Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Brandon,

About your questions:

• How you call the subdirectories shouldn't be a matter: /es/ or /es-es/ (it's meant to be descriptive and short for users but non-relevant at this point as a signal towards search engines). However, what's important is how you name the URLs of each language version later: they should be in the language of the content that they show.
• If your international versions are country targeted (meant to be focused on users in a specific country and not language targeted, meant to focus on any user speaking a language) then you should geolocate them through Google Webmaster Tools.
• You should also use hreflang annotation in your different pages, referring to each URL language (and country, if they're geotargeted) too, so you won't end-up facing any content duplication issues, since you might have for example a Spanish version targeting to Mexico with a very similar Spanish copy than your Spain version.  If you add the annotations then Google will know these different URLs are targeting to different countries or languages audience and shouldn't cause a content duplication problem.
• If you can't just translate/localize the whole site structure to other languages, then it's a must that you prioritize. Start with those language / countries that have the higher current audience for your site and have the higher potential to grow too. Enable just the most important landing pages / sections of your site if you can't do them all, the ones that you can really maintain, translate / localize well, to give also the best user experience to those visitors (besides of being able to rank with them well in search engines).

Take a look at this post where I wrote about how to set an International SEO strategy well from the start and avoid running into issues in the implementation later.

Thanks!

Aleyda

Hi Luke,

If the website is targeting to a specific country then having a ccTLD is an additional signal of relevance for it (unless the US, where typically the domain used de-facto is .com).

Nonetheless, if the Website is targeting to a worldwide audience (let's say a Website in English targeting to any user who speaks that language, for which the country doesn't matter) then it would be more relevant to have a generic domain (like the .com), since the Website is not country targeted.

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi there,

Hreflang annotations serve to inform Google to which language (and additionally if you want to geotarget, country) each of your URL versions are targeted.

You can use the hreflang default annotation, as described here, when you want to show a default URL for a language / country that you're not targeting, which sounds like the situation you describe.

On the other hand, Bing doesn't support hreflang, but you can use the content language meta tag instead that they do take into consideration:

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Jesus,

No, is considered a quality directory because of its authority. Plus, not all requests are published, you pay for them to consider your submission but if it's spammy or non-relevant won't be published. This is the type of criteria that you can apply to any directory really: What's their authority? what's the quality of the other links featured? Do they charge to review the submission or directly publish the link?

On the other hand, one spammy link won't hurt your site (unless is the only link it has or one of the few!) it's required more than that. You might want to consider also doing other type of tactics and building a full link building strategy for your site instead of concentrating so much on a few directory links though.

Here's a list with ideas and another with resources to inspire you.

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Matthew

The IP location it's a signal although it used to be stronger in the past but is still is. Take into consideration that is not the only signal to inform Google that your site is relevant towards a specific country: The usage of a ccTLD or geolocating in Google Webmaster Tools, plus specifying the region also in the hreflang annotations and your content itself: adding the location where it's targeted to in the different elements of the pages, are also additional signals that you should align as much as you can to inform Google where is your relevant country market.

So when someone asks me this question looking to move their site towards a local hosting or a service that can provide the IP of the country where the site is targeting what I ask is that if it also makes sense to make the move for other reasons (better speed for your visitors in that country, better support, etc.) and from a cost perspective, then they should do it. Nonetheless, if it's a painful migration that will cost too much and they still have other factors to optimize, then I would likely recommend to see first the impact of these other aspects that won't cost that much to implement.

In your case is different, since from what you say is about "moving away" your server from the relevant country, then in this situation is about saving or earning in other aspects that are not SEO since you will be taking away a signal that you were already providing. So instead of this what I would do first is to try to find another service that can keep providing you the UK IP and that also meets your other requirements, trying to keep the signal you were already giving while achieving the goals you're looking to have by changing your hosting service.

In the case this is impossible, then yes, you would likely have to assume you will be losing a bit of the "geotargeted" relevance you were already giving, and in dependence how you're optimizing the other relevant factors towards this, it might have a stronger or weaker effect.

Thanks!

Hi Norberto,

The IP location it's a signal although it used to be stronger in the past and having a US IP won't interfere on ranking in Spain, for example. Now Google has additional and stronger  signals: like the use of a ccTLD or geolocating in Google Webmaster Tools, plus specifying the region also in the hreflang annotations and your content itself: adding the location where it's targeted to in the different elements of the pages.

