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Hi Lora,

Can you tell me a little more about what their plans are for separation? Their plans for categorisation could have a lot of benefits in terms of term-targeting, but I want to make sure I'm hitting on the right things, based on their plans.

In general, she need to conduct some keyword research into what people search for in terms of their content. If she finds that they are searching for a certain type of content (video, webinars, etc.), they need to segment those things so that they can develop a specific page tailored to the needs of the people searching for that content. Everything lumped together means that it's harder to optimise a page for every popular term. This is almost always best for SEO, rather than just dumping everything onto one page or onto paginated pages. You can essentially optimise "category" pages for each type of content you produce.

Is creating "category" type pages the sort of thing they're interested in doing, and are facing push-back on?

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Conrad,

Sorry for the late reply on this. I hope it is still helpful.

In general, this is always what we recommend, unless the ccTLDs (or whatever is being redirected) has a substantial history that makes it so strong that it can survive well on its own. If you're languishing in the SERPs or need a boost, this can certainly provide it. Keep in mind that you don't take 100% of the link equity from one site to another during a 301, but you take a large portion, and the added strength from the domain should more than make up for this.

There is absolutely no guarantee that you will get positive results, or won't get negative results - the most likely scenario is that you'll see a dip in rankings and traffic as Google acknowledges the redirects, but that original rankings will return within a matter or days or weeks. After that, your ascent through the SERPs should be faster than when the content was on a ccTLD as opposed to a subfolder.

Where I would not do this, again, is where substantial effort has been put into the ccTLDs and they are climbing steadily on their own. This, to my mind, is always a move to be made when other options do not appear to be making a lot of difference.

Hi there,

I'm not sure of the percentage of sites who have specified all bots as opposed to just Google, but I also have to assume that the percentage depends on the sites' territory. For instance, there are few sites in the UK who would think of Bing or Yahoo, due to those search engines having a tiny market share. In the US, Japan and several other places where non-Google search engines have more share, the consideration will be much higher.

Hi there,

I have found that very high quality content submitted to StumbleUpon can attract a huge amount of traffic in a short period of time. The traffic will never truly dry up either: you'll continue getting traffic for months or even years after the initial push (although the number of visits won't be as high as at the beginning).

Reddit.com is another place to source traffic: find the "subreddit" (section of the site) most relevant to your content and submit there. Bear in mind, however, that most Reddit users are very much against marketing, so your submission should look as natural as possible. It is advisable to take part in the communities on Reddit that deal with your topic, not to just submit articles and wait for traffic: you should become a regular contributor, commenter and submitter, and not just a submitter of your own content.

Your other ideas are also good, although I doubt you will get much traffic from directories: these are going to be for link building purposes, far more than for visibility.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Are you searching in Google.com from the UK, or are you actively making sure that you are seeing US-centric Google.com results? I ask because if you search in Google.com from the UK (without modifying your search to specify US results), you will receive UK-targeted results, even though you are not using Google.co.uk.

I also happen to be in the UK at the moment:

In order to see how Google.com ranks sites for a query in the US, you need to specify that you want US results. I use a Firefox / Chrome plug in to easily modify the URL for me: http://www.redflymarketing.com/internet-marketing-tools/google-global/

Thus, if I search for [credit cards] in Google.com, I can get this URL for US results: https://www.google.com/search?q=credit+cards&pws=0&gl=US.

If I just go to Google.com from here in the UK, these are the results I get: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1177&bih=539&q=credit+cards&gbv=2&oq=credit+cards&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=770l1989l0l2037l12l8l0l1l1l1l271l903l3.3.1l7l0

This search results page contains a few UK brands, because even though I'm on .com, Google knows I'm in the UK. It's not totally UK-centric, of course, since there are UK brands in there too. Depending on your query, you can get different degrees of relevancy.

Are you seeing true US results, or are you seeing UK-centric results on Google.com? If "&gl=US" in the query string of the Google search URL, like there is in my first example here, then you are still seeing UK-centric results.

It is not clear why Google shows different results in the UK for google.co.uk and google.com queries, but word is that soon, google.com results in the UK will be the same as google.co.uk.

If the site really is ranking a lot better in the US than in the UK, there is a different problem, but I thought this might be more likely.

Also, have you had a look at where most of your traffic comes from in Analytics?

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Drew,

In general, we'd say to use one English language domain to target all English speaking regions, but since you have a .com.au domain, you won't be able to use this to effectively rank in the US.

It is possible to mirror a domain and geo-target each so that they rank well in their intended locations. You would set the geo-target for the US site to the US in Webmaster Tools (the Australian site is automatically geotargeted because of its ccTLD). Google reps have stated in the past that this is effective and will eliminate the duplicate content problem.

Of course, Google isn't perfect and sometimes this goes wrong. We had a client with two identical websites--one for the UK and one for the US--whose UK site always showed up in the US and whose US site ranked nowhere in either territory. That's very uncommon, however.

If you do this--mirror the site and properly geotarget in Webmaster Tools under Site Configuration -> Settings--neither version of the site should find itself removed from Google due to duplicate content.

Keep a very close eye on each site's indexation, ranking and traffic though. Like I say, this method isn't perfect as Google has gotten it wrong in the past.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Nick,

It certainly is best to avoid duplicate content like this. Duplicate content is very bad for a site's search engine performance. If you can avoid these duplicated pages being created altogether, that is the best option; however, there are things you can do to reduce and eliminate damage if they are unavoidable.

You can redirect one page to another (most definitely with a 301 and NOT a 302), but if both pages have a usability function on the site, you can also use the canonical tag. More about this tag is explained here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html.

The page you choose as your canonical page should be the one most important to the site / its business. Remember that the page you don't use as the canonical page will most likely drop out of the index.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

The nofollow and the canonical tag can exist quite happily together: if you are using the canonical tag as suggested, the nofollowing of the "next" links definitely strikes me as more of a safe-guard than anything else. The canonical tag should do the job just fine - there is also no guarantee that Google won't find those pages elsewhere, making the nofollow tag obsolete.

Again, the "sort by" pages' links can be nofollowed, but nofollowing links to them doesn't mean that Google will never find them. For instance, someone could link to them on Twitter, in a blog post, etc. Noindex, or a canonical if they are largely identical, should suffice.

Cheers,

Jane