International Link Building
-
Can anyone weigh in on their own efforts to build links into international TLDs?
Which tactics have been successful? Which have failed? Have you engaged any agencies to manage this for you and if so, how did they perform and who are they?
We have nine ccTLDs plus our .com site to manage so it's a bit overwhelming! Fortunately, we have teams dedicated to managing day-to-day operations of each site. Each team is comprised of managers who speak the targeted language as their first language and have intimate knowledge of the targeted culture. I want to leverage them to help my SEO efforts, but I'm not sure how my advice should be different than what we do for our .com site.
-
Thanks for the input, Barry. I like the idea of sharing exclusive content. We have considered that, but haven't ever moved on it.
-
Well, the biggest protip is that international version search algorithms are a bit behind the .com
Ultimately there's not too much difference, but be aware of location specific sites. For example if you're in Brazil get on Orkut rather than (or actually as well as) Facebook. Be prepared to switch off your anglo-centric brain, the sites we all know and love could be completely different to the big sites in other countries. This should be discovered through analysis of competitors and any real engagement with customers though.
Ultimately the same metrics are used to evaluate ranking, so getting quality editorial links from ccTLD specific sites is the long term way to go.
The way you approach people in each country is generally a little different though (and with your local knowledge you should be well placed to adapt to this), for example in the Scandinavian countries they are all very web savvy, know the value of a link and don't respond well to straight up link requests.
In these countries it's best to avoid buying links (were you to do such a thing anyway) as you'll very quickly burn through your budget and instead focus on offering people you want links from exclusive access to something. In your case, maybe an exclusive gameplay video or could even go as far as giving them a code for their site that if people put in game will unlock an exclusive costume, that kind of thing.
Other countries have their own particular idioms but it's hard to just give you a overview of what people are like in each
-
Thanks for the reply. Are you able to weigh in on actual tactics you've employed (or heard about) that have been successful internationally? What I'm getting at is...are there link building methods that are specific to the international market that differ from the domestic market? The answer here might be "no" and that would be fine (in fact, I think that might be what you are saying with "Apart from that it's not much different to normal link building.").
Yes, we do have a great setup - thanks for mentioning it! We've been dedicated to the international market for years and we invest heavily in it. Every game we publish on our international sites has been localized by hand by someone who speaks the language as a first language and knows the culture well. Much of this work happens in our office in Cork, Ireland.
Thanks again for your feedback.
-
Building links from same ccTLDs, sites hosted in those countries and sites in the same language are all preferred links when dealing with country specific sites (with preference to the first two). Apart from that it's not much different to normal link building.
You've got a great set up if you have managers who can speak the language and know the culture, teach them how to build relationships and evalutate sites for links. Get them to run independant social media channels as well if possible (as mixed languages in a single account really doesn't work) and don't be afraid to give each language it's own, slightly different, identity.
And don't discount normal .com links entirely, if it's more relevant to get a link to the ccTLD do that.
Agency wise you just need to make sure they have somebody in the country you're targeting and this was kind of discussed here - http://www.seomoz.org/q/would-you-hire-several-local-seo-company-s-if-your-targeting-multiple-countries
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
-
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 -
Google Analytics Search Console for International Countries
Hi Moz Community, Our e-commerce site is trying to gauge the opportunity of certain queries for specific countries. I'm trying to use the search console data presented in GA to do this. I'm looking at the top queries filtered by each country and also the top landing pages for each country as well. The non filtered data for queries and landing pages is completely different than by country and some if it looks wrong. For instance, our most popular query by impressions shows 0 query impressions in the US once filtered by country. Our site is based in the US so this doesn't make any sense, the same is true for landing pages. Is the queries and landing page data in GA under search console a combination of all countries? Since our target is set to the USA in search console is this data technically US based? How is this data so off? Thanks for answering!
International SEO | | znotes0 -
International Sites and Duplicate Content
Hello, I am working on a project where have some doubts regarding the structure of international sites and multi languages.Website is in the fashion industry. I think is a common problem for this industry. Website is translated in 5 languages and sell in 21 countries. As you can imagine this create a huge number of urls, so much that with ScreamingFrog I cant even complete the crawling. Perhaps the UK site is visible in all those versions http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/GB/ Obviously for SEO only the first version is important One other example, the French site is available in 5 languages and again... http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/en/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/FR/ And so on...this is creating 3 issues mainly: Endless crawling - with crawlers not focusing on most important pages Duplication of content Wrong GEO urls ranking in Google I have already implemented href lang but didn't noticed any improvements. Therefore my question is Should I exclude with "robots.txt" and "no index" the non appropriate targeting? Perhaps for UK leave crawable just English version i.e. http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/, for France just the French version http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ and so on What I would like to get doing this is to have the crawlers more focused on the important SEO pages, avoid content duplication and wrong urls rankings on local Google Please comment
International SEO | | guidoampollini0 -
International SEO strategy for an ecommerce with 3 languages.
Hi all, I've an ecommerce which ships worldwide and we maintain 3 languages, spanish, english and french. My main business is in Spain, so spanish will be shown in the root domain: http://domain.com/. English will have the /en/ subdomain and french the /fr/ subdomain. After some research, I've concluded that the best strategy for my business is the following. 1º- Translate all the URL's to the correct language, since now are in spanish. 2º- Implement Hreflang tag (with self-reference): Note: Due to the "universality" of english, Does it make sense? Or should I use spanish as default since it's the most important one. 3º- Create the 3 sites in Search Console and only geo targetting french sobdomain to France. Since I really want to boost in France rankings. Do you consider this as a contradiction with ? I could also target country in the hreflang. 4º- Add language tag in each language version: <meta name="language" content="spanish">in http://domain.com/</meta name="language"> <code class="broncode"><meta name="language" content="english">in http://domain.com/en/</meta name="language"></code> <code class="broncode"><meta name="language" content="french">in http://domain.com/fr/</meta name="language"></code> <code class="broncode">5º- Use canonical tag together with hreflang.</code> ``` Any opinion will be very appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance! Best regards.
International SEO | | footd0 -
International websites : hreflang
Hi, i'm looking for good examples with 'href lang' tag (rel="alternate" hreflang="x") Have you examples of websites with this tag? Thanks D.
International SEO | | android_lyon0 -
SEO international - ccTLD or Subdirectories / Hosting on 1 server (IP) in Netherlands
Hi All, I do mingle me in discussion if it's better to have an Ecommerce site of a Brand X on seperate ccTLD's (Brand.nl / Brand.de / Brand.com or use subdirectories (brand.com/nl, brand.com/de, brand.com/fr etc. I see a lot of comments on this, but i am missing one (maybe) essential part. We are using Magento with multi ccTLD support. BUT the environment is hosted in the Netherlands. Will we be "penalized" on hosting in NL when using www.brand.DE or other countries? Or is it MUCH better to host those ccTLD in country of Origin? Because if it is, maybe we can better use subdirs because then we can use our builded authority of the root domain. Hope someone have an answer on this one! Thanks! Jeroen
International SEO | | RetailClicks0 -
International SEO: abcJP.com OR abcJapan.com
The ccTLD .jp is not available. What URL should I use instead? MybrandJP.com or MybrandJapan.com *Mybrand is a four-letter acronym
International SEO | | FXDD0 -
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