Using the same domain for two websites (for different geographical locations)
-
Hi all,
My client has a new E-commerce site coming out in few months.
His requirement is to use the same domain (lets call it www.domain.com for now) for two seperate websites:
The first site, for users with ip addresses from USA - which will include prices in US dollars.
The second site - for users outside of the US - will not include any prices, and will have different pages and design.Now, lets say that googlebot crawls the websites from different ip ranges. How can i make sure a user from France, for example, won't see crawled pages from the US? Sure, once he will click the result, I can redirect him to a "Sorry, but this content is unavailable in your country" page. The problem is, I don't want a user from France to see the in the search results the meta description snippets of pages related only to users in the US (in some cases, the snippets may include the prices in $).
Is Geotargeting through Webmaster Tools can help in this case? I know I can target a part of the website for a specific country (e.g. - www.domain.com/us/), but how can I make sure global users won't see the pages targeted only to the US in the search results?Thanks in Advance
-
Hi there,
Just to add to what Martijn has said, you should be able to specify the pages that target the US with this tag and leave the pages for international users unspecified. This means creating different pages / URLs of course, rather than using IP detection which isn't advised for changing content.
-
Thank you for your answer Martijn.
The problem is, the second website is not for French users specifically - it is a global website targeted to all users outside of the US. If there is no specific country, I'm afraid i won't be able to use the rel="alternate" annotation.
-
Hi Sfkir,
I would try to look into using the REL alternate tags, more information can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en you can point from the US pages to the pages in French and vice versa. In most cases this will make sure that Google is able to tell that the US pages won't be shown in a search from France but only the French pages will show up. It was of great help to us for a project where we have our content in different languages.
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
-
Decline in traffic and duplicate content in different domains
Hi, 6 months ago my customer purchased their US supplier and moved the supplier's website to their e-commerce platform. When moving to the new platform they copied the descriptions of the products from their site to the supplier's site so now both sites have the same content in the product pages. Since then they have experienced decrease in traffic in about 80%. They didn't implement canonical tag or hreflang. My customer's domain format is https://www.xxx.biz and the supplier's domain is https://www.zzz.com The last one is targeting the US and when someone from outside of the US wants to purchase a product they get a message that they need to move to the first website, the www.xxx.biz. Both sites are in English. The old site version of www.zzz.com, before the shit to the new platform, contained different product descriptions, and BTW, the old website version is still live and indexed under a subdomain of www.zzz.com. My question is what's the best thing to do in this case so that the rankings will be back to higher positions and they'll get back their traffic. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digital19740 -
Is repurposing an old sub domain better than creating a new sub domain?
We have a good sub domain like** art.ourwebsite.com** which currently sells custom canvas art. We have owned the domain since 2013 but it has only been live for the past few weeks. We want to redesign & repurpose the page to continue to sell custom canvas art but will eventually include other merchandise like mugs, tshirts, etc which wouldn't be custom. Would it be best to keep art.ourwebsite.com since is a shorter/more memorible & older sub domain or would it be best to update the name to something that encompasses our new products? Our marketing team has suggested yourart.ourwebsite.com
Technical SEO | | sb10301 -
Clients domain expired - rankings lost - repurchased domain - what next?
Its only been 10 days and i have repurchased the domain name/ renewed. The who is info, website and contact information is all still the same. However we have lost all rankings and i am hoping that our top rankings come back. Does anyone have experience with such a crappy situation?
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Different domains for multilingual website
Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
Redirect non www. domain to WWW. domain for established website?
Hey guys, The website in question has been online for more than 5 years but there are still 2 versions of the website. Both versions are indexed by Google and of course, this will result in duplicate content. Is it necessary to redirect the non-www domain to the www. domain. What are the cons and advantages? Will the www. links replace the non-www links when it comes to keyword rankings? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
New website, to www or not
I was just wondering if there are any advantages to using the www instead of just the domain name for seo. Can these be elaborated on?
Technical SEO | | simvegas1 -
.com domain is an iframe copy of a .net domain?
Hey folks, This one is over my head. I'm helping out a friend's dental office website (www.capitolperiodontal.com), and their home page source code points to the .net TLD for its content apparently: | | <title></span>http://www.capitolperiodontal.com/</title> http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html" /> rows="100%" id="dd_frameset_0001"> src="http://www.capitolperiodontal.net/" name="dd_content_0001" framespacing="0" frameborder="0" noresize="noresize" title="capitolperiodontal.com" /> <noframes></noframes> My idea was to load all the content from the .net to the .com, then redirect the .net to the .com as it has better domain authority and is, well a .com. Any insights what this iframe biz is all about and if my strategy above is ok? Many thanks folks! john
Technical SEO | | juanzo0070 -
Exact match domain
Will buying an exact match domain and redirecting it to our main site a good idea, if such a domain is available ? What are the pros and cons ? Are exact match domains still powerful for ranking purpose ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050