International SEO - UK & US
-
Hi!
I'm currently working with a brand that is well established in the UK and is looking to expand it's reach in US. The UK site has a solid link profile and I think that creating a sub-folder for the US site is by far the best solution.
My only concern is that the UK site uses a .co.uk domain. Would it therefore be counter-productive to use a subfolder that looks like this:
In an ideal world I would advise the brand to acquire a location neutral domain (e.g. www.example.com) however the [brandname].com isn't available and options are otherwise very limited!
Steps would be taken to ensure all other technical bases are covered (hreflang tags etc) but I'm struggling to find any further insight on this issue.
Any feedback from the community would be greatly appreciated!
Many thanks,
Harrison
-
Glad to be of help, good luck!
-
Thanks for this answer Robin!
I'm reassured that you think Google won't necessarily treat it as less relevant. At the same time I am definitely on-board with your thinking beyond that. I think I will definitely look to find a solution that's more future-proof (i.e. secure a .com domain).
Thanks again. Wish me luck
-
Hi Harrison, thanks for posting - good question!
I think the common understanding is that Google doesn't necessarily treat .co.uk as less relevant in the US per se but things like the domain can hurt clickthrough for example, which can end up having pretty much the same rankings impact anyway (I mean, we're making assumptions here, it would be hard to divorce the two).
I'd usually be all-for making decisions that are as future-proof as possible and you probably wouldn't want to have to go through a US migration in future so I'd lean towards getting one of those neutral ".com" domains you mention which you can use now and in the future.
That being said, you'd be starting from absolutely nothing in terms of trust signals to the new domain so if this business venture is reliant on getting quicker feedback about how you do if you optimise for the US, I think it's also legitimate to take the subfolder approach in the short term, it's just a bit less common and may force you in to a folder migration later if you think you are being limited by the domain.
What do you think?
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
-
International SEO setup issues canonical URL
My site is www.grocare.com for one region and in.grocare.com for another region. Both of them have the same content except the currency for particular regions. Someone told me that google will take the content as duplicate and not rank either. I have setup hreflang and targeted different regions for both in the search console. I read many article which say canonical urls need to be setup for international seo sites. But Im not sure how to setup canonical urls and whether they are the right way to go . i just don't want my content deranked. Now i have setup hreflang properly after asking the moz community itself. So im hoping to get some help with this query too. TIA
International SEO | | grocare0 -
What are the SEO implications of having a website hosted in Singapore (as a subdomain of the global website) when the website is targeting the UK audience?
What are the SEO implications of having a website hosted in Singapore (as a subdomain of the global website) when the website is targeting the UK audience? Will it be hard to get it to rank? Will there be problems with search console?
International SEO | | ToniFarrington-Allthingsweb0 -
What's the difference between 'en-gb' and 'en-uk; when choosing Search engines in campaign set up?
Hi What's the difference search engine wise and which one should I choose, i presume GB since covers entire British landmass whereas UK excludes Ireland according to political definition, is it the same according to Google (& other engines) ? All Best Dan
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
International Confusion between .com and .com/us
A question regarding International SEO: We are seeing cases for many sites that meet these criteria: -International sites that have www.example.com/ ip redirecting to country site based on ip redirect (ex. www.example.com/ 301 to www.example.com/us -There is a desktop + mobile site (www.example.com + m.example.com) The issue we see is Google shows www.example.com/ in US search results instead of www.example.com/us in search results. Since the .com/ redirects, there is no mobile version, and www.example.com/ also shows up in mobile SERPs instead of m.example.com/us. My questions are: 1. If www.example.com/ is redirecting users and Googlebot, why is Googlebot caching it with the content of www.example.com/us? 2. Why is www.example.com/ showing up in SERPs instead of www.example.com/us? 3. How can we help Google display www.example.com/us and m.example.com/us in SERPs instead of www.example.com/? Thanks!!
International SEO | | FranFerrara0 -
Backlinks to URLs with Language Parameters (for Chinese version of website) and SEO?
Hey all, We run a large eCommerce site in Australia and are preparing to launch to the Chinese market. Our site has been fully converted to Chinese and displays the version of the site detected as default in the user's browser unless they manually select otherwise. This is done by appending the parameter "?la=zh" onto the end of the URL, so for example the Chinese version would be: **www.example.com/australia?la=zh ** This then forces the product catalogue to display the relevant language version. My question is, for SEO purposes and back links in particular, since they aren't really a "true URL" (i.e: strictly speaking they aren't different "pages", just the same page being populated with different characters), would getting links from Chinese websites to the URL "www.example.com/australia?la=zh" really be viewed as any different from just "www.example.com/australia"? Do they pass the same amount of juice and is the difference detected by the engines (thinking mainly about Baidu in particular but of course Google as well)? Feedback from anyone with experience in SEO for multi-lingual sites would be much appreciated, thanks.
International SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
International SEO Question with regards to Sub Folders in Webmaster Tools
So, we have a website in 18 or so different languages. bluewidgets.com/br bluewidgets.com/cn etc I have added each sub folder in Google Webmaster Tools and 'pointed' them to be at their respective geographic specific. However, the United States version of the website is sitting on the root domain. Is there any issue with me pointing the root domain at United States Google, considering there are 18 sub folders already pointed at different regions?
International SEO | | LukeyJamo0 -
Is it worth to have a DNS manage service like easydns or ultradns in terms of seo ?
I have a HTML site hosted in Netherlands, i use Could Files from Rackspace and Cloudfront from Amazon as CDN. My target audience are in Portugal Is it worth to have a DNS Manage service in terms of seo? If so what are the benefits? Thank you Paulo
International SEO | | paulogoncalves0 -
Do non-english(localized) URLs help Local SEO and user experience?
Hi Everyone, This question is about URL best practice for multilingual websites. We have www.example.com in English and we are building the exact replica of English site in German www.example.de. On the Geman site, we are considering to translate some portions of the URLs for example last folder and file name as seen below: example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html Is this a good idea? Will this help SEO and user experience both? or the mixed languagues in URL will confuse the users? Google guidelines say that this should be ok. Would love to get feedback from SEOMOZ community! Thanks, Supriya.
International SEO | | Amjath0