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.
Domain strategy for UK and USA
-
Hi Everyone,
We have example.org.uk with 20K inbound links.
We want to target the US as well as the UK. I would be interested to hear what approaches are best for SEO.
For example is it better to keep our current domain and have subdirectories for USA for example. Or would it be better to register example.org and then use subdirectories. Or is it better to use different domains for each country?
Any help with this much appreciated.
Cheers
-
Good question. Am curious about this as well. If the site is translated to the specific geographic area, with the exact same content as the original site, will Google recognize that the content is in a different language and treat it as such?
-
What about the issue of duplicate content? I know of one site that targets the UK, NZ and Australia all with specific country level domains. However, they are simply replicating each site for each country, with the exception of some minor changes such as currency.
Will Google look at these sites individually or will there be consequences for duplicate content?
-
"when interlinking own sites ensure good disclosure is in place"
How would you suggest doing this?
-
Thanks everyone forthese answers, that is really helpful. I did read Petra's article and that was really useful, but I just wasn't sure still. Cheers
-
Having a TLD specific to a country/region makes sense not only from SEO but also business point of view. I understand what it means to start again and building links again from scratch however you have a good headstart and a super relevant link from your old juiced up site. Google will figure it out it's the same brand, country specific and will start treating it as a family of websites. Make sure you use all local signals (phone, address, business reg numbers and are present in local directories). When interlinking own sites ensure good disclosure is in place.
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
-
Spanish word as English domain name
hi anyine any issues with using Spanish, and other non English words, as domain names when trying to rank in Google uk. We launched a number of websites a while back but finding it hard to get much traction in Google uk. We are getting a reasonable number of impressions but cannot seem to get very high in the rankings. All the names are foreign words for their service. Our homeware website, for example, uses the basque word for furniture as its name. other than potential branding issues of having domains people might struggle to spell, is there any serp issues we would face with these names. thanks
International SEO | | Arropa0 -
Problems with the google cache version of different domains.
We have problems with the google cache version of different domains.
International SEO | | Humix
For the “.nl” domain we have an “.be” cache..
Enter “cache:www.dmlights.nl” in your browser to see this result. Following points are already adapted: Sitemap contains hreflang tag Sitemap is moved to the location www.dmlights.nl/sitemap.xml We checked the DNS configuration Changed the Content language in de response header to : Content-Language: nl-NL Removed the cache with webmastertools Resolved serverrequest errors. Can anyone provide a solution to fix this problem? Thanks, Pieter0 -
E-Commerce - Country Domains versus 1 Domain?
Hi, Just wanted to get some feedback and opinions re the idea of segmenting our ecommerce site languages under various domains, like .jp for japanese, .it for italian etc... I do understand the geolocation benefits that this could bring us, but on the flipside, it would mean that we would need to grow our domain authority, link buiding per country domain, which is quite a bit of work. Has anyone ever considered or implemented this and any thoughts? Thanks!
International SEO | | bjs20100 -
Sub-domains or sub-directories for country-specific versions of the site?
What approach do you think would be better from an SEO perspective when creating country-targeted versions for an eCommerce site (all in the same language with slight regional changes) - sub-domains or sub-directories? Is any of the approaches more cost effective, web development-wise? I know this topic's been under much debate and I would really like to hear your opinion. Many thanks!
International SEO | | ramarketing0 -
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 | | modernmusings0 -
Ranking issues for UK vs US spelling - advice please
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.
International SEO | | StevenHowe0 -
Cross domain rel alternate, will it help or hurt?
I have a website that has similar pages on a US version and a UK version. Currently we want Uk traffic to go to the US, but the US domain is so strong it is outranking the UK in the UK. We want to try using rel alternate but have some concerns. Currently for some of our keywords US is #1, UK is #4. If we implement rel alternate, will it just remove our US page? We don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot and lose traffic. Is this worth doing, will it just remove our US ranking and our double listing? Any anecdotes, experiences or opinions are appreciated. Thanks.
International SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Multi Regional website - Folder strategy
Hello Seomoz people ! I've been struggling for some time now with an international website project. It's gonna be an:international website with joomla. To sum up: We have an international company The company has 13 subsidiaries worldwide (same products, different names) The company doesn't have enough resources to get 13 independent websites Some subsidiaries work in one country / one language, some others on a region (several countries, several languages) Thanks to your community we decided to: Get a main website company.com Get subsidiaries folders (middle east, oceania and south america will be easier to link to their subsidiary) .com/asia .com/middle-east .com/oceania .com/south-america .com/uk .com/usa .com/fr .com/es .com/de .com/ma .com/dz .com/it We also need to: Get some websites in different languages .com/asia-cn .com/asia-en etc. Now how do we do to manage: Regional websites (the first 4th on the upper list) Google allows to affect a website to a country not region Will they compete with the .com ? How do we set up them for google ? How do we avoid duplicate content and keep local ranking .com/asia-en/services1.html will have the exact same content that_.com/services1.html_ If we use canonical from _.com/asia-en/services1.htm_l to _.com/services1.html , d_oes that mean /asia will not rank in asia ? Hope you can help us to figure us the best solution for this good project ! Thanks a lot. Florian
International SEO | | AymanH1