International Domains for SEO
-
My company is international and we have websites for each country with Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD). I am in the US and I am seeing that other countries such as Costa Rica and Germany are ranking above us in search results. I thought Google automatically geo-targeted users by default and therefore I should only get .com or US results. Any idea why other countries would rank above our site?
-
Apart everything the others said in their answers, and taking for granted that you see others "foreign" web sites outranking yours, I would consider others things than just geo-targeting factors.
I looked at your web site (which is http://www.fastlaneus.com/... as I supposed reading your username here and searching for it on Google) and, if we consider the main keywords you are targeting:
"Authorized CISCO Training (non personalized SERP)
- I see Cisco ranking in the first 6 positions with its domain/subdomains... this is quite normal;
- I see newhorizons.com, which is a business company with a global presence and with a great link profile (1000+ unique linking domains and DA 63). It's ranking with an internal page, toward which they were able to build and/or earn some deep backlink from 7 unique domain names. This is a good practice in order to strengthen important internal landing pages. So, at first, it seems correct its presence;
- I see pearsonvue.com.. another huge company with global presence and with giant link profile. It ranks worst than newhorizons.com possibly because its on-site SEO is less than perfect, but it is the clear example of how having a great link profile still matters a lot;
- I see lrseducationservices.com, which is company smaller than the others (its a Pearson Vue Test Center too). It's 100% USA based (Illinois). It is not a web site we would expect to see ranking in page 1: a) Almost non-existent link profile and b) the page ranking is not exactly optimized for "Authorized CISCO Training". I don't have the time to dig deeper into the reason why Google shows this site, but I would not exclude a test Google does sometimes (showing something worth in the 1st page and start seeing user signals);
- Finally, in position 10, I see globalknowledge.com. Again another multinational company with a link profile much stronger than the one your site owns.
Good news... fastlaneus.com is ranking in position 11. This means that the situation is not that bad at all.
Maybe you should start thinking more about creating content marketing campaigns that can bring you:
- Big links;
- Great brand visibility;
- Increase of branded and direct traffic.
Other things:
- Improve, then, the quality of your blog, so to earn more interested readers (I read few posts, and they tend to be a masked infomercial).
- Create content you promised with a link (webinars) and that in reality do not exist (I don't see any link to any webinar in the webinar page);
- The webinar page, as everything related to your "community" is sitting in a different domain name (http://fastlane-community.com/). I don't know the reasons of this decision, but maybe you should start thinking about consolidating the community part into the main web site.
- The infographic of your site are not really my style (too verbose)... and they lack of any opportunity to be share (no single page with social media buttons for social sharing and no text commenting the infographic, no embed code for the infographic... nada de nada)
- Your brochures/PDFs are indexed... why? a PDF like this http://www.fastlaneus.com/medi_a/pdf/Cisco-Training_US_8-pg_web.pdf substantially targets the same main keywords you want your organic html landing pages to rank.
And I could continue, but I stop because this is not the place for an audit :D... and also because imagine your site is not fastlaneus.com despite of your user name!!!! :D.
Everything you think about geotargeting and geo-localization of the SERPs is true in theory. In reality Google tends to show the sites it considers better responding to the search intents. And in this effort Google sometimes gets things wrong, as when it presents sites clearly targeting another country (and regional Google) in Google.com.
This also may happen for another reason that in the USA tends to be forgotten.
Formerly Google.com is not only for targeting the USA, but for targeting the global public. It is only because of recurring habit in the States and the same history of Google that made Google.com the preferred Google for targeting USA, so much that if you type in google.us, you are redirected to google.com (302 redirect).
To conclude this "essay"...
- If you are targeting the USA public, then geo-target your site in Search Console (see links in the others answers);
- Start thinking about my suggestions above
- Implement the hreflang annotations, so to suggest Google what site should be presented to the users depending on their location and language.
-
Hi,
Here is a little info I have shared with others on international SEO.
In order to rule out issues with your own sites, start by reading this checklist from MOZ as it will give you a great grounding and allow you to quickly identify and remedy any problems.
