Geotargeting a new domain without impacting traffic to existing domain
-
I had previously asked this as a 'private question' and couldn't make it a 'public question' automatically-- hence reposting it as a new question:
We have an existing site, let's say www.xyz.com --- which attracts traffic from all over the world (including the US), though it's primary audience is the UK/ Europe. Most of this traffic is via organic search results on Google.
Now, there is a business case to launch a US-centric website -- www.xyz.us, which will have most of its content from the original site (probably with some localization).
Our goal is that on day 1 when the new site xyz.us is launched, we want all traffic originating from the US (and may be some other North American countries) to be directed to the .us domain instead of the .com domain.
We don't want to lose any search engine traffic; equally importantly, we want this to be done in a manner that is seen by the search engines as a legitimate technique.
What are the best options to do this such that the new .US site automatically inherits all of the traffic from the .com site on day 1, without either of these sites getting penalized in any form.
Thanks.
-
Thanks, Gareth.
Yes, we are evaluating the different options, including the sub-domain/ separate folder one, though the option we really want to go for (primarily due to business considerations) is the one I've described above. Any more thoughts/ ideas will certainly be appreciated.
-
Sounds like it could get messy to me. As google always crawls from the US they will be redirected to the .us site, while the rest of the world will not... could be seen as cloaking if not done properly.
I'd always go with subfolders and have .com for the US then .com/uk/ etc. see Apple as a good example.
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
-
Back links to pages on our site that don't exist on forums we haven't used with irrelevant product anchor text
Hi, I have a recurring issue that I can't find a reason for. I have a website that has over 7k backlinks that I monitor quite closely. Each month there are additional links on third party forums that have no relevance to the site or subject matter that are as a result toxic. Our clients site is a training site yet these links are appearing on third party sites like http://das-forum-der-musik.de/mineforum/ and have anchor text with "UGG boots for sale" to pages on our url listed as /mensuggboots.html that obviously don't exist. Each month, I try to contact the site owners and then I add them to Google using the disavow tool. Two months later they are gone and then are replaced with new backlinks on a number of different forum websites. Quite random but always relating to UGG boots. There are at least 100 extra links each month. Can anyone suggest why this is happening? Has anyone seen this kind of activity before? Is it possibly black hat SEO being performed by a competitor? I just don't understand why our URL is listed. To be fair, there are other websites linked to using the same terms that aren't ours and are also of a different theme so I don't understand what the "spammer" is trying to achieve. Any help would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rufo
KInd Regards
Steve0 -
Competitor owns two domains which are essentially duplicates. Is this allowed?
Hello everyone,One of my competitors has two E-commerce sites that are almost exactly the same. The company re-branded a few years ago (changed the company name, changed the domain name) but kept the first domain live which is still fairly successful. Their re-branded website is a Top 1000 retailer.The thing is, both websites are essentially the EXACT SAME. They have the same products (with the same item #'s), the same pricing, the same copy and product descriptions, the same contact info, same layout, etc. The internal search bar on the first domain even redirects to their current site! The only real difference are the brand names. Currently, both sites are ranking very well for some very competitive keywords. For the past two years, I kept waiting for Google to penalize one (or both) of them for duplication. But for some reason Google seems to have not noticed. **Is there any way to "show google" site duplication they might be missing?**Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bpharris90141 -
New online store and use black hat to bring lots of sales
I have one online store and all the seo rules are follow to increase ranking and sales. Buying a new url a launching a new store ( to sale exactly the same products) is fast, easy and cheap. How about using black hat to this new store? I think I have nothing to loose. Is there something I should know before moving ahead? Launching a new store is very cheap and black hat can be done by one of those overseas company at low prices First thing, this new store should not link to my actual store I guess. Any advice? Thank you, BigBlaze
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
Goddady's Domain Masking and 301's
I have a client who's 7 domains and single website (instantpages®) exists within the clutches of GoDaddy. They own 6 kewyord rich domain names that 301 redirect with masking to the main branded domain. In effect, what this provides is the ability to add a title tag and meta description for a keyword rich domain name that displays content through an iframe. So really it's not duplicate content but this practice sets off my spidey sense that this is not a best practice regarding SEO. I want to suggest for the client to drop the idea of masking and do a straight 301 redirect to main branded domain. I'm sure that is fine but these domains are Not similar variations but actually vary widely: massage-city.com, city-massage.com, city-acupuncture.com, acupuncture-city.com, city-chiropractic.com, chiropractic-city.com etc ---- Doesn't Google frown on redirecting 6 domains to a single domain if they vary widely? Words of wisdom appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | superZj0 -
Penalty for all new sites on a domain?
