Optimizing for 3 international sites, how to avoid getting into trouble
-
Hi Guys
As a newbie, I want to avoid any penalties or mistakes as possible that will be due to unknown and have taken some steps to educate myself around international sites and multiple domains.
our aim was to target new zealand first and then branch out. Whilst we are pondering the NZ site and writing fresh unique articles for the site and the blog. And besides making the currency, language more relevant to these domains, is there anything else I could work on? I thought about making the meta tags different for the home page and adding Australia etc If we are going to spend time growing the site organically I thought I would make the most of spending the time growing all three together....
Any recommendations on how to get started and optimize the 3 alot better?
Thanks
-
thanks Ray, the site is lifereader. co.nz and the another good one would be california psychics. the industry is quiet competitive so not sure they would join the discussion to tell us there tricks, although that would be great lol
-
I don't see why not - I haven't seen any rules against it and I don't think it would be 'frowned upon.' We're all about analyzing strategies, techniques, and technical issues so if providing a website helps the community do that then I would post it.
If anything, your competitor should be on top of their brand mentions and see that their domain was mentioned, which may invite them into the conversation.
If I'm wrong about that, the Moz staff will set me straight.
-
Can I share a competitors website on here?
-
You can PM me directly if something is sensitive. However, if the community can also respond I prefer to have all questions available to the public.
-
Thanks Ray is concerning that you bring this up, as I said we don't want to be penalised. Can I share more information with you on here somehow?
With regard to the comment made by the seo company, that was initially why we never took action upon this alot earlier, and having seen our competitors do it, we never really paid to much attention to it, but I'm being very mindful of the situation...
It would be good to get more feedback yes. Thanks alot for your responses.
-
Well, that' an understandable position to be in. Unfortunately, I cannot speak directly to the following:
"I was also told by our current SEO company that google only penalises sites that have duplicate content in the same localised areas...."
I'm guessing your developer means country specific areas and not necessary city/region, which would be susceptible to penalties in this situation.
I would really like to hear from someone else in the Moz community with more direct experience on this international issue - hopefully someone speaks up soon
-
Hi Ray-pp
Thank you very much for your response. We had alot of trouble getting merchant facilities for the .com being based in NZ for this type of acitivity with high charge backs we needed the co.nz domain, also we noticed our competitors were doing the same, on top of com, com.au and co.nz they also have co.uk and so when we first initiated the domain we decided to go for It and on top of that it could also be an issue trying to get this appointed to our team, as it is quiet the task atm!
So we are trying to get around this situation. I could name my competitors but It may not look so good to point it out on here, and I don't really know how they are able to get around it as they have not changed any content, they have only changed the content around in the meta tag home page.
I was also told by our current SEO company that google only penalises sites that have duplicate content in the same localised areas.... ? Can you clarify this?
-
As your sites are currently configured, you do run the risk of a duplicate content penalty. Your site's appear to be the same, except for the URLs (same content across each domain name).
I'd start by asking why you need to have country specific domains. A .com ranks very well internationally. I understand the importance of having the unique domain names from a trademark perspective, but if the content will not be unique I suggest having them all 301 redirect to the .com domain. If possible, have the site translate to the country language when choosing from the international drop down, rather than visiting the country specific domain.
This cuts down on a lot of the maintenance needed for multiple domains and prevent duplicate content penalties.
If you want to keep the domains separate and have the content be mostly duplicate, you would need to look into cross-domain canonicalization. From what I saw, you do not have any canonical tags on the site at this point. Plus, we need to remember that canonical tags are only a suggestion for the search engines to follow and they may choose not to adhere to the tags you put 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
-
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 -
International Site Merge
Hello, I've never had to deal with an international site before, let alone a site merge. These are two large sites, we've got a few smaller old sites that are currently redirecting to the main site (UK). We are looking at moving all the sites to the .com domain. We are also currently not using SSL (on the main pages, we are on the checkout). We also have a m.domain.com site. Are there any good guides on what needs to be done? My current strategy would be: Convert site to SSL. Mobile site and desktop site must be on the same domain. Start link building to the .com domain now (weaker link profile currently) What's the best way of handling the domains and languages? We're currently using a .tv site for the UK and .com for the US. I was thinking, and please correct me if i'm wrong, that we move the US site from domain.com to domain.com/us/ and the domain.tv to domain.com/en/ Would I then reference these by the following: What would we then do with the canonicals? Would they just reference their "local" version? Any advice or articles to read would really be appreciated.
International SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
International SEO Question: Using hreflang tags across two different TLDs.
