Factors that affect Google.com vs .ca
-
Though my company is based in Canada, we have a .com URL, we're hosted on servers in the U.S., and most of our customers are in the U.S. Our marketing efforts are focused on the U.S. Heck, we even drop the "u" in "colour" and "favour"!
Nonetheless we rank very well in Google.ca, and rather poorly on Google.com.
One hypothesis is that we have more backlinks from .ca domains than .com, but I don't believe that to be true. For sure, the highest quality links we have come from .coms like NYTimes.com.
Any suggestions on how we can improve the .com rankings, other than keeping on with the link building?
-
Thanks for letting us know how things worked out Aspirant.
Andy
-
Final verdict:
I took the plunge. Even though our product is geography agnostic, I changed our Webmaster Tools setting to "U.S."
Sure enough, we immediately saw some improvements in the google.COM rankings. Not much of an impact on .CA, and any loss here was definitely made up in the new .COM traffic.
I'll be doing a deeper dive into the data later.
Thanks everyone.
-
Hey Rob,
I have a bit of exp with this - had a Canadian based site that wanted to target the states. We were ranking well for .CA and not so good in .COM. I actually did this in WMT for a site - set geo-targetting to USA - and after a week or so started noticing a huge jump in .COm for a lot of keywords. What was great was that the rankings in .CA stayed consistent.
The only drop I noticed was in the .CA (Canada Only) searches. These completely dropped off the map. But normal searches in google.ca were fine.Don't know if this will always happen, but this is my experience.
-
I had exactly the same with a spanish site of mine .es for a long time i was first in google.com but knowhere to be found in google.es . Everybody kept telling me that this was not because i had a lot of .com link and none where .es But when time passed without any link changes the keywords aked well in google.es . So is it maybe the case the some countries are just a few months behind?
-
I have noticed that getting links from the appropriate TLD extension really determines where you rank on each google serps for the individual country.
you can search for sites related to yours for the specific TLD by putting inurl:.com in google along with your keywords.
the same thing works for all other extensions.
this makes finding .edu link opportunities a breeze for example
Besides link building you will want to make sure on webmaster tools you have set your targeted country to the country you want to rank best for. For example I have a site about college students which I've set to target the US since Canada mostly calls post secondary education University and College so the audience is split much more.
Hope this helps.
-
Sorry, I meant David Mihm -- oops!
-
I suspect having the settings in WMT set for the USA "might" hurt your performance in other areas, however the small company website (that gets 90% of its business from the USA) I mentioned in my prior response has the setting set to USA and it ranks #3 for it's main search term in both .ca and .com. Having claimed a Local Places account might also be an issue. I'd suggest you contact either Todd Mihm (http://www.davidmihm.com/blog) or Mike Blumenthal (http://blumenthals.com/blog) for an answer to that question.
-
Thanks for the answer. A couple of questions come to mind:
Won't setting our Google Webmaster Tools to United States hurt our performance in other parts of the world? So far I've made a point of ensuring that Webmaster Tools has us as not geo-specific ("Target users in: unlisted", on the Site Configuration > Settings screen of Webmaster Tools).
Also (on the advice of another SEO advisor) we verified our Google Places location, so is there a risk of sending mixed signals to Google and getting hurt by that?
-
The competition is usually stronger in the USA (.com) arena than in Canada (.ca). I have a little company site (with little work done in the way of SEO) that ranks #3 in both .ca and .com for "wheelchair trays". You may want to adjust your settings on Google WebMasterTools to ensure your site is set to United States rather than Canada. As David Kauzlaric has mentioned, you will definitely benefit from having more links from US based sites - I'd focus on that as a first step.
-
Still no breakthroughs on this issue. Our performance keeps improving on .ca and .com, which is obviously good, but our ranking on .com is always very, very far behind our .ca performance.
It's still a mystery to me, given that most of the inbound links are from U.S.-based, .com websites.
The only answer that works in my mind is that .ca uses a different algorithm. But I'm still very interested in hearing other thoughts!
Thanks,
Rob
-
Hi Rob,
Have you seen any changes with your rankings on Google.ca and Google.com? Do you have any other questions or comments you can add to help others that may be in a similar situation?
Here's hoping you got to enjoy two long weekends in a row from both countries!
-
Agree.
We did a link building campaign for a german website (dot de) and most of the links were from .com websites. They started to rank very well on google.com and google.de had only minor impacts. Is clear that the links should be from the same country zone if you want to rank in that particular area.
You should focus on links from .com domain - but that should be easier then building links from .ca.
You should also get a google maps account with your US location - if you have one. That alone should bring up your results in the US.
-
It's a pretty well known fact that non-US versions of Google are not using the same algorithm and therefore are "behind". This could be the case where you are employing methods that a couple years ago were effective and are working well for .CA but on .COM not as well.
The biggest thing you can do is work on high quality content and build links. Remember, linking is somewhere around 70% of the algorithm alone. Work on getting more .COM authoritative links from sites like NYT, USAToday, etc...
Also, if a good portion of your links are from .CA, that very well could affect it too!
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
-
Website Structured data in Google
Can anyone help me to show website structure data in Google when someone search my website in Google. I already added my website in Google and Google webmaster tool. Thanks in adv.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | talkinnetventure0 -
Sitemaps recommend by google
Google in it guideline recommends to create a sitemap. Do they means a /sitemap.xml or does it need to be sitemap directly on the website ? Does it make any difference ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Can google read ajax
Looking to load a one page product view instead of 10 pages of pagination. Does google read ajax and see all 10 pages as 1 page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Archers1 -
Removing a Page From Google index
We accidentally generated some pages on our site that ended up getting indexed by google. We have corrected the issue on the site and we 404 all of those pages. Should we manually delete the extra pages from Google's index or should we just let Google figure out that they are 404'd? What the best practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0 -
Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash.
Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash. Should we rewrite to just the trailing slash or without because of duplicates. The other question is, if we do a rewrite, google has indexed some pages with the slash and some without - i am assuming we will lose rank for one of them once we do the rewrite, correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero0 -
301 vs. 404
If a listing on a website is no longer available to display is it better to resolve to a 301 redirect or use a 404? I know from an SEO point of view a 301 will pass on the link value, but is that as valuable as saying tto the user hey that page is no lonoger available try something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0 -
Google omitting some entries
Hi, I used this tool to test some domains. The tool can be found at http://www.virante.com/seo-tools/duplicate-content I have no questions about the other checks but with the similarity check. My question is how do i get Google not to omit some entries very similar to the top 1000 pages on my site? Will appreciate your answers, thanks. Suleman
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esuleman0 -
How to position in local Google
Hello, It's been easy for me to jump in .com - English only results. But, regional google is making me problems. How to position there? What are the top 3 key elements for ranking locally that don't matter much internationally? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DaBomb110