Prevent us.domainname ranking for UK searches
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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
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
-
Search visibility increase with international SEO
Hi Moz Community, I am wondering if there is any tool and/or any sort of standard increase in search visibility I can assume that we will have with our website if we expand to start targeting Spanish with our site. At the moment we receive about 6000-7000 visits a day with 75% of that coming from the US and UK. I am wondering is there any way to make a rough assumption on visibility that will increase by launching a new Spanish speaking website. It would be a subdirectory, not a subdomain or gTLD. I am struggling to find a concrete answer on this and i'd like to make a semi-accurate forecast of the traffic we can expect based on the increase in search visibility that our Spanish language site will provide us. Thanks
International SEO | | Brian_Dowd0 -
HELP: Incorrect Meta Tag description showing for the wrong search results
Hi Guys I'm stuck here! I have update the hreftags, updated the sitemaps. I have 3 top level domains and my zenory.com site is showing for the home page the wrong meta tag description, as you can see in the attachement the meta tag is showing the new zealand site meta tag description which is for zenory.co.nz Anyone know what might be going on here? I have also fetched the home page through WMT as well and its still returning the same results any advice would be much appreciated! Thanks
International SEO | | edward-may0 -
Other country TLD's for US product
We have a product ( Example: Car ) where all of the TLD's for North America (Example: Car.com, Car.net, etc) have been taken. I've found several for TLD's like .IT, .LA, .AG, etc. If I purchased those and launched sites under those TLD's in the US on servers here in the US and marketed the same as a North American TLD, do you see any issues with this regarding SEO challenges? Thanks All! Hugs, Natalie 🙂
International SEO | | okiedokie0 -
Site Ranking in all countries except USA
Hello, I have a site www.apdermatology.com in is ranking #1 for
International SEO | | element8design
"Dermatologist Chelsea Mi" "Dermatologist Chelsea Michigan" In Google in Canada, UK, Australia, Etc.. But in the USA it is on the 4th+ Page, it has been this way for weeks if not months. And does not seem to come up. I originally thought maybe that google was penalizing the site although, it comes up in all other counties. Does anyone have any recommendations how to resolve this, or what the problem may be? Thanks.0 -
How important is .ca for Canadian searches?
We currently own a .com domain name, but the .ca is already taken. We're looking at setting up a Canadian ecommerce store, how important is it to have the store on a .ca domain as opposed to a .com? We can always set it up on the .com and attempt to optimize to Canada but in the long run are we shooting ourselves in the foot? Thanks!
International SEO | | absoauto0 -
International Hub site: .uk vs domain vs subdomain
Financial company with 2 sites: 1- Mybrand.com for the US market.
International SEO | | FXDD
2- global.mybrand.com is the hub for international with selection for 10 languages: drop-down allows selecting between mybrand.jp, mybrand.fr, etc Now we have the opportunity to redesign the site from zero and I am exploring to get rid of the subdomain for the global site What would be your preference to use as the international hub? a) mybrand.co.uk: I have to use lawyers to get the URL from squatter b) mybrandGlobal.com : URL easy to get, and can be geo targeted using google webmaster tools. Cons: It might not rank as well as .co.uk in the UK, which is our biggest market c) global.mybrand.com-- pros: keep using it because it is aged and has some authority. Google might now see subdomains as part of TLD, thus making it a valid way to separate international from US .. Cons: SEO best practices advice to avoid subdomains because it might not pass full link value across domains. There is not really different content the subdomain, it is just the hub for international Thanks in advance for the help0 -
How do you submit US based news on Google News US from the UK?
How do you go about submitting US news (based in the UK) to get indexed on Google News and show up in the US rather then the UK?
International SEO | | CameronT0 -
Ranking well in Google US but not showing up in UK
Hi, We are trying to position a specific site for a big sport event that will be played at the end of May. We only care about Google UK. It had no relevant content until last week. The site is a almost a year old but we just started to get links for it (all from the UK). They worked so fast: we were in page 2 of SERPs in the UK within a few days. But suddenly the site has disappeared and we're not even in top 100 anymore. However, we are ranking extremely well in the US (first page for the keywords we wanted to rank for). The site is a .com and it's hosted in Wordpress.com (with a custom URL). I understand that that can be a problem, but we have already told Google that our business is in the UK through Webmaster Tools. I guess that with time and more UK links, Google would ultimately understand that our focus is the UK audience, but unfortunately we have no time and we can't wait due to the date of the sport event. What do you think that we can do to rank well in the UK and not in the US as fast as possible? Thanks!
International SEO | | jorgediaz0