International SEO
-
We want to expand to a few new regions internationally. My question is if we register sites in different geographies and upload our exact site to these web addresses (exact duplicates) so our web addresses will then be
www.mysite.co.uk (current site)
www.mysite.com (new intended site)
www.mysite.com.au (new intended site)
and add rel=“canonical” linking elements to prevent duplicate content issues.Will our content production on our current site www.mysite.co.uk retain its value within all the other sites.
Is this the best way to do it? Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks for this response. Will migrating to a generic site let's say .com :
-
affect the current rank of my current site
-
perhaps turn off users outside the U.S. who might jump to conclusion that it is a U.S. based site
Is it perhaps better to host the blog only on a separate generic .com site and having localised micro sites sans blog in other geographies?
-
-
Hi!
The short answer to your question is: No.
The long answer is this below.
If you create new website in different ccTlds, but which are exact duplicates of the "mother" one, that is a problem.
On the other hand, though, if you use the rel="canonical", you are going to have them never being visible in the SERPs, because you are telling Google to not consider them because of the canonicalization you have set up.
As others have pointed out, you should be safe from the duplicated content issues using the hreflang annotations.
Said that, I too suggest you to localize as much as you can the different English versions and making crawlable and evident every possible local signal (eg: currency, phone numbers, local offices addresses).
Finally, though, IMHO you should not go for a multi-country international SEO, but creating a generic Global website targeting the English speaking market, giving the opportunity to visitors to change currency if they want and creating "local pages" in the about us section if you have local offices (those will be also used as Landing for Local Search).
Having a generic site (hence migrating from .co.uk to .com) will ensure also from the "blog" problem (i.e.: one generic blog for all site? What will be the one to use as content marketing platform? Or a blog for each website, with all the complication of having also "local" writers, local link builders...)
If you, then, decide to expand also to Spanish, French or any other language market, you can create a subfolder multilingual strategy.
-
That post is quite wrong IMHO, because it completely omits and forgets the psychology of the local audiences.
Apart that Country Code Level Domain Names still have a very strong influence in how Google consider a website in terms of geo-targeting, it is quite proved that, for instance, if a Spanish is asked to choose a domain .es or a generic .com (and he doesn't know the brands of both domains), he will choose the .es.
The same happens in France, Italy or anywhere else but the United States.
Even more, if you target Russia and you don't do it with a .ru domain name, in Yandex you will have a long way for ranking well.
Said that, the choice between subfolders and ccTlds should not be based on how better is for SEO, but how logic is for the International Business strategy.
-
Hi there
I definitely agree about looking into hreflang attributes to add to your site. You can also help Bing crawlers by adding language tags on your website variations.
Don't forget that you can country target each site variation to their specific regions through Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. I highly suggest utilizing this.
Moz also has a couple of great resources to look into for more information and tips:
International SEO (Moz)
The International SEO Checklist (Moz)Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
...using ccTLDs might not be worth it compared with using a folder
That's be the route I would be investigating first.
-Andy
-
I agree with Andy above that it's extremely important to markup your sites with href lang, however I would also go further and say to localize the different forms of English. Would be best to use British English on .co.uk and .com.au domains, whereas American English for .com. An added benefit of having separate ccTLDs like .co.uk and .com.au would be that users view your website and company as being UK-based, Australian-based etc., so it might be confusing for visitors if they are seeing American English used everywhere; localizing the content should also mean a better conversion rate!
Additionally, there was a good recent blog post by Liam Curley on the YouMoz blog arguing that using ccTLDs might not be worth it compared with using a folder - https://moz.com/ugc/why-cctlds-should-not-be-an-automatic-choice-for-international-websites. Food for thought!
-
The best way to handle international content, is to make use of HREFLANG. I wouldn't use a canonical tag though as Google suggest this isn't needed (read here) "Update:** to simplify implementation, we no longer recommend using rel=canonical.**"
Have a look at the following resources for explanations on how to do this:
https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en-Andy
-
Thanks so much for your response John
I'm also particularly interested if the content produced in our main site www.mysite.co.uk will be effective in our www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com.au sites considering that google prioritises local content. Will it be as if we posted the content directly in these urls?
thanks again in advance
-
There has been many thesis's written on this subject. A great start is google webmaster:-
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.il/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html The next stop would be Matt Cutts himself on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo - or if like me start with the video first!
If you ensure compliance with google recommendations - duplication will not be an issue.
Any queries let me know.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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.
Related Questions
-
SEO Value of Google+?
Hi Mozers, Does having a Google+ page really impact SEO? Thanks, Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater1 -
Pagination & SEO
Hi We have automatically created brand pages based on which brand they have in their attributes. At the moment, developers have restricted the ability to properly optimise these for SEO, but I also wanted to look at how we should handle pagination. Example: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=1 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=2 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=3 Should we do any of the following - which I've found in an article: Put no follow on all links located on pagination pages Should we no index these pages as they are wasting crawl budget? - Don’t show links to page 2, 3, 4, 5… 10, 11, 12… at the end of your content but only a link to the next and previous pages so that you won’t dilute your page authority. Or does anyone else have any tips on how to handle these pages? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Related products & SEO
My company has a comprehensive set of historical images and text - hosted separately on a free museum site - it's currently displayed on our main site as an iframe. I realize the iframe brings no SEO juice to the site - but we are updating our site - and thinking of bringing the images and text to our site. I'm wondering if this could help or hurt us - the historical information is about "boat widgets" and we sell "car widgets" - could a lot of information about "boat widgets" dilute our "car widgets" seo ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasErb0 -
How good or bad is this for SEO?
I will try to make this as clear as possible. We represent the yellow pages - www.visalietuva.lt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva
For every single company that is listed we have Creditworthiness - that helps to find information about their payment history and their business status. It's pretty useful. An example could be found here: http://www.visalietuva.lt/en/company/dizrega-uab/creditworthiness Some companies that are proud of their result started putting Iframe on their pages:
http://dizrega.lt/lt/kontaktai/firmos-rodikliai We noticed this on Google Webmasters, when new links started to appear.
So we are not sure if this is good for SEO? Of course this is good for our Google Analytics:))
If this is good, maybe we should send offer for our clients, that we can help to put iframe like this for free, for people who are not able to do it themselves. Your opinions please!0 -
Has this site been a victim of negative seo?
The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried: Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links Removed any internal Duplicate Content Removed any broken links Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality No-Followed all outbound links Added any missing title tags changed hosting Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site - just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Joomla SEO
With so many articles on the web talking about how difficult Joomla is to work with in regards to SEO, I'm curious as to what techniques / changes you guys make when using Joomla with your SEO / inbound practices? Any extensions that you love? An extensions that you hate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougHoltOnline0 -
Exit Popups Impact On SEO
Hi looking for any research on the impact of using exit popups (when a visitor is exiting the site), and the impact on it from SEO perspective. Regards, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
What are the bing only SEO tactics?
Recently we realised that our client's SERPs were almost always lower on Bing.com and Bing (canada) when comparing with Google.com and Google.ca We want to know if there's different ranking or blocking factors for Bing and if someone had similar expriences. It would also be appreciated if you have releavent and trusted information on this topic, from blog posts, forums, etc. What are your thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardPicard0