is this actually the right way to do it? Thanks in advance 🙂
International SEO | | Guyboz

0
Have I over-optimized (on-site optimization using SEOMoz tool)?

Hey all, Quite new to SEO although I tried to educate myself as much as I could. I just spent (really) a lot of time doing the onsite optimization of a few key pages of a website in 3 languages (in which I'm more or less conversational - with the help of Google Translate). I know content should not be misleading and feel natural. I think the result is natural but I'm not sure... I optimized as much as I could so as to reach an "A" grade as per SEOMoz tool for each page, for 1-4 keywords per page. I feel sometimes I stretched a bit, but not sure what "stretching" is given my lack of experience. So I was wondering if some of you could tell me what they thought and if there was some obvious don'ts in my work. Here are a few key pages I have optimized: The homepage: http://goo.gl/00Fti The search results page: http://goo.gl/b1fxE The property page: http://goo.gl/t2GdY The destinations page: http://goo.gl/0Kc0l Note that the other versions of the page - Italian & Spanish - may be more awkward, so I welcome your opinions for these as well (dropdown on top of the page to change the language). Thanks!!
International SEO | | Philoups

0
Geo targeting issue and hosting

Hi guys and gals, this is not a problem per se, but an oddity that I would appreciate some insight on from the big juicy brains in this community. Our site had hosting in the US, and I was concerned that therefore our relevance to our own country (Australia) was diminished because of it. For one of our main keywords we were a few spots behind the competitor on the 1st page for an australian searcher, but when i searched the same keyword from Google.com with gl=us to show US only results, we outranked the competitors by a few spots. On page elements aside (if anything we had more geo identifiers on the ranking page in question) I wanted to move hosts anyway and got hosting in Australia. The next week our search traffic jumped by 25%. But it was almost all US traffic. Australian traffic was unchanged. Any idea how this could happen? It's an .AU domain, hosted in Australia, with on page clearly identifying Australia. I checked webmaster tools and our geo is properly set to Australia. I checked the keywords that the traffic increased for and they are not geo specific at all. Besides that I don't know how else to pin this down. Thanks.
International SEO | | Digital360

0