What's the best strategy for acquisition?
-
Hi All,
Recently acquired a competitor company. This acquired company is small in size but is the exclusive UK distributor for a gigantic Swedish company. This is the way the current domain structure is divided.
- swedish-supplier.se (Not owned by us - swedish supplier )
- Swedish-supplier.co.uk (owned by us, operating as the swedish supplier in the UK)
- New-acquired-company.com (owned by us)
The supplier doesn't want us to have two websites as they keep getting confused customers. Because of this we have agreed to remove www.swedish-suplier.co.uk and solely sell the product at www.new-aqquired-company.com.
However, because of the sheer size of the Swedish supplier, a lot of traffic comes through to swedish-supplier.co.uk.
My question is, how can we work together with the supplier to remove this domain and still maintain a good amount of UK traffic?
Should we point swedish-supplier.co.uk back to the suppliers original translated web site and have them pass enquiries onto us or should we point it to our website? & What's the best way to go about it?
Thanks,
Danny
-
Hey Danny, sounds like you have a big migration project ahead of you! As others have said, you're going to have to do mass 301 redirects to the site you want everything to live on moving forward. You should also engage with an international SEO consultant to help you out with this, because you're likely going to need country-specific subfolders and use HREFLANG to send the search crawlers for the right languages to the right pages and rank them accordingly.
Happy to recommend some if you'd like.
-
Just another quick point - the downside of pointing towards the Swedish site is that it's on a .se domain, and is probably hosted etc in Sweden, so while that wouldn't stop it from ranking in UK searches, it won't help.
(Funnily enough I've resumed learning Swedish recently, as I have family ties there, but haven't got on to flooring yet!)
-
So if you're wanting to remove the swedish-supplier.co.uk site and only use the new site, the logical thing would be to redirect the current swedish-supplier.co.uk site with 301 redirects.
That'll keep most of the authority you've accrued in the past, and transfer any current customers across.
The key task is to map out how it will work, because the homepage will be a straight swap, for example, but your old site may have content which isn't currently on the newly-acquired company domain, so you'll either need to direct those pages to the most suitable equivalent, or create new pages on the newly-acquired company domain to point the old stuff to.
Assuming no issues, you should see a pretty straight swap between authority and traffic as the redirects take effect. But if you're wondering about how to go about it, it's probably worth investing a small amount in getting an SEO professional/agency with experience in cross-domain redirects involved, even if you do the bulk of the work yourself and just get them to sanity check it.
You'll also probably want to check that the new domain is set-up correctly, and is registered with Google Search Console and the location is specified etc, plus it's also worth thinking about whether you want to continue using the same analytics account from the newly-acquired domain if it's got some installed, or from your swedish-supplier site, in which case, you need to copy across your existing code, remove it from the old site, and note the change in your GA account to be able to refer back to it...
-
Hi Sean,
Sorry, I got mixed up when typing - swedish-distributor.co.uk and swedish-supplier.co.uk were meant to be the same domain. Edited the question!
-
Danny,
I am not clear on relationship between these three or four domains? Is swedish-distributor.co.uk a fourth?
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
-
Who is the best SEO expert in the World?
Hey everyone, i am creating a blog post on Top SEO Experts in the World. I need your recommendation who is in the top 10 list? Your suggestions is highly appreciated for me. Thanks!
International SEO | | gxpl090 -
How should I handle hreflang tags if it's the same language in all targeting countries?
My company is creating an international version of our site at international.example.com. We are located in the US with our main site at www.example.com targeting US & Canada but offering slightly different products elsewhere internationally. Ideally, we would have hreflang tags for different versions in different languages, however, it's going to be an almost duplicate site besides a few different SKUs. All language and content on the site is going to be in English. Again, the only content changing is slightly different SKUs, they are almost identical sites. The subdomain is our only option right now. Should we implement hreflang tags even if both languages are English and only some of the content is different? Or will having just canonicals be fine? How should we handle this? Would it make sense to use hreflang this way and include it on both versions? I believe this would be signaling for US & Canda visitors to visit our main site and all other users go to the international site. Am I thinking this correctly or should we be doing this a different way?
International SEO | | tcope250 -
Best way to interlink 25 different language versions of a website?
I have a website which has 25 different language versions on 16 different domains. Hreflan are setup to point to different language versions. In the footer we have deeplinks to the 25 language versions. Site is not spammy but in small niche and many language versions have very few other external links. For some time this site had lost rankings for reasons that are unclear till now. I see that large international sites such as booking.com, tripadvisor, apple all use different approaches to interlink their language versions. Interestingly Tripadvisor is nowadays loading the links to their other language versions dynamically only upon click so that these links do not show up in source code, deviating from their former implementation of static deeplinks to all language versions. Matt Cutts mentioned back in 2013 “If you have 50 different sites, I wouldn’t link to all 50 sites down in the footer of your website, because that can start to look pretty spammy to users. Instead you might just link to no more than three or four or five down in the footer, that sort of thing, or have a link to a global page, and the global page can talk about all the different verions and country versions of your website.” But in their webmaster guidelines google recommends: "Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the German version of your page can get to the right language version with a single click." I assume for SEO anyway these links have no value, but for user experience it would certainly be better to provide somewhere deeplinks to other language versions. Also the fact that language versions are on different domains and have few external backlinks may increase a bit the risk in our case. I guess in doubt I would prefer to be safe and load deeplinks only upon click same as tripadvisor. Any thoughts/suggestions on best interlinking in our specific case?
