Why would a site lose rankings in U.S while maintaining rankings in other English locations (Canada & Australia)
-
What would cause a site to lose ranking in the U.S while maintaining top (1st page) positions in other English results countries such as Canada or Australia? Is this purely penguin related because of location of backlinks or are there other significant factors that could be in play? Would this rule out Panda as a cause because it's simply an "English language" targeted algo and not location dependent like backlinks (penguin)?
Appreciate any insights
-
Hello, anybody there?
-
We're still very confused as to why we're ranking in 1st position for our money keyword in Canada, Australia and Hong Kong to name a few countries but we're ranking in 113th position in the USA.
We used to rank in 2nd position for our money keyword in the USA.
Why would this be?
-
Hello Mike and Remus, Thanks for the quick responses!
Mike, unfortunately for us, the drop did not coincide with any documented google updates. Links have also remained stable, in fact, ahrefs reported link profiles for AU and CA specific locations are weak at best.
Mike, you raise good points, however the variations found in the countries we are ranking in top positions are nowhere to be found on our site. It is the commonly universal keywords, used in all locations, that are ranking excellent abroad but horrible domestically. Also, the ranking difference I'm referring to is quite drastic, literally 1st position in CA and AU but having dropped all the way to 10th-12th pages in the U.S., with pages displaying relatively similar user metrics.
I'm wondering if anyone has had experience with keywords ranking drastically differently in other English speaking countries, and if they have identified the cause, outside of regionally popular vocabulary or user metrics?
-
Instead of immediately assuming Penguin there are things like Relevancy, localization, personalization, link authority, language tags, and so on that have affected results for some time. It could just be that the content, while in English and just as readily available to US users, has better bounce rate, better traffic, more authoritative links and so forth for Canadians and Australian search results. It could be that sites which are highly targeted toward US users have better/more relevant content that is pushing your sites down in the US but don't have the same reach in Canada & Australia. It could be that the terms you're losing traction on in the US serps are more volatile or have a different breadth of competition than in Canada or Australia.
-
Hello,
It could be penguin 2.0 update on May 22. This update had more focus on local search results from what I understood. You could do some timing checks using http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change . First look in Analytics when the traffic dropped, then see if there was an algorithmic update in that proximity.
There could also be other reasons like loss of some important links.
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
-
I am based in the UK. I want to appeal to a UK and US market. One of my keywords is 'generalised' which gets way more traffic in my keyword phrase when spelt with a z and not an s. What do I do?
Hi folks. I am based in the UK. I am about to launch a new blog, and I want to appeal to the UK and US markets. One of my primary keywords is 'generalised', which gets way more traffic (as seen using Moz's keyword tool) in my keyword phrase when spelt with a z and not an s. What do I do? Any guidance would be great. I note this has been discussed before, but seemingly without a conclusion. I would really appreciate any help you can provide.
International SEO | | Nobody16165422281340 -
Geolocation issue: Google not displaying the correct url in the SERP's
Hello, Im running a multi-country domain with this structure: domain.com/ar/
International SEO | | EstebanCervi
domain.com/mx/
domain.com/cl/
etc I also have: domain.com/int/ for x-default
domain.com/category/ does a 301 redirect through IP geo-location to the correspondent url, example if your IP is from Mexico, then you got redirected to domain.com/mx/category/ hreflang is correct. webmaster tool geo-location is correct. Example of the issue Im facing right now: When users from Chile do a keyword search in Google Chile, the domain ranks well but the URL that appears in the SERP is the /mx/ version, or the /int/ version or any other country version. Other times is the /cl/ version. The same happens for all the users / countries / keywords. I need to understand what Im doing wrong, because Google is not displaying in the SERP's the correct URL version for the country of the user who is doing the search. Thank you so much! I will appreciate your ideas. PS: I think I should try to change the 301 to a 302 redirect, or completely remove those redirects. Any ideas? Suggestions? Thanks!0 -
International Sites and Duplicate Content
Hello, I am working on a project where have some doubts regarding the structure of international sites and multi languages.Website is in the fashion industry. I think is a common problem for this industry. Website is translated in 5 languages and sell in 21 countries. As you can imagine this create a huge number of urls, so much that with ScreamingFrog I cant even complete the crawling. Perhaps the UK site is visible in all those versions http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/GB/ Obviously for SEO only the first version is important One other example, the French site is available in 5 languages and again... http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/en/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/FR/ And so on...this is creating 3 issues mainly: Endless crawling - with crawlers not focusing on most important pages Duplication of content Wrong GEO urls ranking in Google I have already implemented href lang but didn't noticed any improvements. Therefore my question is Should I exclude with "robots.txt" and "no index" the non appropriate targeting? Perhaps for UK leave crawable just English version i.e. http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/, for France just the French version http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ and so on What I would like to get doing this is to have the crawlers more focused on the important SEO pages, avoid content duplication and wrong urls rankings on local Google Please comment
International SEO | | guidoampollini0 -
Geotarget subfolders with the same language or get rid of duplicates but lose option to geotarget?
