.com Outranking my ccTLD's and cannot figure out why.
-
So I have a client that has a number of sites for a number of different countries with their specific ccTLD. They also have a .com in the US. The problem is that the UK site hardly ranks for anything while the .com ranks for a ton in the UK. I have setup GWT for the UK and the .com to be specific to their geographic locations. So I have the ccTLD and I have GWT showing where I want these sites to rank. Problem is it apparently is not working....Any clues as to what else I could do?
-
rel=alternate works for GB vs US, for example. I don't see it as a problem!
-
The problem I see with the rel=alternate tag is how do I set this up for a locale versus just setting this up with the hreflang? Both are english so it really doesn't qualify as alternate in a different language.
-
I would definitely try the rel=alternate tag in this instance, and start working on some decent links from .co.uk sites to the .co.uk site. Good luck!
-
The content is fairly similar as we sell most of the same products in all the locales but the problem I have is this is true for all my regions but the UK is where I am seeing most of the trouble. The backlink profile is pretty garbage for the UK site.
Would using the rel=alternate tag on the XML sitemap for the .com help any you think?
-
I think we'd need some more info to provide a helpful answer.
- Is the content the same between the sites?
- What does the backlink profile look like for the sites?
If you have all your links and great content on the .com and nothing (or worse,duplicate content) on the .co.uk (for example), then I'd absolutely expect the .com to rank, especially if you have UK-specific links pointing to it, regardless of what you set in GWT.
Does that help a bit?
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
-
Hreflang targeted website using the root directory's description & title
Hi there, Recently I applied the href lang tags like so: Unfortunately, the Australian site uses the same description and title as the US site (which was the root directory initially), am i doing something wrong? Would appreciate any response, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oliverkuchies0 -
Duplicate content URLs from bespoke ecommerce CMS - what's the best solution here?
Hi Mozzers Just noticed this pattern on a retail website... This URL product.php?cat=5 is also churning out products.php?cat=5&sub_cat= (same content as product.php?cat=5 but from this different URL - this is a blank subcat - there are also unique subcat pages with unique content - but this one is blank) How should I deal with that? and then I'm seeing: product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 and product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000&cont_ref=giftselector (same content as product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 but from this different URL) How should I deal with that? This is a bespoke ecommerce CMS (unfortunately). Any pointers would be great 🙂 Best wishes, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Development site is live (and has indexed) alongside live site - what's the best course of action?
Hello Mozzers, I am undertaking a site audit and have just noticed that the developer has left the development site up and it has indexed. They 301d from pages on old site to equivalent pages on new site but seem to have allowed the development site to index, and they haven't switched off the development site. So would the best option be to redirect the development site pages to the homepage of the new site (there is no PR on dev site and there are no links incoming to dev site, so nothing much to lose...)? Or should I request equivalent to equivalent page redirection? Alternatively I can simply ask for the dev site to be switched off and the URLs removed via WMT, I guess... Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Ecommerce SEO - Indexed product pages are returning 404's due to product database removal. HELP!
Hi all, I recently took over an e-commerce start-up project from one of my co-workers (who left the job last week). This previous project manager had uploaded ~2000 products without setting up a robot.txt file, and as a result, all of the product pages were indexed by Google (verified via Google Webmaster Tool). The problem came about when he deleted the entire product database from our hosting service, godaddy and performed a fresh install of Prestashop on our hosting plan. All of the created product pages are now gone, and I'm left with ~2000 broken URL's returning 404's. Currently, the site does not have any products uploaded. From my knowledge, I have to either: canonicalize the broken URL's to the new corresponding product pages, or request Google to remove the broken URL's (I believe this is only a temporary solution, for Google honors URL removal request for 90 days) What is the best way to approach this situation? If I setup a canonicalization, would I have to recreate the deleted pages (to match the URL address) and have those pages redirect to the new product pages (canonicalization)? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | byoung860 -
Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
Hi Folks, Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again? One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g. Stirling
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shooting We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map. These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to. With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get. Is there a limit to how big a site should be? edit0 -
.com ranking over other ccTLD's that were created
We had a ecommerce website that used to function as the website for every other locale we had around the world. For example the French version was Domain.com/fr_FR/ or a German version in English would be Domain.com/en_DE/. Recently we moved all of our larger international locales to their corresponding ccTLD so no we have Domain.fr and Domain.de.(This happened about two months ago) The problem with this is that we are getting hardly any organic traffic and sales on these new TLD's. I am thinking this is because they are new but I am not positive. If you compare the traffic we used to see on the old domain versus the traffic we see on the new domain it is a lot less. I am currently going through to make sure that all of the old pages are not up and the next thing I want to know is for the old pages would it be better to use a 301 re-direct or a rel=canonical to the new ccTLD to avoid duplicate content and those old pages from out ranking our new pages? Also what are some other causes for our traffic being down so much? It just seems that there is a much bigger problem but I don't know what it could be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Posing QU's on Google Variables "aclk", "gclid" "cd", "/aclk" "/search", "/url" etc
I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
/aclk - No cd value
/search - No cd value
/url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!0 -
Don't want to lose page rank, what's the best way to restructure a url other than a 301 redirect?
Currently in the process of redesigning a site. What i want to know, is what is the best way for me to restructure the url w/out it losing its value (page rank) other than a 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marig0