Of course, if you can invest on hiring a hosting service with an IP in the location where you're targeted and won't suppose a too high investment for you, do it (it will likely impact positively on the site speed, for example), but as also happens with other factors and signals in SEO, is that the benefits you get should surpass the cost of the changes you'll do.

Thanks!

You shouldn't remove them. If you implement the 301-redirects and do everything what's described before, although it might take some time, they should be eliminated from the index while referring their value with the redirects.

Hi Dan,

Despite it's not a domain migration there are a lot of aspects that apply in this situation too! For example:

• You should monitor is that up update your internal (menu, content from your own site) and external links (at least the most important) towards the old URLs and target to the new ones.
• Make sure that the 301-redirects have been correctly implemented (in a URL to URL basis) to the relevant pages and make sure the new ones are still relevant and optimized for the same keywords than the previous ones.
• Generate a new XML sitemap with your new URLs and resubmit them in GWT.
• Resubmit your Old URLs with the fetch as Googlebot option in GWT to make sure Google knows about the update and identifies the 301-redirects.
• Monitor the (organic search and general) traffic and visibility (with GA and GWT) that the old URLs still receive vs. the new ones. If everything has been correctly implemented then there should be a trend that goes down with your old URLs and one that goes up with your new ones. If not, check which ones are still receiving a high amount of traffic and why: if they're still linked from an external source and hasn't been correctly redirected, etc.

Follow the previous recommendations and you should be able to minimize the effects of the changes.

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Wesley,

If you enable a new language version totally optimized in another language (From the URLs, to titles, descriptions, text content, comments, etc.) there shouldn't be any problem. If you want to help Google to identity that this is your French version (in this case algo specifically targeted to a Belgium language), you can use the hreflang tag specifying the language and country, as explained here, in your pages html head section. Additionally, you can add the hreflang annotations in your XML sitemap as described here. You can also use this tool to facilitate the process.

Best regards,

Aleyda

Hi there,

In order to rank for specific languages and countries is important that you build a crawlable and indexable site structure, with their own URLs that will be ranked (the Google translate plugin won't help you with this), with optimized content for each one of them, and after, you build links from sites in these countries towards them. Remember the fundamentals of SEO: Is Relevance (relevant text content that is indexed and optimized) and popularity (links, citations, references).

Please take a look at this presentation I did a month ago that will take you through the most important aspects of the process: from researching the best way you should target the audiences (language vs. country targeting), the best type of web structure for your international versions (ccTLDs, subdirectories or subdomains), the usage of specific annotations in order to tell Google the content is in a specific language (hreflang tags), and then of course, identify the appropriate relevant sources for each country to build links from, etc.

To go more in depth with your international SEO strategy, take a look at this post, where I also share some dos and don'ts and finally, these recommendations to take into consideration when developing your international web versions.

As you can see, this cannot be achieved with plugins to automatically translate content, is a real investment to identify the best language / country opportunity and then develop a whole site structure targeting them, this is why it's very important to validate well at the beginning and do a in depth research, so it's cost effective and help you effectively achieve your international SEO goals.

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi again Dan,

I would recommend that you first follow this checklist so you make sure your whole migration is SEO friendly and that you're not forgetting anything in the migration process and that you validate everything well.

The best process is the one the most straightforward one: do the migration as simple as possible (from one domain to the other with 301 redirects) and avoid changing many things at the same time. Please keep in mind that redirects will help but is not the only thing you should do, take a look at the checklist and you'll see.

It's actually natural that in the following days after the migration your rankings drop, search engines need time to crawl and index again the URLs in the new site, identify that you have moved your content from the old domain to the new one and with the help of the 301-redirects.

Among the additional things you should do to have an SEO friendly migration that you'll see in the checklist are that you should notify Google that you've moving your domain through Google Webmaster Tools (there's an option for this), create a new profile and generate a sitemap for the new domain, verify that the 301-redirects are all well implemented, that the content relevance is also kept in those pages for the keywords they were ranking with, that external and internal links going to the old urls are updated and now go to the new ones, prioritizing those landing pages that had the most highly relevant traffic, trying to change the minimum from the structure -keep one change at a time to be able to identify any issue-, check and follow-up on crawling errors). If you do everything what is recommended on the checklist little by little you should see how you start regaining your rankings again, but you need to give time (usually at least a couple of months if everything goes right).

