Urgent: Any point having /au version of the website for Australia?
-
Hi,
We just migrated our website from /uk to the global one (but we still kept /us). We are expanding our business to Australia. Is there any point having the global .com site duplicated as .com/au provided the content will be identical?
What's the /au impact on the domain strength and rank in Australia in comparison to having just .com.
Is there any point? Anyone has direct experience? What's the best practice?
Many thanks for the answers.
Katarina
-
Duplicate Content
I have experience facing problems like these ones. In the past, I worked with sites multilingual and multi-region and even multi-location (same country but different cities) websites, mostly for Hotels, Restaurants, and Business related to the tourism.
First of all (probably you did it. But is ok keeping it in mind)
Add Every domain and every variation of your domains on Search Console- http:yoursite.com
- http:www.yoursite.com
- https:yoursite.com
- https:www.yoursite.com
Talking about your questions
It's common for websites to provide similar or the same content in different languages when targeting different regions while having different URLs. Google is okay with this as long as the users are from different countries. Your website will not be penalized when translation is manual and accurate. Even though Google still prefers unique content for each version, it understands that having unique content can be quite tough. Google clearly states that you don't need to hide such content by not allowing Google to crawl it using a robots.txt file or no index robots meta tag.
The circumstances are entirely different if you're providing the same content to the same audience through two URLs. Let me explain this with an example. Imagine you've created yourbusiness.com and yourbusiness.com.au. One targets the USA and other targets Australia respectively. Since both are in English, this will cause duplicate content. Luckily, it can be easily solved using an hreflang tag, which is widely accepted by all search engines globally.
The hreflang tag protects international SEO campaigns from being penalized with duplicate content. It's usually required by businesses that cater to different languages or countries through sub-domains, subfolders, or ccTLD. The hreflang tag also is important if you have multiple languages for one single targeted country.
Here's what I do to implementing it:
Step 1: First, we must handle language targeting. You'll have to list out the URLs that have equivalents in different languages. Any stand-alone or non-equivalent URLs would not need the hreflang tag, so don't list them.
Step 2: Now comes setting up the tag. This is what a general hreflang tag looks like:
All you need are the country-wide codes
http://www.mathguide.de/info/tools/languagecode.html
For having a site that targets different countries in same language, you'll use code like:**Step 3:**Here the hreflang="x-default" is used to create a default common page for all countries. This is generally the homepage or another neutral page for all countries.
After implementation, you can check that what you've done works properly by logging into your Google Webmaster Tool account. Proceed to "Search Traffic" and then "International Targeting." If the hreflang tags were placed properly, you'll be able to test them utilizing the feature presented there. When problems ensue, try using the hreflang tag generator tool to make things easy.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Incorrect use of language codes: All tags should contain codes as per ISO 639-1. Using incorrect ones will negatively impact your international SEO.
- Missing confirmation link: If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A with a proper hreflang tag.
IF THIS ANSWER WERE USEFUL MARK IT AS A GOOD ANSWER
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
-
About DA of the Website
Hi There, I would like to know why one of my website - https://patnalocalguide.com Domain Authority is not improving. It is not going up and down but it is maintaining its score between 10 since last 5 months. Not going above 10 or below. Why is it so? I'm conitnuously working on creating backlinks for the website and the DR score on Ahref improving but the DA is not. What steps to follow to increase DA? How to find out whats going wrong with our present strategy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozByAnuj0 -
Content very similar on different websites
Hello, I am in the travel industry and I am currently building the same website (different domain names), one for the US and one for the UK (same website design). They will both features the same content (itinerary, activities) on the page with 2 exception, the 1 st one is that I will use different hotels for my uk clientele and for my US clientele and on the UK page I will use the word "holiday" in the UK and the word "vacation" in the US. Can the fact that I do the same "itineraries" and use the same text on 95 % of the page hurt my ranking in one country or another ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Could i add my website in Google News
Hi , I am looking to add article news section of my website http://goo.gl/De5MKo in google news. We'll remove all content from this news section http://www.99acres.com/articles/real-estate-news and upload unique news, might be possible we use graph/chart and images from some other news site and other sources but the content will be unique and fresh. Any specific guidelines for URL structure for this news section? We are thinking about to create URL like xyz.com/news/ <title>. Is it okay and will not harm our site? Google News can consider my section as a news?</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Our website is not being indexed
We have an issue with a site that we can't get to the bottom of. This site: (URL removed) is not being properly indexed. When we do a search for (URL removed) in google.com.au. The site appears as the 4th listing with the following title and description: (Title removed) A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. We have checked the site's robots.txt and can see its been now implemented correctly: (URL removed) About a week ago, we also went into  Webmaster Tools and submitted a request for Google to recrawl our site. We are unsure what the issue is that is causing the site to not be properly indexed and how to resolve it. Any assistance on this topic would be most appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Ecommerce website consolidation
I have a large ecommerce site and several smaller nitche ecommerce sites. All have the same products, but the smaller sites are loosing traffic. I want to combine all the sites to the larger site so it will be easier to manage, but I don't want to loose any rank on the smaller sites. Example: www.yourpromopeople.com - This is the large site I want to use. www.logocoolies.com www.fourcolormagnets.com - These are a couple of the smaller sites I want to combine with the larger one. Questions: What are the pros and cons in doing this? What would be the best way to do this? Would redirecting the URL's to the larger site's product pages do the trick or is there a better option? Thanks for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHSpecialty0 -
How canonical url harm our website???
Even though my website has no similar/copied content, i used rel=canonical for all my website pages. Is Google or yahoo make any harm to my SERP's?? EX: http://www.seomoz.org is my site, in that i used canonical as rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.seomoz.org" to my home page like that similar to all pages, i created rel=canonical. Is search engine harm my website???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MadhukarSV0 -
Changing website providers
After increasing suffering down time from my current website provider, I am seriously considering finding a new one. My only concern is the effect on SERP. Does anyone have any experience with this and what to do and avoid?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Need bullet points for a new website on what to do for SEO
Hello, My company just launched a new website and its a competitve market it looks like. Its for moving boxes and moving supplies. They want a bullet point list (nothing real specific) of what I will be doing for SEO for the new website. I have been out of the loop for more than a year with SEO so not sure what the best things to do first are. Any help would be great. Thanks John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maximumrank0