Multiple geographic targeting in Europe
-
I have a site that is applicable to German speaking people in central europe. If I were to geotarget the site in google webmaster tools to Germany, would that prevent users in Switzerland or Austria seeing the site in their search results.
-
I'm using a .de domain, so google does the geo targeting by default. I have several region specific sites that have a high degree of content overlap, so I use <link rel="alternate" tags to prevent duplicate content issues. I also do ip based redirections so users are sent to the most relevant site.
the urls in question are
http://fiik.com (this only does the ip based redirection)
http://fiikelectric skateboards.com - USA
http://fiikelectric skateboards.com.au - Australia
http://fiikelectric skateboards.co.uk - UK and english speakers in europe
http://fiikelectric skateboards.de - Central Europe, German speakers, not built yetmaybe the best approach would be to use a .com or .eu domain, so geotargetting isn't forced, the rely on the <link rel="alternate" tags to do language based targeting.
-
I agrre with Robert, It will not prevent sites from showing is SERPs for other locations but it will definatly goingto give more importance to the geographic area you have defined.
If you have other site for other geographic locations so you can send them to the targeted website by tracking their IP address (not sure how SEO effective it will be).
Hope this helps!
-
Daniel,
It will not prevent the site/page from showing in SERPs for Switzerland or Austria. But, it will likely limit how often that happens. So, if you want to be sure people see the result in any of the countries where German is more prevalent as a language do not use the geo targeting.
If you can give us more details re the site (generic or cc tld, more than one language on the site, etc.) we can probably give you better assistance.
Best
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
-
International targeting
I submitted each language URL as a separated website to google webmasters, I've submitted Hreflang sitemap which has language codes only(without countries codes) each page in my website has hreflang language and country code. Should i use international target option for each language to target the countries? will that hurt the language targeting? or I have to leave international targeting option unchecked for each language? My Goal to target by languages, not countries.
International SEO | | MTBE0 -
How to avoid duplication across multiple country domains
Here's the scenario: I have a client currently running one Shopify site (AU) They want to launch three more country domains (US, UK and EU) They want each to be a standalone site, primarily so the customers can purchase in their local currency, which is not possible from a single Shopify site The inventory is all from the same source The product desscriptions will all be the same as well Question: How do we avoid content duplication (ie. how will canonical tags work in this scenario)?
International SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Multiple Domains
I have a .com domain which sells digital and physical products. I was thinking about doing a .co.uk domain just for the physical products. So far im just getting very confused with how to do this with google plus. Whats the best way to do this? Have a .com for worldwide and a .co.uk for just UK.
International SEO | | theindic0 -
Website Target in Europe
Hi, I am planning a site to target in Europe and I expect to translate my site into ten different languages namely English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Greek, Portuguese, Dutch and Swedish. I am doing some study of this case in targeting different countries for SEO, most of the advise are the following: a. Build 10 different websites and target different geographical location in Google Webmaster b. Get 10 different country specific domains for 10 different websites I would like to hear any suggestion if there is anything better than this ? I had all the materials and translation ready but building 10 different websites or getting 10 different domains are very time consuming and costly. I would be appreciated if any one had any advise for me to make the website more management friendly. Thank you. Tom
International SEO | | Stevejobs20110 -
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 | | Digital3600 -
Targeting France Best SEO practices
I've got a client with a large e-commerce site with a .com domain and they want to start targeting France. Other than building another site in Frence with a .fr domain, what would be the best course of action? I know that the obvious option would be to build a separate French site with a .fr domain but is there another more cost effective way? I tried doing a search for one of their key-phrases using the Google Global app (Google.fr) and they are ranking in pretty much the same position as for Google.co.uk. Your thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
International SEO | | FishEyeSEO0 -
Site with multiple languages
We are building a Joomla site for a customer that has an USA division and a South American division (english and spanish). The products and services are the same. I am trying to understand the best posible way to architect the site. 1- Do I create 1 site with duplicate pages in different languages? Does Google recognize that it is duplicate content if different languages are used? 2- Do I create seperate sub domains for each language? 3- Should I just use Google translate to translate the pages as required? The problem here is that each site has a different geographic target. any other alternatives?
International SEO | | brantwadz0 -
Geo Targeting for Similar Sites to Specific Countries in Google's Index
I was hoping Webmaster Tools geo targeting would prevent this - I'm seeing in select google searches several pages indexed from our Australian website. Both sites have unique TLDs: barraguard.com barraguard.com.au I've attached a screenshot as an example. The sites are both hosted here in the U.S. at our data center. Are there any other methods for preventing Google and other search engines from indexing the barraguard.com.au pages in searches that take place in the U.S.? dSzoh.jpg
International SEO | | longbeachjamie0