So, there are a lot of other factors and I will make sure to follow the recommendations to minimize the negative impact, although is impossible of not having it. What is definitely not recommended is that you are updating many times your URLs or that you redirect many times, this is why this process should be effectively planned and designed validating all the aspects from the beginning and making sure that the more relevance signals you can keep (like the keywords in the appropriate elements of the pages) the best it is and making one change at a time makes things much more simple (first migrate, then one the effects of the migration have gone you can start optimizing and changing the new domain architecture) otherwise it can get really messy and this is what you're already experiencing I'm afraid.

I hope this helps! Aleyda

Hi Jesus,

Here's the Mexico section in Yahoo where you can include your Mexican targeted website.

Thanks!

Hi there,

There's much more you can do:

• Link all of your language versions using a crawlable language menu. Like this Google will be able to initially crawl and index these versions.
• Create a Google Webmaster Tools profile for each one of your language versions independently, like this you will be able to generate a specific XML for each (besides tracking each one of them much more easily), and if they are not only language targeted but also, country targeted, you can also geolocate them through GWT too.
• Add to each specific XML sitemap the hreflang annotations referring to the language of each one of your websites as specified here. To help you with this you can use this MediaFlow tool.
• Add the hreflang annotations in the HTML too, in the head section of the HTML of each one of your different pages, as specified here.

The more of these you do, the easier will be for Google to identify that these new version of your sites are targeting these additional languages.

Thanks!

Hi there,

In order to tell Google that your sites are targeted to different locations (.com for the US and .co.uk for the UK) and that despite having very similar, almost duplicated content this is not the case you should:

• Add the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags to your pages, targeting them to their specific countries:  hreflang="en-gb" for the UK and hreflang="en-us" for the US. Like this you're specifying that these pages are both in English but targeting to different countries.
• Even if you're offering the exact same products or services try to differentiate the content by localizing key elements of your pages content. You can do this by adding the name of the countries (or cities if you have different content per cities) in your titles, meta descriptions, headings. Also adding the specific addresses and currencies you have for different countries too. Like this search engines will see that the content is not exactly the same and includes references to different locations. Take a look at this post I wrote some time ago where I shared the main criteria and aspects to take into consideration for International websites.

Thanks!

Hi there,

In order to increase your rankings in German speaking search results it's recommended that you:

• Use the rel="alternate" hreflang="de" tag, as specified here by Google in order to inform them that this content is in German and targeted to these users.
• Build links from specific German speaking websites, from blogs, communities, forums, news sites, etc. specially those hosted in German IPs and with German  (.DE) or Swiss (.CH) ccTLDs
• Since I understand that you're using a .com domain to rank for all of the German speaking countries with the same content, both Germany and Switzerland and not specifically targeted to a specific country (so your site is language, not country targeted) in this case you're not able to geotarget it in Google Webmaster Tools which would be also an additional possibility if you had for example, a specific German version targeting Germany with: yourdomain.com/de/ or targeting to Switzerland with: yourdomain.com/ch/, nonetheless, if at some point you are, is important that you also know of this setting. Moreover, if you switch towards a country targeted domain structure, instead of using a generic domain such .com the best is to switch over a .de targeting Germany and .ch targeting Switzerland.

These additional signals should help!

Hi there,

I've checked your ranking  with a non-personalized result and I see your website is ranking with this specific page: www.office1web.ie/office-furniture that has in its title both the Office and Desks keywords:

"Office Furniture** | Desks and Desking | Tables at Office1web.ie**"

As you can also see in this screenshot: http://www.screencast.com/t/tuMZvCKku

Additionally, although the page content is targeting the "Office Furniture" keyword is also featuring information about Office Desks which mixed with any potential incoming external or internal links with this anchor text and the overall popularity of this specific page (along with the relatively low competition that you can verify with the domain popularity and page popularity of the other ranking pages) could positively influence its rankings for this query.

I hope this helps!

Aleyda

Hi there!

There can be geolocation factors that could affect your mobile search results, additionally maybe some of the sites that you're competing against for desktop are not that relevant towards that location but your site is, or maybe for some of these sites Google identifies that they're not suitable to be displayed in Mobile and even if you don't have a specific Mobile version your site can be still identified as suitable to be shown in Mobile search results and for any of these type of reasons you might you end-up ranking better.