I would also read this article from Google as this will walk you through what you need to do.
HREFLANG will be used to explain to Google about international pages with duplicate content.
Any idea why other countries would rank above our site?
I would also like to know how you are determining these facts. If you are just searching from your own machine, there could be all kinds of personalisation getting in the way. If this is the case, use something like MOZ or Positionly, etc., to track SERP positions accurately.
If you are seeing these results from within a tracking app, then refer back to my first points above and check that everything is in order with your sites. You might stumble across an easy fix.
-Andy
-
Are you looking at rankings manually on Google results pages OR via rank tracking type software (such as Moz) ?
If the former then have you deleted history/cache etc and/or searched in incognito mode etc etc to help filter out subjective considerations like search & surfing history etc to try and make the results as objective as possible?, since if not that could be skewing the results ?
Have you geo targeted the websites to their target countries in Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) ?
In addition you can also apply 'hreflang' country/language attributes to further try & control which regional search results the various country versions appear in (but only of you definately don't want them appearing in US results too)
Just a few thoughts hope they help a bit !
All Best
Dan
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
-
Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain
Hi- Can you give me your opinion please... if you look at murrayroofing.com and see the high SPAM score- and the fact that our domain has been put on some spammy sites over the years- Is it better and faster to place higher in google SERP if we create a fresh new domain? My theory is we will spin our wheels trying to get unlisted from alot of those spammy linking sites. And that it would be faster to see results using a fresh new domain rather than trying to clean up the current spammy doamin. Thanks in advance - You guys have been awesome!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | murraycustomhomescom0 -
Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs?
Hello. My question is:** Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs and a gTLD - and the gTLD is much more authoritative to begin with? ** I appreciate this is a very nuanced subject so below is a detailed explanation of my current approach, problem, and proposed solutions I am considering testing. Thanks for the taking the time to read this far! The Current setup Multiple ccTLD such as mysite.com (US), mysite.fr (FR), mysite.de (DE). Each TLD can have multiple languages - indeed each site has content in English as well as the native language. So mysite.fr (defaults to french) and mysite.fr/en-fr is the same page but in English. Mysite.com is an older and more established domain with existing organic traffic. Each language variant of each domain has a sitemap that is individually submitted to Google Search Console and is linked from the of each page. So: mysite.fr/a-propos (about us) links to mysite.com/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in French. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc) mysite.fr/en-fr/about-us links to mysite.com/en-fr/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in English. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc). There is more English content on the site as a whole so the English version of the sitemap is always bigger at the moment. Every page on every site has two lists of links in the footer. The first list is of links to every other ccTLD available so a user can easily switch between the French site and the German site if they should want to. Where possible this links directly to the corresponding piece of content on the alternative ccTLD, where it isn’t possible it just links to the homepage. The second list of links is essentially just links to the same piece of content in the other languages available on that domain. Mysite.com has its international targeting in Google Search console set to the US. The problems The biggest problem is that we didn’t consider properly how we would need to start from scratch with each new ccTLD so although each domain has a reasonable amount of content they only receive a tiny proportion of the traffic that mysite.com achieves. Presumably this is because of a standing start with regards to domain authority. The second problem is that, despite hreflang, mysite.com still outranks the other ccTLDs for brand name keywords. I guess this is understandable given the mismatch of DA. This is based on looking at search results via the Google AdWords Ad Preview tool and changing language, location, and domain. Solutions So the first solution is probably the most obvious and that is to move all the ccTLDs into a subfolder structure on the mysite.com site structure and 301 all the old ccTLD links. This isn’t really an ideal solution for a number of reasons, so I’m trying to explore some alternative possible routes to explore that might help the situation. The first thing that came to mind was to use cross-domain canonicals: Essentially this would be creating locale specific subfolders on mysite.com and duplicating the ccTLD sites in there, but using a cross-domain canonical to tell Google to index the ccTLD url instead of the locale-subfolder url. For example: mysite.com/fr-fr has a canonical of mysite.fr
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatello
mysite.com/fr-fr/a-propos has a canonical of mysite.fr/a-propos Then I would change the links in the mysite.com footer so that they wouldn’t point at the ccTLD URL but at the sub-folder URL so that Google would crawl the content on the stronger domain before indexing the ccTLD domain version of the URL. Is this worth exploring with a test, or am I mad for even considering it? The alternative that came to my mind was to do essentially the same thing but use a 301 to redirect from mysite.com/fr-fr to mysite.fr. My question is around whether either of these suggestions might be worth testing, or am I completely barking up the wrong tree and liable to do more harm than good?0 -
How Can I Redirect an Old Domain to Our New Domain in .htaccess?
