Campaign landing pages
-
Hi
At our company we decided we wanted to reach out to a more global audience. So we bought a bank of domains for different countries, e.g. ".asia". Some are our company name, others are things like "barcelonaprivatejets.com."
We then put up single page websites for each of these domains, which link to our main .com site.
However, I don't know if this is good for our SEO or bad. I've seen so many different things written but I cannot find a definitive answer.
The text will be different on all the pages, but being only one page, and the "design" being the same, will we get penalized in some way or another?
I've also added links to 2/3 of them in the footer of our main site but now I'm reading that this is bad too - so should I remove these?
If anyone also has any ideas of how better we could use these Country-specific domains I would be welcome to suggestions to that too! I am not an SEO person really, I'm a web developer, so this is all completely different to me.
P.S My name is Michael not Andy.
-
if we just duplicated our homepage, would we not get penalized?
You would not receive a penalty as long as the SEO was handled properly.
If you have a page mysite.com design for the US and another page mysite.com/uk designed for England then search engines should understand clearly that each site is designed for a particular country, even though they are all in English. A few added points:
-
a ".com" site is not thought of as a US site automatically. Google makes that determination based largely in part of where your site is hosted. You can also set your site's target country in Google WMT to avoid any confusion.
-
there is a langauge meta tag which is something like "EN-US" for the United States and "EN-GB" for England. By setting that tag you will help search engines understand your target audience.
-
be certain to localize your page. For example the US says "center" while English people say "centre". There are different monetary units, systems of measurements and phrases associated with each culture as well.
if our host was able to simply put the pages on different servers, would that be sufficient?
No. A different server with the same host would not be sufficient. You need to change your C-block and usually a host will retain the same C-block for all of their servers.
having a page targeted at say, Mexico, loading from a UK server may not be great for page load times.
True, which is where cloud hosting is very helpful. The prices are fairly reasonable and it is an option you may want to explore.
-
-
Hi Michael, Ryan has covered many of the relevant points but there are a couple of things I wanted to pick up.
You mention having pages of different text for each site or region but the same design and wonder if you will get penalised. I can confirm that you won't get penalised for duplicate design but if you had duplicate content you may find that the duplicate pages do not rank as you would expect or may not be indexed.
Many companies will use the same design on different regional sites to maintain consistent branding. If the sites are selling different products or services e.g one is cars and the other is cheese then it may be appropriate to vary the design to make it fit the product better.
Hope this helps.
-
Hi Ryan
That's some really great stuff, thank you. However, surely if we just duplicated our homepage, would we not get penalized? As some of the countries we'll be targeting will also be English speaking. Additionally, all the site content (news items etc) are written in English, so I'm not sure how we would handle that?
Or - could we just have a few headers/description on the target language, but then the rest in English. We're also only an English speaking company so we want to make that clear too so we don't have any awkward emails/calls.
Additionally, thanks for pointing out regarding the host. However, if our host was able to simply put the pages on different servers, would that be sufficient? Or should we absolutely have each page on a different host? I am also thinking that having a page targeted at say, Mexico, loading from a UK server may not be great for page load times.
Thanks again for a fantastic response.
-
Hi Michael.
The practice of purchasing a number of URLs then pointing them back to your main site is much more difficult to pull off then most people realize. In most cases, companies spend their time and resources but receive minimal or no benefit.
The best practice would be to develop your main website with landing pages for each country. If your main site is privatejets.com you can have a privatejets.com/es/ page for Spain, privatejets.com/uk/ for England and so forth. Each landing page should be targeted by country, not language. For example both Spain and Mexico speak spanish, but the dialects are different along with their monetary units and cultures.
In short, if you want to use your existing URLs you need to develop each of them into a solid landing page and then provide one link back to your main site. You need to also work on these pages to get them boosted in search engines so they rank well, and finally they need to be hosted with a different hosting company then your main site. Links between sites with the same C block are not valued.
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
-
Robots.txt file in Shopify - Collection and Product Page Crawling Issue
Hi, I am working on one big eCommerce store which have more then 1000 Product. we just moved platform WP to Shopify getting noindex issue. when i check robots.txt i found below code which is very confusing for me. **I am not getting meaning of below tags.** Disallow: /collections/+ Disallow: /collections/%2B Disallow: /collections/%2b Disallow: /blogs/+ Disallow: /blogs/%2B Disallow: /blogs/%2b I can understand that my robots.txt disallows SEs to crawling and indexing my all product pages. ( collection/*+* ) Is this the query which is affecting the indexing product pages? Please explain me how this robots.txt work in shopify and once my page crawl and index by google.com then what is use of Disallow: Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
SEO - All topic related pages in same directory?
Hey Mozzers, How would you structure the following pages for SEO. The site is a multi-product / multi-topic site, but all pages in this example are based on a single topic - CRM Software: CRM Software product CRM Software related blog post 1 CRM Software related blog post 2 CRM Software related blog post 3 CRM Software downloadable resource 1 CRM Software downloadable resource 2 CRM Software downloadable resource 3 I know building directory pyramids is a bit old hat nowadays, but I still see the odd website organising the above pages, as follows: /crm-software /crm-software/crm-blog-post-1 /crm-software/crm-blog-post-2 /crm-software/crm-blog-post-3 /crm-software/crm-resource-1 /crm-software/crm-resource-2 /crm-software/crm-resource-3 However, I'm more inclined to apply a more logical structure, as follows: /crm-software /blog/crm-blog-post-1 /blog/crm-blog-post-2 /blog/crm-blog-post-3 /resources/crm-resource-1 /resources/crm-resource-2 /resources/crm-resource-3 What would you say is SEO best practice? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Zoope0 -
How/why is this page allowed to get away with this?