In order to verify well how you attract the visibility with your desktop site with mobile search results:

• Take a look at your Google Analytics, verify specifically the organic search traffic coming only from mobile devices. Identify which keywords are bringing this traffic and the pages that these visitors are going to.
• Go to Google Webmaster Tools and select the "Traffic >> Search Queries" and select the "Mobile" filter and see which keywords and pages are giving you mobile search visibility.
• Use a mobile emulator or a user agent switcher to simulate a mobile search result and closely analyze how your current pages are shown there, who you're competing with, your link popularity and relevance against them, etc.

All this will give you a much better idea of your current mobile search situation. If you identify that you're already getting a reasonable amount of traffic and there can be potential, I would suggest that you do a Mobile targeted keyword research, following the steps that as I described in this Mozinar... you might identify much more opportunity through Mobile SEO.

I hope this helps!

Hi again!

It's normal that you feature very similar or even, duplicate content through both your mobile and desktop Website versions, what it is fundamental though is that you use the rel alternate and canonical tags that I shared with you in my previous answer. I've just checked your site and you're not using them.

If you correctly add these tags in your mobile and desktop URLs as I described in my previous answer you shouldn't have any content duplication or cannibalization issues in Google's search results.

Thanks!

Aleyda

Hi there!

It's ok (and needed) in these circumstances to use a parameter in the URL since you cannot simply add a direct link otherwise your mobile users who select to switch to the desktop version will end-up in a redirection loop. What you can do to avoid any type of content duplication issues in this type of settings is:

• Add a link rel="alternate" tag in each of the desktop URLs referring to their specific mobile URL versions and a link rel="canonical" tag in all of the mobile URLs referring to their specific desktop URLS versions, as specified here by Google. Take a look at an example here
• Configure the appropriate canonical tags in your Desktop URLs as specified here by Google, so they always refer to their original URL versions (without parameters). This means that in http://www.website.com/?m=off you should add this canonical tag:```
  pointing to its original URL version... and do this with every URL (referring to its own original URL version).

By doing this you won't have any content duplication issues. If you want to learn more about Mobile SEO take a look at the Webinar I did sometime ago in SEOmoz here and this post where I answer the most common Mobile SEO questions.

Thanks,

Aleyda

Your registrar usually gives you the option to choose if it's a temporary or a permanent situation so it forwards with 302 or 301 depending on that. Nonetheless, you can check directly yourself very easily with: http://web-sniffer.net/ by taking a look at the HTTP response header of the forwarded domain (and see if it's a 301). Good luck with the new domain

Hi Robert,

The rewrite rules shared by Patrick should work well for that although you could also use Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin that features options to do that through the control panel.

Nonetheless, in general what can be better in performance and also for tracking purposes with your site URL, leaving tracking parameters while avoiding content duplication content is to use canonical tags. You can also set them easily for Wordpress with Yoast's plugin.

I hope this helps!

Aleyda

Hi Dan, my domain registrar let me forward to any URL (not necessarily another domain root) so there shouldn't be an issue to do it. I recommend that you check with your registrar if you can do the same with yours. Thanks

Hi Dan! Thanks for the clarification. This change it all really and is pretty straightforward then: You should directly go to your domain registrar and set the "Domain Forwarding" option to go to the new domain.

Hi there!

You shared that you're using responsive along with dynamic serving (can you please specify more?), since for any of those two approaches you will be providing the same URLs for both mobile and desktop users and crawlers, you won't need to redirect:

• With responsive: You use CSS Media Queries and the same HTMLs for both mobile and desktop purposes. Your design will be fluid and always "fit" the visitors device, you won't need to serve different HTMLs nor redirect.
• With dynamic serving: You serve different HTMLs based on the user agent (mobile or desktop) through the same URLs. Since the different HTMLs will be shown through the same URLs no redirect is needed neither. What you need to make sure to effectively implement user agent detection (avoiding the errors specified by Google here), using the vary HTTP header, as explained here.

On the other hand, the mobile Web approach that does need redirects is when you set a parallel mobile Website, for which you will enable a mobile targeted Web version through their specific URLs (it's recommended to show them in an "m" subdomain, following a clean and optimized URL naming system that can easily refer to the desktop one), for example:

• Category A for Desktop version: www.yourbrand.com/category-a/
• Category A for Mobile version: m.yourbrand.com/category-a/

For this last setting you do need redirects, along with the usage of rel="alternate" tag pointing to the corresponding mobile URL from their desktop URL version and a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the corresponding desktop URL from their mobile URL version, in a page to page basis, as described here.

