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SEO Strategy Questions on an International Domain

Competitive Research

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KathleenLTG last edited by

I'm going to try not to get too wordy with my question. Any help that could be provided would be much appreciated!

We recently purchased a Germany-based company. They were using two domains (possibly more) for their website. Domain1 and Domain2. I'm sure for duplicate content reasons, only Domain1 ranked well.

We in the US wanted to use Domain2, as it contains the brand name and would add legitimacy to our website in the US. Problem is that they also wanted to use it in Germany. So we split it using GeoDNS. Any international traffic goes to their server. Any US/Canada traffic goes to ours.

From what I've read, we in the US should have the advantage here in terms of getting our pages indexed on Google, because Google will crawl from the US. So to Google, it should be as if we've changed all of our URLs.

The problem is that Google has not recognized these changes for our homepage and it has been about a month since I submitted a sitemap and changed our geo-targeting to the US in Webmaster tools. They've picked up other pages of ours, but the Title and Meta descriptions for the homepage are in German still. We also rank about 23rd for our own brand name. Bing and Yahoo have picked up the changes without issue and we rank 2nd for our brand name.

My other issue is that the old distributor in the US (whom we have replaced) is ranking first for our brand name. I'm working on increasing our inbound links, but is there anything else I could be doing to jump ahead of them in the rankings?

Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks!
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