I was doing some research on a competitor's backlinks in Open Site Explorer and I noticed that their most powerful link was coming from this page: http://nytm.org/made-in-nyc. I visited that page and found that this page, carrying a PageRank of 7, is just a long list of followed links. That's literally all that's on the entire page - 618 links. Zero nofollow tags. PR7. On top of that, there's a link at the top right corner that says "Want to Join?" which shows requirements to get your link on that page. One of these is to create a reciprocal link from your site back to theirs. I'm one of those white-hat SEOs who actually listens to Matt Cutts, and the more recent stuff from Moz. This entire page basically goes against everything I've been reading over the past couple years about how reciprocal links are bad, and if you're gonna do it, use a nofollow tag. I've read that pages, or directories, such as these are being penalized by Google, and possible the websites with links to the page could be penalized as well. I've read that exact websites such as these are getting deindexed by the bunches over the past couple years. My real question is how is this page allowed to get away with this? And how are they rewarded with such high PageRank? There's zero content aside from 618 links, all followed. Is this just a case of "Google just hasn't gotten around to finding and penalizing this site yet" or am I just naive enough to actually listen and believe anything that comes out of Matt Cutts videos?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Millermore0 -
Is it wrong to have the same page represented twice in the Nav?
Hi Mozzers, I have a client that have 3 pages represented twice in the Nav. There are not duplicates since they land with the same URL. It seems odd to have this situation but I guess it make sense for my client to have those represented twice since these pages could fall into multiple categories? Is it a bad practice for SEO or is it a waste to have those in the NAV? Should I require to eliminate the extras? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Linking my pages
Hello everybody, i have a small dilemma and i am not shore what to do. I am (my company) the owner of 10 e-commerce web sites. On every site i have a link too the other 9 sites and i am using an exact keyvoerd (not the shop name).Since the web stores are big and have over a 1000 pages, this means thet all my sites have a lot off inbound links (compared with my competiton). I am woried that linking them all together could be bad from Googles point of wiev. Can this couse a problem for me, should i shange it? Regardes, Marko
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Spletnafuzija0 -
Starting every page title with the keyword
I've read everywhere that it's vital to get your target keyword to the front of the title that you're writing up. Taking into account that Google likes things looking natural I wanted to check if my writing title's like this for example: "Photographers Miami- Find the right Equipment and Accessories" ..Repeated for every page (maybe a page on photography in miami, one on videography in Orlando etc) is a smart way to write titles or if by clearly stacking keywords at the front of every title won't be as beneficial as other ways of doing it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xcyte0 -
On page SEO? (This is good! I promise)
I have been doing some research on onsite optimization and I hit a dead end, need some help with OnSite.... These three I get for the most part... (If you would like to add anything please do) Title optimization - needs to be unique with keywords included under 90 words Meta description - needs to be unique with keywords included under 150 words Meta keywords – all keywords Questions begin here... H1 headings – Should this be the first thing the spider crawls? Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? (H1s are under the logo at the top of every one of my sites pages) H2-H6 headings – Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? Bold text – does this matter for SEO? Italic text - does this matter for SEO? Link anchor text – These are the same on most pages. However, most of these links are part of the navigation, does this matter for SEO? is this duplicate? how does the search engine analyze this data? Image alt attributes – I have the share image buttons on my site (Facebook, Twitter, etc...) and they have the same alt attributes on each page. Does this matter for SEO? Body text – I found a competitor site that’s ranking #1 for a key term. This competitor has 11,106 words in their body with the keyword mentioned 29 times (0.8%). They placed all this text in a small scroll down on the bottom of their page. Its strange how they included it. Please review attached image. the competitor URL is http://www(dot)1804design(dot)com/ w6AiM.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Google Penalising Pages?
We run an e-commerce website that has been online since 2004. For some of our older brands we are getting good rankings for the brand category pages and also for their model numbers. For newer brands, the category pages aren't getting rankings and neither are the products - even when we search for specific unique content on that page, Google does not return results containing our pages. The real kicker is that the pages are clearly indexed, as searching for the page itself by URL or restricting the same search using the site: modifier the page appears straight away! Sometimes the home page will appear on page 3 or 4 of the rankings for a keyword even though their is a much more relevant page in Google's index from our site - AND THEY KNOW IT, as once again restricting with the keywords with a site: modifier shows the obviously relevant page first and loads of other pages before say the home page or the page that shows. This leads me to the conclusion that something on certain pages is flagging up Google's algorithms or worse, that there has been manual intervention by somebody. There are literally thousands of products that are affected. We worry about duplicate content, but we have rich product reviews and videos all over these pages that aren't showing anywhere, they look very much singled out. Has anybody experienced a situation like this before and managed to turn it around? Link - removed Try a page in for instance the D&G section and you will find it easily on Google most of the time. Try a page in the Diesel section and you probably won't, applying -removed and you will. Thanks, Scott
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | scottlucas0