Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your reputation grow with Reviews AI
      Moz Local

      Let your reputation grow with Reviews AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. International SEO
    4. Ranking issues for UK vs US spelling - advice please

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Ranking issues for UK vs US spelling - advice please

    International SEO
    3
    3
    3881
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • StevenHowe
      StevenHowe last edited by

      Hi guys,

      I'm reaching out here for what may seem to be a very simple and obvious issue, but not something I can find a good answer for.

      We have a .com site hosted in Germany that serves our worldwide audience. The site is in English, but our business language is British (UK) English.

      This means that we rank very well for (e.g.) optimisation software but optimization software is nowhere to be found.

      The cause of this to me seems obvious; a robot reading those two phrases sees two distinct words. Nonetheless, having seen discussions of a similar nature around the use of plurals in keywords, it would seem to me that Google should have this sort of thing covered.

      Am I right or wrong here?

      If I'm wrong, then what are my options? I really don't want to have to make a copy of the entire site; apart from the additional effort involved in content upkeep I see this path fraught with duplicate content issues.

      Any help is very much appreciated, thanks.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Hannah_Smith
        Hannah_Smith last edited by

        Hi Steven,

        I'd have to agree with EGOL here - it is something that Google should have figured out - however, to some extent I think they have. For example, if I search for optimisation software here in the UK I get results for pages which are targeted to 'optimization' as well as 'optimisation'.

        Whilst I'd guess that the UK spelling might not be helping you in this instance, I wonder if there might also be issues in terms of your site's authority or strength which are also causing you issues.

        You've not said which site you're working on, but how does it stack up in terms of domain authority and page authority versus your SERP competition? It might be worth looking into that in the first instance.

        The other alternative would be as EGOL highlighted - target 'optimization' instead.

        It occurs to me that this might be worth testing - take your page as it is right now but switch out UK for US English and see if your rankings improve.

        As you say you could create a US targeted subfolder on your site (I'd recommend implementing hreflang to avoid duplicate content issues) and try to tackle the issue that way - however if you're site isn't authoritative enough it likely still won't rank.

        Hope this helps,

        Hannah

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • EGOL
          EGOL last edited by

          Am I right or wrong here?

          I agree. I think that Google has lots of problems here.

          sulfur and sulphur have lots of problems

          gray and grey have enormous problems

          From what I see proper nouns for names of people, places and things cause a lot of the problems - but there are lots of webpages that seem to be overlooked or unreasonably ranked.

          Any help.....

          I don't have any help.  I can only say that I am gunning for American English usage as that is where I think I will get the most traffic - and that is where my website is hosted.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • 1 / 1
          • First post
            Last post

          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

          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.

          • See all categories

          Related Questions

          • MarkCanning

            Advise on the right way to block country specific users but not block Googlebot - and not be seen to be cloaking. Help please!

            international seo crawling

            Hi, I am working on the SEO of an online gaming platform - a platform that can only be accessed by people in certain countries, where the games and content are legally allowed.
            Example: The games are not allowed in the USA, but they are allowed in Canada. Present Situation:
            Presently when a user from the USA visits the site they get directed to a restricted location page with the following message: RESTRICTED LOCATION
            Due to licensing restrictions, we can't currently offer our services in your location. We're working hard to expand our reach, so stay tuned for updates! Because USA visitors are blocked Google which primarily (but not always) crawls from the USA is also blocked, so the company webpages are not being crawled and indexed. Objective / What we want to achieve: The website will have multiple region and language locations. Some of these will exist as standalone websites and others will exist as folders on the domain. Examples below:
            domain.com/en-ca [English Canada]
            domain.com/fr-ca [french Canada]
            domain.com/es-mx [spanish mexico]
            domain.com/pt-br [portugese brazil]
            domain.co.in/hi [hindi India] If a user from USA or another restricted location tries to access our site they should not have access but should get a restricted access message.
            However we still want google to be able to access, crawl and index our pages. Can i suggest how do we do this without getting done for cloaking etc? Would this approach be ok? (please see below) We continue to work as the present situation is presently doing, showing visitors from the USA a restricted message.
            However rather than redirecting these visitors to a restricted location page, we just black out the page and show them a floating message as if it were a model window.
            While Googlebot would be allowed to visit and crawl the website. I have also read that it would be good to put paywall schema on each webpage to let Google know that we are not cloaking and its a restricted paid page. All public pages are accessible but only if the visitor is from a location that is not restricted Any feedback and direction that can be given would be greatly appreciated as i am new to this angle of SEO. Sincere thanks,

            International SEO | | MarkCanning
            0
          • MedicalSEOMarketing

            CcTLD vs subfolder for international SEO

            In what situations is subfolder better than ccTLD, and vice versa.

            International SEO | | MedicalSEOMarketing
            1
          • Substance-create

            How do hreflang attributes affect ranking?

            We have a site in English. We are considering translating the site into Dutch. If we use a hreflang attribute does that mean we have to create a duplicate page in Dutch for each English page, or does Google auto-translate?  How would duplicate pages, even if they are in a different language, affect ranking?

