Managing international sites
-
Hi all,
I am trying to figure out the best way to manage our international sites. We have two locations, 1 in the UK and 1 in the USA. I currently use GEOIP to identify the location of the browser and redirect them using a cookie to index.php?country=uk or index.php?country=usa. Once the cookie is set I use a 301 redirect to send them to index.php, so that Google doesnt see each url as duplicate content, which Webmaster tools was complaining about.
This has been working wonderfully for about a year. It means I have a single php language include file and depending on the browser location I will display $ or £ and change the odd ise to ize, etc.
Problem I am starting to notice is that we are starting to rank better and better in the USA search result. I am guessing this is because the crawlers must be based out of the USA. This is great, but my concern is that I am losing rank in the UK, which is currently where most of our business is done out of...
So I have done my research and because I have a .net will go for a /uk/ or /us/ sub folder and create two separate webmaster tools site and set them up to target each geographic location. Is this okay? http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#2
HERE IS THE PROBLEM: I don't was to have to run two separate website with two separate sets of copy. Also, I dont want to lose all the rank data on urls like: http://www.mysite.net/great-rank-result.html now becomes http://www.mysite.net/uk/great-rank-result.html. On top of this I will have two pages, the one just mentioned and now adding http://www.mysite.net/us/great-rank-result.html, which I presume would be seen as duplicate copy? (Y/n)
Can I use rel canonical to overcome this? How can I don't this without actually running the two pages. Could you actually have 1 site in the root folder and just use the same GEOIP techology to do a smart MOD REWRITE adding either UK or US to the url therefore being able to create two webmaster accounts targeting each geographic location?
Any advise is most welcome.
-
I would canonicalise the index.php and non index.php versions to avoid duplicate content here and ensure that the weight is combined into one version.
You may find that your rankings have changes as a result of this redirect process based on IP.
As far as I can see, any links that point to your homepage go through this process:
link -> www.mysite.com
--301--> www.mysite.net/index.php?country=usa/uk
--301--> www.mysite.net/index.php
This is going to send the links on a chain of 301's eventually ending up with duplicate content, which isn't best practise. Hopefully someone else can chip in on this one and advise if this is the case and potential solutions.
-
If you already have http://www.mysite.net/great-rank-result.html and it is ranking good, i would use that as the US version and don't create/redirect to http://www.mysite.net/us/great-rank-result.html. In other words US is the default. If you redirect you are losing page juice for no reason.
This can be tricky what you are trying to do because they are both in the English language and cultural variations aren't enough to create uniqueness. You should include UK and/or United Kingdom in your title tag and meta descriptions so that your tags are all unique! Also sends the signal to Google about the region. That content should be at least once on every page and custom footers and headers created of course for the UK template. If you have a UK office location use list it in the UK, same with the US and use microformats.
In most cases if you target the country correctly Google will get it right, but it's not guaranteed and results could get filtered (it's not a penalty) and if you come across this you would probably need to rewrite content which may or may not be an option depending on the size of your site and value of your business in that region.
Please thumbs up or mark as a good answer if this helps you out
thanks
-
I guess so. It will either push it into /us/ or /uk/
-
Does this mean that Google will no longer see www.mysite.net then?
With www.mysite.net and www.mysite.net/index.php being different URLs this may mean that there is duplicate content between these two pages.
-
So Google was seeing my www.mysite.net/index.php?country=usa and www.mysite.net/index.php?country=uk as two separate pages and reporting it as duplicate content. So I have 1) created a canonical as www.mysite.net/index.php and do a redirect from www.mysite.net/index.php?country=usa/uk to www.mysite.net/index.php once the cookie has been set. This seems to have solved that problem.
-
It would seem that the best solution is the URL structure that you have suggested, but with unique content. I know you don't want to do this but you will run into duplication issues if you don't.
If I understand correctly, the search engines will only see the index.php with the US language on it? You don't have canonical issues do you? i.e. when you say you redirect them to index.php, do you mean the root (www.domain.net) or the actual index URL (www.domain.net/index.php)? - ideally these two should be the same thing.
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
-
Best way to Load Responsive Images for Responsive Site?
Hello All, Can anyone suggest be best technique to load responsive images? We are developing responsive site so looking for good ideas from your side so that it load very fast. Thanks!
Web Design | | micey1230 -
Competitor's new site ranking with out much keywords - How?
Hi all, One of our competitors have recently redesigned their website with new content. Now I can see much less keywords in the content. And page title also changed away from keywords. Still this is ranking at good position. How? Previously they used to have much landing pages with related keywords which some of them are missing now. Still I wonder why this website is ranking high? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Moving the site and Rebranding
I was wondering about moving the site and rebranding. If one was to move their site with a good Google Page Rank, how long should you take before doing the updated redesign, cms update and url restructuring? I know that Matt Cutts has said that you should move BEFORE doing your redesign but I don't remember him saying how long you should take for each step. Thanks!
Web Design | | Therealmattyd0 -
Is WP okay for E commerce sites?
Do any of you out there use wordpress for an ecommerce site? I'm getting some mixed reviews on it (but it's the internet, so that's bound to happen). Is there any sort of site traffic or page limit that would make using wordpress a bad idea? Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Does Google penalise for alot of advertising on your site?
I look after the search side of a decorating website on which we carry a large amount of advertising from external brands as that is our business model. Do you know if we would get penalised for having too much advertising - would it be deemed to affect the user experience? Many thanks for your help on this.
Web Design | | Pday0 -
Getting a highly ranked site a better result for 1 search term
I have a highly ranked website for a niche category. My site ranks higher in SEOMOZ than all of my competitors, but I can't get any higher than 4th on a page for one specific search term. What can I do to help my site increase its ranking on a specific search term?
Web Design | | tadden0 -
Worth Splitting Up Main Site into Several Microsites?
The company I work for offers a variety of very different products, that are sold to different audiences. Right now (and for the past 4 years) all the products have been listed on one main website. Over the years, we have accumulated over 200,000 links and rank relatively well in most of the product-specific keywords. Still, for business purposes we really feel that having a unique site specific to each product would be more beneficial than having them all on one site. What are the pros and cons of making a move to different subdomains from a main site. (i.e. instead of www.cleanedison.com/solar we would set up a solar.cleanedison.com)
Web Design | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
International SEO issues for multiple sites
We currently have 3 websites: oursite.co.uk oursite.fr oursite.ch We also own Oursite.com, and that URL currently redirects to Oursite.fr. We are considering a complete site redesign and a possible merge of the 3 sites. Assumptions: ** the 3 sites currently receive organic search traffic to varying degrees
Web Design | | darkgreenguy
** Oursite.ch is almost identical to Oursite.fr in terms of the site content
** Our target market is NOT the USA for English-language searches. It is the UK. With a re-design, we see our options as follows: Merge the 3 sites and make Oursite.com the "main site" and then have subfolders as follows: /uk /fr /ch Keep the 3 sites as they are. We see Option 1 as the best in terms of saving time when updating the site, and saving money paid to the site developers (1 site vs 3 sites). We see Option 2 as the best in terms of ability of the site to rank, as well as confidence of searchers when seeing our site in the search results (in other words, a person searching in France would be more likely to buy and/or submit a form on our site if they saw Oursite.fr vs Oursite.com/fr). I guess we're looking for some suggestions/guidance here. Are we missing any big issues? Does anyone have experience with an issue such as this? Thank you in advance...
-Shawn0