International SEO | | lcourse0 -
SEO Strategy for international website with similar content
Hello, If a company is in different countries and has same content in most of the countries does it hurt SEO? For Ex. fibaro.com is the website that I am researching and I have seen the indexed pages to be about 40,000 however there is not much content on it. On further inspection I noticed that for every country the sub folder is different. So for us it will be fibaro.com/us/motion-sensor and for Europe fibaro.com/en/motion-sensor. Now both of these pages have same content on it and the company is in 86 countries so imagine the amount of duplicate content it has. Does anybody have any ideas on what should be an ideal way to approach this? Thanks
International SEO | | Harveyspecter0 -
What are the best practices for translation of city/state names for international SEO? (ie. New York in English vs. Nueva York in Spanish)
I'm working on international SEO / translation of a global travel site. While we have a global keyword research and translation strategy in process for each market they serve, I've run into a unique question. Overall, we are translating (and localizing) content for each market but aren't sure what to do with location names. Each country/state has cities and locations that have their own dedicated pages. I see three options for these location names (when titling a page and writing content): keep them in English, translate the names in the market languages, or use a combination of the two. The challenge with altering the location names to the market languages is that they are truly not known by those names. Though there are some instances where it may make sense…for instance **New York **in Spanish would be "Nueva York" with **‘**Nueva' being the Spanish translation of ‘new’. There are other instances, where no translation exists. If you’ve had a similar experience I'd love to hear your approach/recommendation.
International SEO | | JonClark150 -
Same website in different countries, best practices for SEO?
Hey Guys, I have read several similar questions regarding mine, but none seem to truly cover my question. Basically, we have a company named Junair. We created the website for the company here in Australia (http://www.junair.com.au). As can be seen throughout the page, it mentions that it caters for both Australia and NZ (NZ has its own phone number). It does ok in the rankings at the moment, but rankings will continue to rise in the future once more links are getting picked up. Now however, the Junair team in NZ purchased the NZ domain http://www.junair.co.nz and redirected it to the Australian page. No matter which page you visit on the NZ URL, the URL will never change, and neither will the page title. They have now contacted us and asked to perform SEO on the NZ domain so the NZ domain would show up in searches on Google NZ. At the moment, when searching for "Junair" on google.co.nz, the Australian domain is coming up. How could I change this so the NZ URL would show instead? And what would be the best practices to perform SEO on the NZ URL, should I just create links pointing to http://www.junair.co.nz ? Thank you, Roderic
International SEO | | Michael-Goode0 -
Migration from tld's to .com sub folders
Hi Guys, We currently operate five websites, 1 on .co.uk, 1 on .co.nz, 1 on .de and 1 on .com (geo targeted to USA) and 1 on .com/au (targeted at Australia). Open Site Explorer currently credits our .co.uk with 212 unique domains linking to us, our .com has 130, our .co.nz has 110 and our .de (which is new) has around 10. We have a website on .com/au targeting Australia and we have gained around 30 - 40 links into this sub folder. Our rankings in google australia for this website are fantastic and it would appear to me that we have inherited all the domain authority of our .com. The UK is currently our most important market and we operate a website on a .co.uk there. Our main competitors there have around 300 - 400 unique domains linking to them. What I am thinking of doing is deploying our UK content onto our .com root domain (which is currently geo targeted at the US which is a really small market for us) and redirecting all of the .co.uk pages at the root folder of the .com and changing the geo targeting of the .com to the UK. Additionally I was going to migrate our .co.nz and our .de websites into .com/nz/ and .com/de/ sub folders. I will also create a new .com/us/ folder for the US. I can only go off the fact that the only sub folder website we have (.com/au) has been very successful for us. Do you think migration of all of these websites onto the .com domain using sub folders will provide a meaningful boost to our rankings by virtue of having more back links into one domain? Are there any big risks in doing so and how long would you expect the redirects and changes to be picked up by google. I really appreciate any help and comments on this. Kind Regards
International SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield0 -
What’s the best way to convert ccTLD to global TLD?
We started out as a Canadian site targeting Canadian users. Now our site http://iCraft.ca has a lot of international buyers and sellers and .ca TLD doesn’t make sense anymore, as we are not performing well on Google.com We are doing a complete site redesign right now, which will address a lot of coding and content specific issues, but we suspect .ca domain will always hold us back in achieving good positions on Google.com. Since Google doesn’t allow ccTLDs to set geo-targeting, what are our options? a) Migrating to a brand new .com site and setting up 301 redirects for all links from iCraft.ca. Would we lose all rankings in this example and pretty much start building them from scratch? Or would PR be transferred page by page from one domain to another through 301 redirects? b) Setup a separate .com site with mirrored content to target global audience and keep .ca site to target Canada. Not sure if splitting PR for the same pages between 2 sites is a good idea. Also, how would you address duplicate content properly in our situation?
International SEO | | MarinaUX
In this video that I found here on forum http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo Matt Cutts says that it’s ok to have duplicate content on different ccTLDs, but he says - make sure you localize your content on those domains. What if you can’t? Most of the content on our site is meant for anyone, not just Canadian users. So, for the most part, we’d have exactly same content on .com site, as we have on .ca site. We could display prices in different currencies on product pages, but the rest of the content – blogs, forum etc. are not country-specific and can’t be localized easily. Also, it’s not clear from the video if all mirrored sites should sit on the same domain name for each country, like example.com and example.ca or is it ok to have example.com and icraft.ca? c) Is there a better option? Thanks for your help!0