There is an old version of http://chesapeakeregional.com still floating around the web here: http://www.dev3.com.php53-24.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/component/content/category/20-our-services. Various iterations of this domain pop up when I do certain site:searches and for some queries as well (such as "Diagnostic Center of Chesapeake"). About 3 months ago the websitetestlink site had files and a fully functional navigation but now it mostly returns 404 or 500 errors. I'd like to redirect the site to our newer site, but don't believe I can do that in chesapeakeregional.com's .htaccess file. Is that so and would I need access to the websitetestlink .htaccess to forward the domain? Note* I (nor anyone else in our organization) has the login for the old site. The new site went live about 9 months before I arrived at the organization and I've been slowly putting the pieces together since arriving.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smpomoryCRH0 -
SEO advice with having a blog on sub domain.
Righto, so: I've been working on our company website www.nursesfornurses.com.au which is built on .asp which is a real pain because the site is built so messy and on a very dated CMS which means I have to go back to the dev every time I want to make a change. We've made the decision to move the site over to Wordpress in stages. So, (and I hope logically), i've started by making them a proper blog with better architecture to start targeting industry related keywords. I had to put it on a sub domain as the current hosting does not support Wordpress http://news.nursesfornurses.com.au/Nursing-news/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 9868john
The previous blog is here: http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/blog Its not live yet, so I'm just looking for SEO advice or issues I might encounter by having the blog on a sub domain. In terms of user experience, I realise that there needs a clearer link back to the main website, I'm just trying to work out the best way to do it... Any advice / criticism is greatly welcomed. Thanks0 -
Hosting Providers and SEO
I have been wondering for a while which web host provider is the best for SEO purposes? Things to consider. Shared Hosting vs Dedicated Server Location of the Host Provider Site Up Time One question that I have been thinking about is what impact would changing a host provider have on a websites serps ranking? Is there a possible negative impact and if so how can it be avoided? Name the top 3 Web Hosts for SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Can Anybody Link to my URL to Hurt SEO? Weird URL pointing at my Domaine!
Our ranking has drop since a few weeks. I did not do any major change in my site. Surfing WebMaster Tool, I found lots of new URL linking at our site: url.org linkarena.com seoprofiler.com folkd.com digitalhome.ca bustingprice.com surepurchase.com lowpricetoday.com oyax.com couponfollow.com aspringcleaning.com pamabuy.com etzone.ca How do I find if those was done intentionelly to hurt SEO? Could it be possible? Thank you, BigBlaze
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
Affects of vanity domains?
Hi there! My client's domain name is his name, let's say (www,myname.com) because he is well-known in his industry. He is a physician with a very specific specialty and organic competition is fierce for the most relevant keyword to his specialty. A domain has just become available that includes the keyword. If we bought the domain, how could we use it to our advantage? I'm confused about redirecting, etc., with this type of situation. Am i making any sense here? Help! Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mills0 -
Redirect on exact match domain to Brand domain question :)
Hi, If I have a website with the domain crazysocks.co.uk and a title tag 'black socks' would I see any benefit redirecting blacksocks.co.uk to crazysocks.co.uk, to give my keyword 'black socks' a boost in the SE's from the EMD. I see it loads where an EMD is indexed for its term but when you click the result it redirects to a branded domain. I personally cant see this being true but wanted to double check.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0