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DaveSottimano

Hi Matt,

International SEO is always a fun question, especially when dealing with English speaking countries. Here's what I would do to help Google determine that this is a separate site and hopefully avoid any duplicate content issues - this will be specific to your UK site but the practice is universal:

List the UK phone number and address + any other specific UK contact info on every page (header + footer). The great thing is that you're already using the phone number and your registered business number in England. If it's ok with how you conduct business, I would also include the address in the footer as well
Change the HTML lang code to GB. Currently in the .co.uk source code you have: xml:lang="en" - what you need to be doing is specifying UK English like so: html lang="en-GB"

http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/web/tips/langtag.html#why

Double check webmaster tools for the UK site is targeting the UK
Ideally, you would want to change some of the text content to reflect differentiation between the English sites. I would simply paraphrase or rewrite the content from the American version and place it on the UK site.
If you see the .com version in the UK, don't panic. You'll need to build some links to the UK site ideally from .UK domains(co.uk, org.uk) and it should naturally sort itself out.
Something I've been wanting to try is the html link language tag. In this case it would work from the .com version link pointing to the .co.uk. W3 says it's not supported by browsers but doesn't mention crawlers - IMO it's worth a try if all else fails.

[http://www.webhostingbuzz.co.uk](<a href=)" hreflang="en-GB">Web Hosting Buzz

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_hreflang.asp

If you follow these instructions you should be fine, I mean apple.com and apple.com/uk are almost completely identical and they seem fine now. I haven't had any issues myself yet, and I've taken my own advice.

On a side note, I think I might become a customer - plans look pretty sweet

Good luck!

Dave

DaveSottimano

Hi Sally,

This isn't ideal for SEO, and the immediate answer is: It's not OK, and you have to reduce this to one.

Each time you use a 301 redirect, you lose some "link juice" - the less you redirect Googlebot, the more value your pages will retain.

Can I ask why you're having to redirect twice?

Cheers,

Dave

DaveSottimano

I had help from the UK seo community doing a Google +1 experiment recently - it's a bit silly but I think this is what you're looking for. http:// [www] davidsottimano [.com] /gareth-hoyle-sexiest-man-alive/ (purposely not a link!). I think it had around 40-50 +1's last time I checked.

Ranks #4-#5 https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=gareth+hoyle&gl=uk

Feel free to use it if it suits you.

DaveSottimano

Hi Danny!

I don't have much to add here, I think the guys have it right in that you'll need to figure out how to make the 301 work. I quickly read that documentation, then realized I wasn't a robot, so I found this: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/10/amazon-s3-support-for-website-redirects.html which was a bit more friendly.

I wish I could help you out more, but I'm not using AWS. I'm assuming you'll be able to use wildcard or regex matching somewhere, and that should solve your problem.

Great site by the way, anything you're using to help out with the static blog? (Jekyll, Octopress?)

DaveSottimano

Just to add to Alan's answer, and this is from pure experience:

You'll likely see a "down" period. Expect organic traffic to drop for a few weeks and hopefully get back to previous level or better. If you rely on organic, up your spend on PPC during this period
Do not redirect internal pages to the root. domainA.com/page should redirect to another inner page. Don't start redirecting groups of pages to the new root.
Like Alan said, pages without external links are not worth redirecting. Make sure you get all of your links from OSE, Majestic, Ahrefs and WMT to get a decent picture. Ensure you're redirecting to similar content too!
Change the site address in WMT, verify new site in WMT - watch this like a hawk, especially crawl errors.
Once the new site is up, submit your XML sitemaps to WMT.
Triple check your robots.txt, and other robots directives - I've see too many sites go up with NOINDEX and full robots.txt blocks.
Fetch pages in WMT to ensure you're getting 200 response codes on your most important / new pages
Recrawl all your old pages (that you've redirected) to ensure they return a 301 > 200. No chains, just 1 301.

There's probably more, but those are the essentials.

DaveSottimano

Hi!

I'm guessing that you're using a campaign in the Seomoz toolset? This is perfectly normal as Seomoz only crawls your site and doesn't check against Google's index.

So, this means that Roger (Seomoz robot) found duplicate content in your Feed URLs. Google is pretty good at determining dupe content from feeds but you should always double check to see if these URLs are indexed:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=1440&bih=796&gbv=2&q=site%3Asoobumimphotography.com+inurl%3Afeed

Phew! Looks like you're clear

If you want to be super sure on your Wordpress site, you can install this plugin http://yoast.com/noindex-for-rss-feeds/ which will add the NOINDEX tag to the feed.

Don't worry too much, it looks like you're clear - it wouldn't hurt to install that plugin though!

Cheers,

Dave

DaveSottimano

Just my opinion here, since you have some great answers already:

I might be completely alone on this, but I definitely would encourage testing. Mock up some SERPs and do some user testing with Mechanical Turk to judge if it looks spammy, enticing etc..

Here's an example from Australia - Look for Travel Insurance Direct (should be #1) http://dis.tl/vph36j

I think it might be the only way we can add our personal touch in SERPs and I love creativity. Good luck!

DaveSottimano

Hi there, your suggested setup is perfectly fine. You're able to, and allowed to target the root domain to a specific country, while targeting subfolders to others. The geotargeting on the main domain's URLs will be overridden if you specify a different target for subfolders, for example:

if you target www.domain.com -> UK, then