Prevent us.domainname ranking for UK searches

[mcmnetjames]

Hi Moz Community,

I'd appreciate any advice you can offer on this. We have a client with international offices, and we manage the website and SEO for some of these offices, including UK. Others, such as their US office, are managed by another agency.

All websites have the same domain name, but differ in their sub domains depending on their targeted country, e.g. uk.domainname for UK, us.domainname for US. All are .com.

The US office's agency re-desgined their us.domainname website earlier this year. We noticed a couple of months ago that the US website started to outrank the uk.domainname website for branded searches on Google from the UK.

After some investigation, we found that their agency had incorrectly implemented hreflang tags and set the us sub-domain as the hreflang="x-default" instead of www.domainname. They corrected this and uk.domainname is now the first organic result on Google. However, us.domainname has remained in 2nd place for organic brand searches (from Google UK) for the past two months, when we were hoping that this would have dropped out of the rankings by now.

We have asked the US office to ensure that their International Targeting is set to United States in Google Search Console, but have no way of knowing if this has actually been done.

Does anyone have experience of this? Is there anything else we could try to stop the US site ranking for Google UK, or is it just a matter of waiting?

Many thanks,

James

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Best of luck James and please feel free to reach out to me if you need any further help - I tend to live on Twitter as well.

-Andy

[mcmnetjames]

Thanks very much for your advice, Andy. Very good point about brand searches!

Yes we've fetched as Google again and the tags seem to be working fine. We'll just have to be patient in this case.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi James,

A brand search is likely to throw up international pages as it is very different from a search term - this is much more specific and handled differently because you are using sub-domains rather than a folder structure. This is (almost) another separate entity in Google's eyes.

It is possible that over time Google will address this, but I am not sure there is anything more than you have already done that will make more differences.

Have you done a new fetch as Google? Are you sure HREFLANG is all working correctly? You can use this to test it.

-Andy