If at some point you have a desktop URL that doesn't have a mobile version (or viceversa, a mobile URL that doesn't have a desktop version) then you shouldn't really do anything "extra" really, since:

• If for some reason a user can end-up visiting for a URL targeting another device and you don't have it, then it's better to leave the users browsing through the other Web version, since you don't really have that content still optimized for them and although not optimized from a user experience perspective, this is better than implement "non-relevant redirects" that would "force" these users to go to other URLs that although will be optimized for Mobile, won't provide the content that they're looking to consume.
• If you correctly configure your mobile and desktop versions tagging they shouldn't rank in the search results that they're not targeting to so the previous situation really would happen mostly if someone directly shares a specific Mobile URL to Desktop users and you don't have that Desktop version for that URL, for example, or viceversa.

So to avoid this type of situation directly the best is to have always a mobile version of your desktop URLs and viceversa, although as you can see, if this is not possible, the alternative scenario (to leave it as it is) is not really negative and shouldn't affect a high amount of your users.

If you have any question or additional doubt, please let me know!

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Paul,

As Andy mentioned earlier, the complexity here comes by the fact that these IDs cannot be simply removed since they play a role in the Magento product/category system.

The first step would be that you identify how these are generated to identify the best way to optimize it to become relevant or at least doesn't add more depth and complexity in the URL structure.

I've seen that there's a URL rewrite area in Magento with some system configuration options that you might want to take a look here and to this in-depth guide explaining Magento URL rewrites.

I've also seen that a similar question has been asked in Stackoverflow and as you can see the potential alternatives discussed here goes into Magento's system configuration.

Hope this helps!

Aleyda

Hi Rasmus,

You can try what Emanuele mentioned before and if it doesn't work please let me know exactly which are the different alternatives of the URLs that you want to rewrite and the output URLs that you're looking to get so I can help you.

Thanks!

Hi there,

Why are you looking to migrate the subdomains to subdirectories? In general, the most "natural" URL structure for a city organization would be: yourdomain.com/city/category/ since you will be able to consolidate all the popularity that you can attract to the different cities to your main domain structure and on the other hand, optimize (as you should be already doing with your subdomains) every landing page targeting each city.

Nonetheless, if you're already ranking with these subdomains for your keywords related to these cities the effort and substancial benefit that you might look to get might not compensate the effort -only if you see that you're not ranking with this structure and look to consolidate popularity-.

What is definitely fundamental that you do whether you decide to keep the subdomains or migrate to the subdirectories is that each city page (and its subpages) should feature unique, relevant content optimize for them. This shouldn't be necessarily difficult to achieve if you organize and optimize your structure to show:

• The name of each city in the titles, meta descriptions, headings.
• Add your specific office address in each city.
• Add your telephone number in each city.
• Enable and promote user generated content, like reviews, comments, ratings targeting each city.
• Create different offers or promotions for each city.

Like this, despite the fact that these city landing pages might feature similar offering (which is normal since they're the same business at the end) the content will be unique for each one of them.

I hope this helps. If you still have any doubts, please let me know.

Aleyda

Hi there,

If it's only that URL (not a group of URLs with a pattern to follow) that you need to 301-redirect then you can directly use:

RedirectMatch 301 /dynamic-url.php?id=43 http://www.yourdomain.com/static/page/url/inserted/here

If this is not the situation please let me know!

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Dan,

What is is important in these types of scenarios is that you make sure that the redirects are relevant from a user and SEO perspective, since although the link popularity from the old pages will pass by just 301-redirecting them to their new location, what it is important to preserve is also the relevance of these redirects, since these old pages could be already not only externally linked, but also ranking for keywords relevant to their specific content, so if you do a "bulk" redirect to a new page that is not optimized for these keywords (and is very unlikely that a single page is optimized and relevant for a high diverse amount of content and keywords that are at the moment covered through many different pages) you will lose those rankings.

Because of this, take a look at which are the keywords bringing organic traffic to the "old pages" you want to redirect and what you should do to preserve this organic traffic is to redirect them to the new pages on your new domain that also cover these topics, so they will still be relevant for them and when you redirect to them, you won't not only refer the popularity but also keep the rankings and make sure that your users are finding that they were looking for (or at least, something similar).