Hi! My UK based company just recently made the decision to let the US market operate their ecommerce business independently. Initially, both markets were operating off the same domain using sub-directories (i.e: www.brandname.com/en-us/ , www.brandname.com/en-gb/ ) Now that the US team have broken away from the domain - they are now using www.brandnameUSA.com while the UK continues to use www.brandname.com/en-gb/. The content is similar across both domains - however, the new US website has been able to consolidate several product variations onto single product pages where the UK website is using individual product pages for each variation. We have placed a geo-filter on the main domain which is 301 redirecting North American traffic looking for www.brandname.com to www.brandnameUSA.com However, since the domain change has taken place, product pages from the original domain are now indexing alongside the new US websites product pages in US search results. The UK website wants to be the default destination for all international traffic. My question is - how do we correctly setup hrlang tags across two separate TLDs and how do we handle a situation where multiple product pages on the "default" domain have been consolidated into one product page on the new USA domain? This is how we are currently handling it: "en-us" href="https://www.BRANDNAMEUSA.com/All-Variations" /> href="https://www.BRANDNAMEUSA.com/All-Variations" />
International SEO | | alexcbrands0 -
Google does not index UK version of our site, and serves US version instead. Do I need to remove hreflanguage for US?
Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
International SEO | | lcourse
We have another US domain with identical content but USD prices which is indexed fine. When I search in google for site:mydomain I see that most of my pages seem to appear, but then in the rich snippets google shows USD prices instead of the GBP prices which we publish on this page (USD price is not published on the page and I tested with an US proxy and US price is nowhere in the source code). Then I clicked on the result in google to see cached version of page and google shows me as cached version of the UK product page the US product page. I use the following hreflang code: rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.domain.com/product" />
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.domain.co.uk/product" /> canonical of UK page is correctly referring to UK page. Any ideas? Do I need to remove the hreflang for en-US to get the UK domain properly indexed in google?0 -
Site Ranking in all countries except USA
Hello, I have a site www.apdermatology.com in is ranking #1 for
International SEO | | element8design
"Dermatologist Chelsea Mi" "Dermatologist Chelsea Michigan" In Google in Canada, UK, Australia, Etc.. But in the USA it is on the 4th+ Page, it has been this way for weeks if not months. And does not seem to come up. I originally thought maybe that google was penalizing the site although, it comes up in all other counties. Does anyone have any recommendations how to resolve this, or what the problem may be? Thanks.0 -
Keyphrase ranking a geo-redirected site in Google
Hi all This is the situation. I have a client who runs a number of ccTLD sites (all exact match brand name domains), including a .com which they use for the US. This is a hair care product and due to Advertising Standards Authority (UK) restrictions, they cannot use a certain phrase to promote their products - 'hair loss' on the domain.co.uk site. However, in the US, there is no such restriction and can use wording this on the site. A brand name search in google.co.uk brings up .co.uk as 1st result and .com as 2nd result, so the .com is indexed in google.co.uk. Any non-US user visiting domain.com will be redirected to their ccTLD site. Here's my question - could I feasibly get the domain.com site ranking in google.co.uk for certain 'hair loss' based keyphrases, considering the fact that I can mention it in the copy on there but not on the domain.co.uk site. Would I need to remove any Geographic Target in the WMT account for domain.com? Or is this a form of Google cloaking and could see the site penalised? Thanks
International SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Site Spider/ Crawler/ Scraper Software
Short of coding up your own web crawler - does anyone know/ have any experience with a good bit of software to run through all the pages on a single domain? (And potentially on linked domains 1 hop away...) This could be either server or desktop based. Useful capabilities would include: Scraping (x-path parameters) of clicks from homepage (site architecture) http headers Multi threading Use of proxies Robots.txt compliance option csv output Anything else you can think of... Perhaps an oppourtunity for an additional SEOmoz tool here since they do it already! Cheers! Note:
International SEO | | AlexThomas
I've had a look at: Nutch
http://nutch.apache.org/ Heritrix
https://webarchive.jira.com/wiki/display/Heritrix/Heritrix Scrapy
http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/overview.html Mozenda (does scraping but doesn't appear extensible..) Any experience/ preferences with these or others?0 -
Site structure for multi-lingual hotel website (subfolder names)
Hi there superMozers! I´ve read a quite a few questions about multi-lingual sites but none answered my doubt / idea, so here it is: I´m re-designing an old website for a hotel in 4 different languages which are all** hosted on the same .com domain** as follows: example.com/english/ for english example.com/espanol/ for **spanish ** example.com/francais/ for french example.com/portugues/ for portuguese While doing keyword search, I have noticed that many travel agencies separate geographical areas by folders, therefor an **agency pomoting beach hotels in South America **will have a structure as follows: travelagency.com/argentina-beach-hotels/ travelagency.com/peru-beach-hotels/ and they list hotels in each folder, therefor benefiting from those keywords to rank ahead of many independent hotels sites from those areas. What **I would like to **do -rather than just naming those folders with the traditional /en/ for english or /fr/ for french etc- is take advantage of this extra language subfolder to_´include´_ important keywords in the name of the subfolders in the following way (supposing the we have a beach hotel in Argentina): example.com/argentina-beach-hotel/ for english example.com/hotel-playa-argentina/ for **spanish ** example.com/hotel-plage-argentine/ for french example.com/hotel-praia-argentina/ for portuguese Note that the same keywords are used in the name of the folder, but translated into the language the subfolders are. In order to make things clear for the search engines I would specify the language in the html for each page. My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´ although most travel agencies do it in their site structure. Any Mozers have experience with this, any idea on how search engines may react, or if they could penalise the site? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | underground0