Hi, we have a domain that is aimed to cover LatAm region. Currently, the homepage contains country selector for ~20 countries. 95% of them hold content in Spanish. We have only homepages for each regions as separate subfolders, i.e.
International SEO | | eset
www.maindomain.com/co
www.maindomain.com/cl
www.maindomain.com/br
etc. but once the user clicks on menu item he is taken back to main domain subpages, i.e. www.maindomain.com/comprar My struggle is to decide whether it is better to: A) copy all content for each subfolder, which will create huge amount of duplicates (there are no resources to create unique content and it is even impossible taking into account nature of the product - mostly tech.specs, etc.) and implement hreflang sitemaps and configure GWT to target each country with its own Spanish content (the same for each country) OR B) remove all local subfolders and keep only main domain in Spanish that will serve all countries within the region. With this option, we will get rid of duplicates but also lose option to geotarget. So, my questions is which option will do less harm, or if there is any other approach that comes to your minds. I consulted with two agencies but still haven't got clear answer. Thanks a lot for your help!0 -
Do you recommend for registering international domains (IDN) for ranking on words used in domain name?
Hi everybody, thanks for putting time to reply me 🙂 I am working on SEO of a website that its content is in Farsi. I have chosen a few rather competitive keywords (difficulty between 30-40% :thanks to KDT in seomoz!) to target. Due to the importance of keyword in domain name I was thinking about registering a few international domains that contain exactly the same Farsi words that I target. Do you recommend this as a valid approach? For each of these domains, I am going to setup a very simple 1 page site for each domain, a few lines of content and a big button linked to my primary website. How does it sound? Best regards,
International SEO | | Ashkan10 -
Best domain for spanish language site targeting ALL spanish territories?
hi, we're have a strong .com domain and are looking to launch a site for spanish speakers (ie latin america + spain). we already have various subdirectories for some foreign language sites (eg. ourdomain.co.uk, us.ourdomain.com, ca.ourdomain.com, ourdomainchina.com, ourdomainindia.com etc) we already have a B2B site ourdomain.com-es which will remain the same. I'm thinking best practice would be to launch translated copy for the following: ourdomain.com/es ourdomain.com/cl ourdomain.com/mx ourdomain.com/pt etc etc firstly is this the best option? secondly, i'm really interested to hear whether there is a less time/resource intensive route that would give us visibility in ALL spanish speaking territories? Also - if we go with just one of the above (eg ourdomain.com/cl) how likely are we to get traction in other spanish speaking territories? any help much appreciated!
International SEO | | KevinDunne0 -
Moving British site to the US... who will have .com? US or UK?
We are the UK's first baby social commerce site launched in Nov 2011. We're doing quite well and are looking at expanding to the US. However I'm not sure what advice you'd give me in terms of internationalising the site. I see three options on how to deal with the URL structure? Make US site as .com as it will be my main source of revenue for the long run and redirect all British traffic to .co.uk Have .com for both UK and US but have the URL as either: us.babyhuddle.com or as babyhuddle.com/us/. Same thing for the UK Another option? Would love to hear the feedback from you guys. Thanks, Walid
International SEO | | walidalsaqqaf0 -
Ranking local content against English content
Hi SEOMoz, If I have a site that has multiple language selection, how would it be possible for my site with localized content to rank higher than the default/English content? For example, in Google.co.th, my site with English content (http://www.xyz.com/en-us/) ranks higher than the localized content (http://www.xyz.com/th-th/). How is it possible for me to turn things around and ensure that for local markets like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China etc the localized content organically ranks higher than the default-English page? Thanks! Steve
International SEO | | sjcbayona-412180