In case you need to provide information to your users telling them that they're being redirected since the old pages have been migrated because of an acquisition, you can do it so through a message "banner" like the one that Yahoo uses here to warn visitors that they have been redirected to another language version, in a non-intrusive way.

The best way to implement 301-redirects is server side. In case you're using an Apache server then you will need to edit your .htaccess file that you can access easily via FTP for example, and should be located in your root domain.

If you would redirect your old domain pages to a new one preserving the URL structure you would be able to do this with rewriting rules, very straightforward in this case:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Nonetheless, if you need to implement them in a page to page level, since the URL names of in the new domain are not the same than in the old one, you might need to implement them in a page to page basis:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^oldurl.html$ http://www.newdomain.com/newurl.html

I hope this helps!

Aleyda

Hi Chris,

To redirect your old domain to the new domain with the same path for all the URLs except a specific directory, for example: /blog/ that is going to be renamed /newblog/ in your new domain, it will be:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On</ifmodule>

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/blog/(.) [NC]
RewriteRule ^blog/(.)$ http://www.newabc.com/newblog/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^abc.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.abc.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newabc.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Spencer,

The rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag inclusion along with the Geotargeting option in Google Webmaster Tools (if the websites are not ccTLDs but generic domains) are solutions for these situations: When you have two websites targeting different countries with the same language and they're competing with each other in SERPs, cannibalizing their opportunities and that might end up also with content duplication issues at some point.

About your concern: "Currently for some of our keywords US is #1, UK is #4. If we implement rel alternate, will it just remove our US page".

Your US website would be removed for the UK search result pages indeed and although in the short term this might seem as counterproductive, the reality is that this result from a relevancy perspective doesn't belong there since you already have your UK website targeting those users especially.

This also means that you can also be losing opportunity by having UK users going to the US version that is not as relevant for them, so their experience can be poorer and the conversions might not be the same. Additionally, as I mentioned before you might end-up suffering from content cannibalization / duplication issues with both websites showing the same or very similar content without giving signals to Google that they're not really duplicates but two versions targeting different audiences.

Because the previous in the long-run the best is that you make the most out of your international Web versions (country versions in this case) and give the necessary signals to Google so these start ranking in these countries search results instead.

In case your US version is a .com domain and it's also attracting rankings, organic traffic and conversions from abroad, excluding the UK (for which you have your own UK website version) then you can leave that website without a specific geolocalization in Google Webmaster Tools and just specifying the language in the hreflang attribute (not the country) but if you have a specific website version for the UK then you should definitely specify that this website (whether it's a .uk ccTLD, subdirectory, subdomain or another generic domain) is geotargeting to this country.

I hope this helps!

Hi Daniel,

I agree with Emanuele, you can invest your time and resources in much more valuable, long-term link building strategies, that will be much more beneficial for your clients without risks that links from directories that are not necessarily that relevant or an authority towards your industry.

Instead of thinking where to create links with high PageRank you should instead identify along with your clients how you can create and promote valuable and attractive assets (from content, guides, tools, giveaways, contests, etc.) with them in order to not only improve their Website popularity (with natural links, shares, references, +1's, citations, etc.) but that are also aligned with their business goals and allow you to improve your branding, loyalty, conversions, etc.

If you have a bit of time you should watch the #RCS presentation of Wil Reynolds at Mozcon last year where he covered this topic.

You can see what I talk about and get inspired by taking a look at this summary with the slides of the latest LinkLove presentations.

By switching your focus on building links like this you can really create a competitive advantage over your local competitors that from what you shared might still be building links in a more "artificial" way.

I hope this helps!

Hi there!

Ideally if you're going to be targeting another country the best way to go is with a ccTLD, in this case, .ca. In case you're not able then you can go with a directory and at some point switch to the ccTLD (when you're ready) with a migration, when it makes sense for your business.

You can take a look at the different criteria you can take into consideration in this post I wrote some weeks ago, where I also gave my recommendations from a web structure perspective when you target many countries with different languages for each with a generic domain. In this case it would be the following one to maintain a consistency from a country/language perspective and keep the URL structure as simple as possible for a user and crawling perspective:

USA: yourbrand.com

Canada in English: yourbrand.com/en-ca/

Canada in French: yourbrand.com/fr-ca/

In the post I mention you will find also some examples with this different structures and other best practices to follow.

Good luck with the site

Aleyda