Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. International SEO
    4. Showing different content according to different geo-locations on same URL

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Showing different content according to different geo-locations on same URL

    International SEO
    3
    5
    1789
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • seoec
      seoec last edited by

      We would like our website to show different content according to different Geo-locations (but in the same language).  For example, if www.mywebsite.com is accessed from the US, it would show text (in English) appealing to North Americans, but, if accessed from Japan, it would show text (also in English) that appeals more to Japanese people. In the Middle East, we would like the website to show different images than those shown in the US and Asia.

      Our main concern is that we would like to keep the same URL.

      • How will Google index these pages? Will it index the www.mywebsite.com (Japan version) in its Asia archives and the www.mywebsite.com (US version) in its North American archives?
      • Will Google penalise us for showing different content across Geo-locations on the same URL?
      • What if a URL is meant to show content only in Japan?
      • Are there any other issues that we should be looking out for?

      Kindest Regards

      L.B.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • seoec
        seoec @Chris.Menke last edited by

        Thanks Chris Menke! Checking out the videos now!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Chris.Menke
          Chris.Menke last edited by

          seoec,

          How your content is cached in different data centers, will have a lot to do with the architecture of your site(s) and where they may be hosted.  CC TLD's may be the way for you to go but it does require an investment in the domains. You can also set up subdomain or us location specific sub folders to separate unique content for each market.  Each option has its own set of pros and cons.

          Matt Cutts did a video that goes over the duplicate content issue on country code top level domains here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo and Rand did a white board Friday that covers your architectual options here  http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

          seoec 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • seoec
            seoec last edited by

            Thank you so much Paddy Displays for such a prompt and detailed answer.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • PaddyDisplays
              PaddyDisplays last edited by

              Our system does this and I think its a bad Idea (for us any way),  our target market is UK and Ireland.  But when google was crawling our pages they were only getting the US version of the site, so all that nice text we had for the UK and Ireland pages was was missed by google (the US page was the systems default page, with no custom text).  I just copied and pasted our UK & Ireland text to the US default page, then we started to rank for some of the targeted keywords.

              Now our problem is that is google bot is getting the prices us dollers instead of Pounds or Euros so for some of our rankings it picking up meta data and showing $ prices in the serps for the UK.

              So my advice is be careful, it might seem like a good idea for users, but google will only see the US version of the site

              To answer you questions:

              • How will Google index these pages? Will it index the www.mywebsite.com (Japan version) in its Asia archives and the www.mywebsite.com (US version) in its North American archives?

              It will only index US version for all

              • Will Google penalise us for showing different content across Geo-locations on the same URL?

              To my knowledge no  (we used they system for 3 years and rank modestly)

              • What if a URL is meant to show content only in Japan?

              Not sure what you mean, but you need different urls for different content

              • Are there any other issues that we should be looking out for?

              See what I said above

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • edward-may

                HELP: Incorrect Meta Tag description showing for the wrong search results

                Hi Guys I'm stuck here! I have update the hreftags, updated the sitemaps. I have 3 top level domains and my zenory.com site is showing for the home page the wrong meta tag description, as you can see in the attachement the meta tag is showing the new zealand site meta tag description which is for zenory.co.nz Anyone know what might be going on here? I have also fetched the home page through WMT as well and its still returning the same results any advice would be much appreciated! Thanks

                International SEO | | edward-may
                0
              • Guyboz

                Mixed English and Arabic URLs

                I'm currently working with a global brand who need localisation in each of their territories. They're operating on a single .com domain name, with different language versions in separate directories. Example:
                domain.com/en/
                domain.com/fr/
                domain.com/ar/ We're using ahreflang tags to make sure Google shows the correct language version for each region. Now onto my question... As the domain is a .com with an English company name, when it comes to the Arabic version of the website, will having a completely mixed language URL like this be detrimental to the site's performance in searches from the middle east? Currently we're coming up with URLs like the following: domain.com/blog/عنوان بلوق عربية طويلة حقا على شيء مثير جدا للاهتمام Is this a bad thing?

                International SEO | | Guyboz
                0
              • SameerBhatia

                When I upload my app in chrome web store, it shows this error - "no manifest found in package please make sure to put manifest at the root directory of the zip package". Please explain me the process of putting manifest file.

                Chrome Web store give error "no manifest found in package please make sure to put manifest at the root directory of the zip package"

                International SEO | | SameerBhatia
                0
              • ALLee

                International hreflang - will this handle duplicate content?

                The title says it all - if i have duplicate content on my US and UK website, will adding the hreflang tag help google figure out that they are duplicate for a reason and avoid any penalties?

                International SEO | | ALLee
                1
              • pikka

                Best URL structure for Multinational/Multilingual websites

                Hi I am wondering what the best URL format to use is when a website targets several countries, in several languages. (without owning the local domains, only a .com, and ideally to use sub-folders rather than sub-domains.) As an example, to target a hotel in Sweden (Google.se) are there any MUST-HAVE indicators in the URL to target the relevant countries? Such as hotelsite.com**/se/**hotel-name. Would this represent the language? Or is it the location of the product? To clarify a bit, I would like to target around 10 countries, with the product pages each having 2 languages (the local language + english). I'm considering using the following format: hotelsite.com/en/hotel-name (for english) and hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name (for swedish content of that same product) and then using rel=”alternate” hreflang=”se-SV” markup to target the /se/ page for Sweden (Google.se) and rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” for UK? And to also geotarget those in Webmaster tools using those /se/ folders etc. Would this be sufficient? Or does there need to be an indicator of both the location, AND the language in the URLs? I mean would the URL's need to be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name/se-SV (for swedish) or can it just be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name? Any thoughts on best practice would be greatly appreciated.

                International SEO | | pikka
                0
              • journeybeyondtravel

                Does Keyword and Location Matter?

                Hi Everyone, I'm always learning, but here's a question. I would like to know if keyword and location truly matter. For example, I've been trying to rank my website for a LONG time for a UK English term. My site is hosted in the US. My site has great content and internal and external links using the keyword. I cannot seem to climb the SERPs although my "American" keywords do fine and I see results. If anyone wants to take a look, that would be great. My website is JourneyBeyondTravel.com and I wish to rank for "Morocco Holidays" (I am at about #20 currently). I am also having trouble with "Morocco travel" although I have continuously ranked well for "Morocco tours" and "trips." Along this same line, I've been doing some quality guest posting and blogging. I've used longer phrase-type keywords (3-5 words) in the article text that have keyword terms in them. Should keywords be varied like this? How long until I see results? And, should I look for blogs in different countries to keep things balanced (such as blogging on .co.uk sites so that I can get link juice for UK keywords). Thanks again! Thomas

                International SEO | | journeybeyondtravel
                0
              • BlinkWeb

                Targeting Different Countries... One Site or Separate?

                I have a client who has 3 ecommerce sites. They are somewhat differentiated but for the most part sell the same stuff. Luckily 2 of them are quite authoritative, old and rank reasonably well. Most of the visitors and sales come from the US. He wants to start targeting Europe, Mexico and Canada. What are your suggestions for doing this? Are we better targeting on the main domains? Not really sure how to do that? Should we use a subdomain and a new store front for each geo? Should we use a .co.uk .co.mx and .co.ca each with a unique storefront? It looks like we are moving to a Magento platform so setting up multiple storefronts on a single database is not a big issue. Anyone have any experience with this?

                International SEO | | BlinkWeb
                0
              • Amjath

                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 | | Amjath
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.