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
-
International SEO Query
Hi All, I have an international SEO question and was wondering if you could help. My client runs a website in the UK (www.example.co.uk). The site is ranked well for it's collection of keywords, my client now wishes to target the US market. He wishes to use the same web structure and design in new site www.example.com as we know this converts well. My questions are: What would be the best practice for setting this up? I know there will be duplicate content issues if a website is duplicated. If we use the same design and website structure but re-word content, would this be acceptable? Thank you for all your help in advance.
International SEO | | SO_UK0 -
International SEO
Hi If you were developing a US version of an existing UK site then is this the correct format/instructions for on-page SEO. Ive taken quite a lot from Aleydas great post: http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist but just want to confirm below is a good overall checklist to provide to clients developers ? Create US & UK country & language subfolders such as: domain.com/en-us/ and domain.com/en-gb/ Add 'rel=alternatehreflang' attribute according to google guidelines Add individual site map to each subfolder or will the hreflang attribute do or vice versa or both best? Don't redirect users via IP sniffing their location and serving up country/language version. Instead obviously link between language/country versions with a crawlable and very visible menu. Use the meta content language/country by adding the 'country-language' meta-tag in your html head Create individual profiles in GWT & GA for each country/language version and geotarget accordingly Localise content: spelling, currency, contacts etc Anything else re on-page/technical im missing ? Many Thanks
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Dan [edited to fix formatting]0 -
Ranking in Different Countries - Ecommerce site
My client has a .com ecommere site with UK-based serves and he wants to target two other countries (both English speaking). By the looks of it, he wouldn't want to create separate local TLDs targeting each country, I therefore wanted to suggest adding subdomains / subfolders geo-targeted to each country that they want to target, however, I'm worried that this will cause duplicate content issues... What do you think would be the best solution? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
International SEO | | ramarketing0 -
E-Commerce site in 2 languages - Duplicate content or not?
How does Google view this? Our current site works like:
International SEO | | bjs2010
www.domain.com/EN - English
www.domain.com/ES - Spanish All products are the same, just different language and different URL for them - is this good or bad? I thought of either Going with .co.uk or .com for "English" and a .es for "Spanish"
OR Subdomaining it. www.es.domain.com and www.en.domain.com Any advice appreciated!0 -
Using Javascript to alter ONE or TWO keywords in International Site
Hi, What is the best way to target a language that has slight variations in it without actually targetting specific countries? Scenario: Ecommerce site that sells mobile phones in Spanish, initially created to target Spanish from Spain. We call a mobile phone a "movil" Now we want to target LatinAmerican users, which also use Spanish with variations, the most notable being mobile phone called "celular". We don't want to create specific sites via new ccTLDs, nor subdomains, no directories for each new country, and we want to avoid having two sites - one for spain, one for latinamerica- given that the only major difference is we say MOVIL in spain and CELULAR in LatinAmerica. What is Googles take if we simply decide to modify THAT specific keyword in each page where it is mentioned? Either by: a) Server based. IP Detect. that is, render the page with either one or the other term b) Javascript based. i.e. Have BOTH terms on all pages but using Javascript show/hide according to user preferences. c) Display the keywords with different font sizes/emphasis, depending on the visitor. Any ideas?
International SEO | | doctorSIM0 -
How to optimise a site for 2 countries
Hi there - Any help with the below much appreciated I am helping an Australian company, producing packaging products for businesses. Their site is hosted in Australia and their offices are in Australia. They have asked me to take care of both on-page and off-page SEO so that they rank for keywords related to their products - e.g. 'cardboard boxes'. This should be fairly straightforward for Australian based (.com.au) searchers, but they also supply their products to South Africa, and so want their results to show up also for South African based (.co.za) searchers. Also consider: it is not typical for searchers for these products to use geomodifiers in their search terms there is no unique content for the South African market versus the Australian... the product information is essentially identical. What should we do to ensure their results show up equally for those in South Africa as well as Australia? I am considering building a completely separate site, hosted in South Africa and specifically for the S.A market, but will the duplicate content effect be an issue? Also, this would essentially mean double the SEO effort, is there no way I could achieve our goals more efficiently? many thanks to any help
International SEO | | dnaynay0 -
Google UK picking up USA Site
I have a site with two subfolders one is .../uk and one is .../us Part of the content on the two sites is the same and part is unique. The US site's language is set to en and the UK site's language is set to en_gb. I have setup geo-targeting in webmaster tools. The problem is that the home page is a GEO-IP redirect and it seems to be picking up information from the US site even on google uk. I'm not concerned too much about getting the uk site crawled as we submit a sitemap for that anyway. But my concern is that if I setup the geo-ip redirect as a 301 will my UK site loose all of it's ranking? Also am I likely to be penalised for duplicate content?
International SEO | | matthewdolman0 -
Reciprocal Links between my own sites ?
Is is ok to have Reciprocal Links between sites you really own ? We have a website that has been regionalized to 5 countries, using 5 different domains. The content is exclusive for the country but the keywords used might be similar. We have all the domains under the same Analytics account and all of them share the same Adsense code. Can I be penalized by Google for making reciprocal links between them ? Is something usefull for improving the SEO rank or I should avoid doing it ? Thanks in advance
International SEO | | martincad0