            International SEO | | Substance-create
            0
          • moon-boots

            Subdirectory vs. gTLD

            So I am merging two ecommerce brands together and have decided to do so either under a Subdirectory or gTLD. My aim here is to increase the quality of my SEO for the weaker site (this would be the second italic domain shown in A and B below), thus taking domain authority from the dominant site, while 301 redirecting all pages from the old domain which will hopefully boost the authority and rank for the merged site). My options for the merged site are: A. www.website.com & www.website.com/hreflang=en B. www.website.com & www.website.com/us Or a combination of A & B (below): C. www.website.com & www.website.com/us/hreflang=en Factors: Option A and C results in a longer URL structure for the merged domain which has a negative impact on SEO, while Option B is much more succinct. Both Option A and Option B are the same distance from the root directory, weakening the SEO credibility of the merged domain somewhat. While option C would be further still. Here are my questions: Option B consolidates Domain Authority, but do Option A and C do the same? Will the first domain receive a boost in Domain Authority and Rank due to 301 redirects targeting the second italic domain? Will any option cause duplicate content issues (some categories/products are identical on both sites)? And if so, how best to avoid them (having Google ignore the subdirectory/gTLD is not an option). One website will target the UK/EU while the other will target the US, will the merged italic site be able to rank well in the US? Are there any other ranking factors I have missed or should consider? I know this is quite an advanced series of questions, so I would appreciate the opinions of others so I can make the most informed choice. Thank you

            International SEO | | moon-boots
            0
          • SameerBhatia

            When I upload my app in chrome web store, it shows this error - "no manifest found in package please make sure to put manifest at the root directory of the zip package". Please explain me the process of putting manifest file.

            Chrome Web store give error "no manifest found in package please make sure to put manifest at the root directory of the zip package"

            International SEO | | SameerBhatia
            0
          • modernmusings

            Working with country specific domain names vs. staying with .com

            I've recently inherited a client that has a country specific domain for Canada (.ca) but there is also a US branch for the company at the .com address. They have a direct competitor that operates also in the U.S. and Canada that has decided to operate entirely under the .com address and re-direct all .ca traffic to their .com address. When I compare the link analysis data for both the .ca, .com, and competitors site, I'm finding there is a huge difference between the .ca site and the competitors site, but not a huge difference between the .com site and the competitors site. For example, the domain authorities are as follows: myclient.ca  (Canadian branch) - 22 myclient.com (US branch) - 46 competitor.com - 53 When I do a brand search for my client in Canada, the Canadian branch website shows up first, but the American one is second. At this point, would it be better for my client to consolidate the two branches into the .com address and focus on increasing external followed links to the .com website? Or, is there merit in continuing to create a separate inbound link strategy for the .ca site? Thanks.

            International SEO | | modernmusings
            0
          • sparkit

            Are my translated pages damaging my ranking?

            Hi there, I have a site in English but with duplicates in different languages. The first problem is that these translated versions of my site receive no ranking on google stars (while the english does) - why is this? The second problem is that SEOmoz counts the errors on my site and then duplicates this error count for all the translated versions of my site - meaning I have a huge amount of errors (too many on-page links). Add this to the fact that I use affilite ID´s to track different types of traffic to my site - so all page urls in english and other languages, with an affiliate id on the end of the url, count as an error. This means I have a huge amount of on page errors indicated by SEOmoz, plus no ranking for my translated pages - I think this is really harming my overall ranking and site trust. What are your opinions on this?

            International SEO | | sparkit
            0
          • PixelKicks

            Poor Google.co.uk ranking for a UK based .net, but great Google.com

            I run an extremely popular news & community website at http://www.onedirection.net, but we're having a few ranking issues in Google.co.uk. The site gets most of its traffic from the USA which isnt a bad thing - but for our key term "one direction", we currently don't rank at all on Google.co.uk. The site is located on a server based in Manchester, UK, and we used to rank very well earlier this year - fluttering about in position 5-7 most of the time. However earlier this year, around July, we started to fall down to page 2 or 3, and at the start of this month we don't rank at all for "one direction" on Google.co.uk. On Google.com however we're very strong, always on page one. We're definitely indexed on .co.uk, just not for main search term - which I find a bit frustrating. All the content on our site is unique, and we write 2-4 stories every day. We have an active forum too, so a lot of our content is user-generated. We've never had any "unnatural link building" messages in Webmaster Tools, and our link profile looks fine to me. Do we just need more .co.uk links, or are we being penalised for something? (I can't imagine what though). It certainly seems that way though. Another site, "www.onedirection.co.uk" which is never updated and has a blatant ad for something completely unrelated on its homepage, ranks above us at the moment-  which I find quite frankly appalling as our site is pretty much regarded as the worlds most popular One Direction news and fan site. We've spent the last few months improving the page-load times of our site, and we've reduced any unneccesary internal linking on the site. Approx 2 months ago we launched a new forum on the site, 301'ing all the old forum links to the new one, so that could have had an impact on rankings - but we'd expect to see an impact on Google.com as well if this was an issue. We definitely feel that we should be ranking higher on Google.co.uk. Does anyone have any ideas what the iproblems could be? Cheers, Chris.

            International SEO | | PixelKicks
            0

          Get started with Moz Pro!

          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

          Start my free trial
          Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz API
          • Moz Data
          • STAT
          • Product Updates
          Moz Solutions
          • SMB Solutions
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Digital Marketers
          Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Authority Checker
          • Link Explorer
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • Brand Authority Checker
          • Local Citation Checker
          • MozBar Extension
          • MozCast
          Resources
          • Blog
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Help Hub
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • How-to Guides
          • Moz Academy
          • API Docs
          About Moz
          • About
          • Team
          • Careers
          • Contact
          Why Moz
          • Case Studies
          • Testimonials
          Get Involved
          • Become an Affiliate
          • MozCon
          • Webinars
          • Practical Marketer Series
          • MozPod
          Connect with us

          Contact the Help team

          Join our newsletter
          Moz logo
          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
          • Accessibility
          • Terms of Use
          • Privacy

          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.