International SEO and Server Hosting

[stradiji]

I am quite new to international SEO. I have a customer who wants to use the same website content on various domains targeting different countries. Such as;

xxxx.hk - same content targeting Hong Kong

xxxx.co.uk - same content targeting UK

xxxx.de - same content targeting Germany

I found that it could be possible with the Google suggested hreflang without any duplicate content problem. Is that true? Could someone explain this for me.

Another question; if above is true do we need to make other adjustments as well. Such as;

• Any adjustments in Google Webmaster Tools (for each domain)

• Server location, does that really make a difference? Can we host each of the domains on the same server or should we seperate them and host each one on the country it is targeting ?

Thanks in advance!

[stradiji]

Hi Lynn,

Thank you so much for the detailed explanation and reference links. Much appreciated

Regards,

Mert

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Mert,

Hreflang is the way to go to avoid duplicate content issues. Check out this post for a good rundown on international setup considerations and this post for a recent guide to hreflang generation (and it has a tool to help you create the needed tags!).

In regards the other things, yes you should declare in GWT which domain is aimed at which region (although the tld ,hk, .de etc is declaring this pretty obviously anyway) and as for the server location for me this is not so important if it creates too much overhead in terms of multiple hosting packages etc. The server location issue can also be influenced by such things as how fast your site loads in the different areas (if it is slow, maybe a local server or a cdn setup is in order) but in terms of how google views your sites for geo specific searches, the top level domain and hreflang implementation are more important than server location for me.