Hi @all, a friend has an interesting problem. He got a manuel link penalty in the end of 2011...it is an old domain with domainpop >5000 but with a lot bad links (wigdet and banners and other seo domains, but nothing like scrapebox etc)...he lost most of the traffic a few days after the notification in WMT (unnatural links) and an other time after the first pinguin update in april´12. In the end of 2012 after deleting (or nofollowing) and disavow a lot of links google lifted the manuel penalty (WMT notification). But nothing happened after lifting, the rankings didn´t improve (after 4 months already!). Almost all money keywords aren´t in the top 100, no traffic increases and he has good content on this domain. We built a hand of new trust links to test some sites but nothing improved. We did in february a test and build a completely new site on this domain, it´s in the menu and got some internal links from content...We did it, because some sites which weren´t optimized before the penalty (no external backlinks) are still ranking on the first google site for small keywords. After a few days the new site started to rank with our keyword between 40-45. That was ok and as we expected. This site was ranking constantly there for almost 6 weeks and now its gone since ten days. We didn´t change anything. It´s the same phenomena like the old sites on this domain...the site doesnt even rank for the title! Could it still be an manuel penalty for the hole domain or what kind of reasons are possible? Looking forward for your ideas and hope you unterstand the problem! 😉 Thanks!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheLastSeo0 -
How should I look to gain traffic for a blog hosted on our own site?
Ok I know what you're going to say.. social media etc right? The problem is we do that already but we're stuck in an industry that just isn't very sexy! People reading twitter/facebook don't want to read about toilets in their spare time, or keep it as a hobby. If you search bathroom blog (uk google), you will see we are about 5th, it gets us no traffic, as I imagine it's not a popular term so I can see you starting to ask why we write a blog in the first place. We write the blog because at the moment the whole industry is dominated by pile it high sell it cheap online stores and all their blogs are written for google only so finding decent or unbiased advice is rare. Seriously, these guys are creating fake blogs and paying for links inside other blogs all over the place in order to boost their rankings so we figure if you really want some good advice people can't find it. If they find our blog they will get some good advice and good content.. and then the hope is that they give us a call and we can see if we can help them. The problem is these guys are hogging all the keywords.. and it seems the bathroom industry has very few keywords that people search! Now I know we are in it for the long haul.. so taking time doesn't bother me, but I was wondering if there were any tried and tested places to post a blog that could get us at least seen so that people could see how different our content is? Or if all else fails, can anyone suggest the right keywords to aim at besides the "bathroom suites" etc that these huge online stores dominate?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | willryles0 -
Would the same template landing page (placed on 50+ targeted domains) help or hurt my ranking?
Scenario: Company ABC has 50 related domains that are being forwarding to the main company URL. Q1: Would there be SEO value by creating a template landing page for each domain that includes product info, photos and keyword links to the main URL? Q2: If all 50+ landing pages were the same, would that penalize the main site due to duplicate content?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brianmeert0 -
Is domain name or page title "safe" as anchor text?
I am aware of the dangers of excessively optimized anchor text I have seen some suggestions that as long as your anchor text is either the URL or the page title that this will be OK, no matter how many links come in with that anchor text. Does anyone have an opinion, or even any hard data on this? Thx Paul
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diogenes0