International SEO

[aquaspressovending]

We want to expand to a few new regions internationally. My question is if we register sites in different geographies and upload our exact site to these web addresses (exact duplicates) so our web addresses will then be

www.mysite.co.uk (current site)

www.mysite.com (new intended site)

www.mysite.com.au (new intended site)

and add rel=“canonical” linking elements to prevent duplicate content issues.Will our content production on our current site www.mysite.co.uk retain its value within all the other sites.

Is this the best way to do it? Thanks in advance!

[aquaspressovending]

Thanks for this response. Will migrating to a generic site let's say .com :

1. affect the current rank of my current site

2. perhaps turn off users outside the U.S. who might jump to conclusion that it is a U.S. based site

Is it perhaps better to host the blog only on a separate generic .com site and having localised micro sites sans blog in other geographies?

[gfiorelli1]

Hi!

The short answer to your question is: No.

The long answer is this below.

If you create new website in different ccTlds, but which are exact duplicates of the "mother" one, that is a problem.

On the other hand, though, if you use the rel="canonical", you are going to have them never being visible in the SERPs, because you are telling Google to not consider them because of the canonicalization you have set up.

As others have pointed out, you should be safe from the duplicated content issues using the hreflang annotations.

Said that, I too suggest you to localize as much as you can the different English versions and making crawlable and evident every possible local signal (eg: currency, phone numbers, local offices addresses).

Finally, though, IMHO you should not go for a multi-country international SEO, but creating a generic Global website targeting the English speaking market, giving the opportunity to visitors to change currency if they want and creating "local pages" in the about us section if you have local offices (those will be also used as Landing for Local Search).

Having a generic site (hence migrating from .co.uk to .com) will ensure also from the "blog" problem (i.e.: one generic blog for all site? What will be the one to use as content marketing platform? Or a blog for each website, with all the complication of having also "local" writers, local link builders...)

If you, then, decide to expand also to Spanish, French or any other language market, you can create a subfolder multilingual strategy.

[gfiorelli1]

That post is quite wrong IMHO, because it completely omits and forgets the psychology of the local audiences.

Apart that Country Code Level Domain Names still have a very strong influence in how Google consider a website in terms of geo-targeting, it is quite proved that, for instance, if a Spanish is asked to choose a domain .es or a generic .com (and he doesn't know the brands of both domains), he will choose the .es.

The same happens in France, Italy or anywhere else but the United States.

Even more, if you target Russia and you don't do it with a .ru domain name, in Yandex you will have a long way for ranking well.

Said that, the choice between subfolders and ccTlds should not be based on how better is for SEO, but how logic is for the International Business strategy.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I definitely agree about looking into hreflang attributes to add to your site. You can also help Bing crawlers by adding language tags on your website variations.

Don't forget that you can country target each site variation to their specific regions through Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. I highly suggest utilizing this.

Moz also has a couple of great resources to look into for more information and tips:
International SEO (Moz)
The International SEO Checklist (Moz)

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

...using ccTLDs might not be worth it compared with using a folder

That's be the route I would be investigating first.

-Andy

[Daniel_Morgan]

I agree with Andy above that it's extremely important to markup your sites with href lang, however I would also go further and say to localize the different forms of English. Would be best to use British English on .co.uk and .com.au domains, whereas American English for .com. An added benefit of having separate ccTLDs like .co.uk and .com.au would be that users view your website and company as being UK-based, Australian-based etc., so it might be confusing for visitors if they are seeing American English used everywhere; localizing the content should also mean a better conversion rate!

Additionally, there was a good recent blog post by Liam Curley on the YouMoz blog arguing that using ccTLDs might not be worth it compared with using a folder - https://moz.com/ugc/why-cctlds-should-not-be-an-automatic-choice-for-international-websites. Food for thought!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

The best way to handle international content, is to make use of HREFLANG. I wouldn't use a canonical tag though as Google suggest this isn't needed (read here) "Update:** to simplify implementation, we no longer recommend using rel=canonical.**"

Have a look at the following resources for explanations on how to do this:

https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

-Andy

[aquaspressovending]

Thanks so much for your response John

I'm also particularly interested if the content produced in our main site www.mysite.co.uk will be effective in our www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com.au sites considering that google prioritises local content. Will it be as if we posted the content directly in these urls?

thanks again in advance

[ClaytonJ]

There has been many thesis's written on this subject. A great start is google webmaster:-

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.il/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html The next stop would be Matt Cutts himself on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo - or if like me start with the video first!

If you ensure compliance with google recommendations - duplication will not be an issue.

Any queries let me know.