International SEO
-
Okay, so I have read through the following link in respect to International SEO (https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo), and I believe that the way forward it a ccTLD.
My thought was to have .com, .co.uk and .eu.
Currently my site is .com, but receives most of its traffic from UK sources. I'm concerned that when I switch over to ccTLDs, the .co.uk in particular, that my UK traffic could dry up. Switching from .com to .co.uk and then using the .com to target the US market makes sense, but I would like to know others opinions on the potential dangers of doing this.
Also, are ccTLDs kept on the same hosting or would they require individual hosting? The link doesn't cover this question.
-
You can try by approaching the top brands in your niche to get the high quality and authority link insertion for your website SEO. There are many website examples that doing the same for guest posts.
-
Perfect candidate for geo-targeting! You can keep them on one domain though if you're interested. You can do subfolders and geo-target each, but not sure if that works with your setup. Regardless, if you do the .com, and want that to be US only, make sure to claim that domain in GSC and Bing WMT as the US. .com is a general TLD, so it doesn't auto-geo-target. ccTLDs like .co.uk do automatically take care of this.
Keep in mind that in best practices, if you have two pages with the same content across two domains, usually the SEs will pick one, the older stronger one. Try to find a way to differentiate the content that is the same across the two sites. You can also use hreflang between the two sites to help the association, but that is really meant for translated content only. However, people have seen it help.
To ensure people are getting to the right content, I recommend detecting the user's location by IP and ASKING if they live in the US, UK or others you might geo-target. Then set a cookie. They will always get to the right content. Google will crawl from the US, ignore the JS for the most part, and will index everything.
Think about the .com and subfolder idea, that might be better for you.
-
Hi Kate,
Thanks for the reply.
We have a warehouse in the UK and USA and the products sold on each site vary, so we need to keep them seperate. We want our efforts to be pushed towards SEO best practice, that is to say that the hosting we want regionally and also to merge the brands together (they're currently under two different brand/domain names).
The site we have operating in the US currently isn't doing great and is taking a lot of effort in terms of SEO, effort we could be putting towards the .com. If we bring the US site under the flag of the .com our hope is that it will benefit from the .com's authority and receive a boost (we would also 301 redirect all traffic from the previous domain as not to lose any juice).
-
Hi Moon boots!
First be aware of the .eu TLD, it isn't a geo-targeted TLD as the EU isn't a country. Keep that in mind, you can't target regions, just countries.
Can I ask why you want to go down the route of ccTLDs? Does your content need to be different in each country? There is no problem with keeping everything on a .com, but let me know if there are external factors at play here.
Where you host the TLDs doesn't matter much. The localization is a signal, but not a huge one. If you can give us some insight into your situation, we can help better. Thanks!
-
Any follow up?
-
Also, if I am using hreflag tags, am I still able to have both sites on different servers with their own localised IPs? This is necessary for SEO.
-
Thank you for the response, Nigel. A few follow up questions:
Using the lang tag in a link, i.e. www.website.com/?lang=en, isn't that a detractor for SEO? I was under the impression that the route to the product should be as short as possible for SEO, i.e. www.website.com/product, as opposed to www.website.com/?lang=en/product. Or will google ignore the ?lang in terms of SEO?
-
Hi spacecollective
As long as you tag the sites correctly then you will not have a problem.
Add Hreflang tags to the pages. They can be identical pages on the same server in if you wish but this is how I would do it. As long as they are separated like this.
website.com for the US
website.com/en for the UKAny other country would then have its own directory.
This avoids you having to mess with the various country TLDs like .co.uk or any other you'd wish to set up.
Then add Hreflang tags to tell Google which country is targetted and the relationship between each one.
https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
(The first part en is the language and the second, the country)
The combination of search console and Hreflang tags is enough for Google to know that there is no duplication.
You would move UK users on to the gb version and US users would see the .com. It would all resolve pretty quickly as you are telling Google the alternative country versions in the Hreflang tag.
I hope this helps
Nigel
Carousel Projects
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
-
What is the best way to manage multiple international URLS
Hi All Our company is looking to expand into Europe (we are a UK based company) and we are planning to copy over our current .co.uk site to a .com one and create 301 redirects to maintain our SEO rankings. With the .com domain we were looking to use this as our main ecommerce site and then create sites for different countries in Europe. What we are unsure about is the best way to execute this in terms of the domain. Would it be best to have it setup as a domain structure such as: UK = www.example.com/gb/
International SEO | | MartinJC
Ireland = www.example.com/ie/
France – www.example.com/fr/ and so on. Or would we be better served creating sub domains for each country, example www.gb.example.com. Our main concerned is what is the best way to do this without hurting our SEO rankings. Thanks for the help.0 -
International URL paths
Wanted to ask everyone a questions: So our company is going to be doing a website that is going to be full of videos. The url path will be country.domain.com/language/slug/content-id. We redirect the user when they go to the different country. So if you're in spain on a train to france your URL will change from es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id. Each country can listen to each video in all languages. My question is with hreflang tags and canonicals. Aside from targeting users in a certain country via Google Search Console, how do I eliminate duplication and tell Google which I'd like to show up via which country. In spain I would like es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to show in Google and would have hreflang tags on each of the es.domain pages but what about fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id since it would show the same content? I can't canonical to one of them since I need them to show in their respective country. How do I show the difference in language and country without showing duplication?
International SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Need help with search results for US site for a compnay that has many international sites
I am tasked with optimizing a US site for a company that has many international sites. Currently, if you search for just the main company name and don't include "USA" in your search, it won't even give you the US site on the SERP. It displays the Italian, French, etc etc sites - even though I'm searching on Google in the US with a preferred language of Engilsh. Unfortunately I don't have any control over the other sites, only the US one. Is there anything I can add to the US site (aside from setting the country code in GSC) so that when someone searches from within the USA, they get the US site and not all of the other ones? thanks!
International SEO | | SEOIntouch0 -
International site
Hi everybody,one of my clients has a domain (www.sea-aeroportimilano.it) well ranked on Google.it.
International SEO | | vanGoGh-creative
He has a redirect 302 from www.sea-aeroportimilano.it to www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_it.html. The site has also an english version (www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_en.html).Do you think it's the right setting? What about a 301 from www.sea-aeroportimilano.it to www1.seamilano.eu/landing and after that an authomatic redirect 302 for the language (to www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_it.html or www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_en.html)?Thanks a lot.Massimiliano0 -
International SEO question domain.com vs domain.com/us/ , domain.com/uk etc.
Hi Mozzers, I am expanding a website internationally. I own the .com for the domain. I need to accommodate multiple countries and I'm not sure if I should build a folder for /us/ for United States or just have the root domain .com OPTION 1:
International SEO | | jeremycabral
domain.com/page-url -- United States
domain.com/de/page-url -- Denmark
domain.com/jp/page-url -- Japan OPTION 2:
domain.com/us/page-url -- United States
domain.com/de/page-url -- Denmark
domain.com/jp/page-url -- Japan My concern with option 2 is there will be some dilution and we wouldn't get the full benefit of inbound links compared to Option 1 as we would have geo ip redirection in place to redirect users etc. to the relative sub-folder. Which option is better from an SEO perspective? Cheers, Jeremy0 -
International Link Building Vendors
I'm working with a large enterprise site with many international domains. I have most of the markets covered but am having trouble identifying link building specialists/vendors in APAC - specifically Japan and Korea. Any recommendations from the community? Many thanks in advance!
International SEO | | JonClark150 -
Russian SEO: Do you know some good sources with tips and news about Yandex?
We are launching our site in Russia - and basically I have no experience in Russian SEO! Could you please recommend me some good English sources with news, tips and hints about Yandex? Basically I am looking the Russian SEOmoz 🙂 Thanks!
International SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
International SEO - auto geo-targetting
I read with interest the recent post on international SEO and the top level domain architecture approaches to local content: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview#jtc135670 The issue I have is a little more complex: The business sells a wide variety of products (37) but one is by far and away the biggest and most popular. This means that due to the link profile of the various country sites and HQ site, search engines categorise the site according to this product (this is easily seen with the Google Adplanner) and the other product lines suffer as a result. The current architecture is to have a .com site and then individual ccTLD country sites, again with all products on each site. This creates an issue as in most countries the brand is not strong (compared to the keyword names and search volumes of the products) and so it is not that effective in generating organic traffic. The .com hogs much of the inbound links and the country sites themselves are not that well optimised for a number of reasons. A proposed solution has been to leverage the strength of the .com and the search volume for the product names, and to produce thematic sites based on each product: productA.brand.com
International SEO | | StevieCC
productB.brand.com
productC.brand.com In this way, the sites, content and link profiles are aligned around the more desirable products and we can expect improved organic search performance as a result (or at least ensure relevant traffic finds the relevant content fast). In terms of providing localised content, the plan was to use content mirroring and to then assign each content mirror to a specific geo-location using the webmaster tools console (and other SE equivilents). This is shown I think in one of Rand's videos. ProductA.brand.com/de/de Germany site for product A with unique German content
ProductA.brand.com/fr/fr French site for product A with unique French content This makes economic sense to me as to utilise the ccTLDs would result in hundreds of separate sites with all the licence and server considerations that entails. For example, for product A alone we would have to produce: productA.brand.de
productA.brand.fr
productA.brand.cn
productA.brand.jp
ect ect ect This just would not be sustainable in license/server costs alone across 37 products and 24 countries. However, I saw in a recent presentation at SES London that (auto) geo-targeting is risky, often doesn't work well for SEO and can even be seen as cloaking. I think the above strategy could still work, but perhaps we should avoid the use of auto-geotargetting altogether and hope the search engines alone do their job in getting users to the right content as we optimise the unique content for each country (and if they don't, ensure our desgn, UX and country selectors do the job instead). SEO guru consensus is to use the ccTLD if you own it, but as described above, in the real world that just isn't possible or practical given the company's strategic position. Which leads to the final question- we do own the brand ccTLDs- if they are directed back to the content mirror for the country on the .com, is there any SEO benefit in doing so aside from directing back any link juice associated with the domain)?0