undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers

      Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
  4. Regional and Global Site

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Regional and Global Site

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
3
5
660
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • Clickmetrics
    Clickmetrics last edited by Apr 14, 2014, 10:42 AM

    We have numerous versions of what is basically the same site, that targets different countries, such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa.

    These websites use Tlds to designate the region, for example, co.uk, co.za I believe this is sufficient (with a little help from Google Webmastertools) to convince the search engines what site is for what region.

    My question is how do we tell the search engines to send traffic from other regions besides the above to our global site, which would have a .com TLD.

    For example, we don't have a Brazilian site, how do we drive traffic from Brazil to our global .com site?

    Many thanks,

    Jason

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • JaneCopland
      JaneCopland last edited by Apr 28, 2014, 3:41 AM Apr 17, 2014, 12:26 PM

      Hi Jason,

      If you use the unique ccTLDs and the href lang / rel="alternative" tag, this duplication will be fine. The tag was brought out in late 2011 and tells Google: "just because this content is the same on an Australian site, a British site and an American site, this is okay - it has been done on purpose." You can also use it to point to direct translations, e.g. "this Spanish content is the same as this English content over here, but one is meant for the UK and one for Argentina." Lastly, you can also use this tag as mark up to say "This is French content meant for Canada, and this English content over here is also meant for Canada".

      More information about the tag is available here and here.

      Cheers,

      Jane

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • kwoolf
        kwoolf @Clickmetrics last edited by Apr 14, 2014, 11:45 AM Apr 14, 2014, 11:45 AM

        That last comment kind of worried me. Each site has a separate domain, but is the content all the same? You'd basically be competing with each other and even your global site, not to mention suffering from possible duplicate content issues. Not sure what kind of approach you've taken but can't think of too many reasons one would want to host the same site on multiple domains.

        But to answer your question, yes. More tips here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

        Good luck Jason. I'm not going to sleep well because of what I read here tonight, but if you're fulfilling your business goals with this approach I'll just have to trust that you know what you're doing.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Clickmetrics
          Clickmetrics @kwoolf last edited by Apr 14, 2014, 11:16 AM Apr 14, 2014, 11:16 AM

          Hi Kevin,

          Thanks for your quick and helpful reply.

          So if I understand you correctly, without specifically targeting a region using web master tools and using a region agnostic tld such as .com tells Google that this is our Global Site. As long as we leave our global site un-targeted and the regional sites targeted would be the most effective way to ensure non-regional traffic is driven to our global site.

          As our sites are not multilingual, maybe the Brazilian example was not the best - however I was referring to English based queries.

          With regards to your last point, no each site is a separate domain.

          Thanks again for you help and advise.

          Many thanks,

          Jason

          kwoolf 1 Reply Last reply Apr 14, 2014, 11:45 AM Reply Quote 0
          • kwoolf
            kwoolf last edited by Apr 14, 2014, 11:09 AM Apr 14, 2014, 11:07 AM

            Hey Jason,

            You're basically telling Google to do just that when you indicate the geographic target for .com site as unlisted and your other ccTLDs target as a specific region. If you don't have language specific content for Brazil in Portuguese or Spanish, then ranking for commonly searched terms in this locale will be challenging.

            If you care to post a link to your site, we can all give you better advice. One question I have after thinking about your question for a minute is do you have these ccTLDs all pointing to the same site? Is your content translated into different languages? Unless there is a strong rationale for these ccTLDs, i.e. sales tracking, conversions, etc., I'm going to say you're probably hurting your ranking by having so many URLs all pointing to the same page. This spreads link juice out between all the pages instead of concentrating it to a single URL.

            Clickmetrics 1 Reply Last reply Apr 14, 2014, 11:16 AM Reply Quote 0
            • 1 / 1
            1 out of 5
            • First post
              1/5
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • inhouseseo

              Merging Niche Site

              I posted a question about this a while ago, but still haven't pulled the trigger. I have a main site (bobsclothing.com). I also have a EM niche site (i.e shirtsmall.com). It would be more efficient for me to merge these site, because: I would have to manage content, promos, etc. on a single site. In other words, I can focus efforts on 1 site. If I am writing content, I don't have to split the work. I don't have to worry about duplicate content. Right now, if I enter a product URL into copyscape, the other sites is returned for many products. What makes me apprehensive are: The niche site actually ranks for more keywords than the main site, although it has lower revenue. Slightly lower PA, and DA. Niche site ranks top 20 for a profitable keyword that has about 1300 exact match searches. If you include the longer tail versions of the keyword it would be more. If I merge these sites, and do proper 301s (product to product, category to category) how likely is it that main site will still rank for that keyword? Am I likely to end up with a site that has stronger DA? Am I better off keeping the niche site and just focusing content efforts on the few keywords that it can rank well for? I appreciate any advice. If someone has done this, please share your experience. TIA

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 20, 2015, 2:21 AM | inhouseseo
              0
            • AMHC

              Multiple Ecommerce sites, same products

              We are a large catalog company with thousands of products across 2 different domains. Google clearly knows that the sites are connected. Both domains are fairly well known brands - thousands of branded searches for each site per month. Roughly half of our products overlap - they appear on both sites. We have a known duplicate content issue - both sites having exactly the same product descriptions, and we are working on it. We've seen that when a product has different content on the 2 sites, frequently, both pages get to page 2 of the SERPs, but that's as far as it goes, despite aggressive white hat link building tactics. 1. Is it possible to get the same product pages on page 1 of the SERPs for both sites? (I think I know the answer...) 2. Should we be canonicalizing (is that a word?) products across the sites? This would get tricky - both sites have roughly the same domain authority, but in different niches. Certain products and keywords naturally rank better on 1 site or the other depending on the niche.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 29, 2014, 8:45 PM | AMHC
              0
            • auke1810

              Wrong titles in site links

              Hello fellow marketers, I have found this weird thing with our website in the organic results. The sitelinks in the SERP shows wrong written text. As in grammatically incorrect text. My question is where does Google get the text from? It is not the page title as we can see it. kKsFv0X.png

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 24, 2014, 8:20 AM | auke1810
              1
            • Blink-SEO

              URL mapping for site migration

              Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 10, 2014, 3:04 AM | Blink-SEO
              0
            • Paul78

              Removed Site-wide links

              Hi there, I have recently removed quite a lot of site-wide links leaving the only link on homepage's of some websites, since doing this I have seen a dramatic drop on my keywords, going from position 2-3 to nowhere. Has anyone else experienced anything like this, should I expect to see a return on these keywords? Thanks

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 31, 2012, 11:57 AM | Paul78
              0
            • RichardTaylor

              So What On My Site Is Breaking The Google Guidelines?

              I have a site that I'm trying to rank for the Keyword "Jigsaw Puzzles" I was originally ranked around #60 or something around there and then all of a sudden my site stopped ranking for that keyword. (My other keyword rankings stayed) Contacted Google via the site reconsideration and got the general response... So I went through and deleted as many links as I could find that I thought Google may not have liked... heck, I even removed links that I don't think I should have JUST so I could have this fixed. I responded with a list of all links I removed and also any links that I've tried to remove, but couldn't for whatever reasons. They are STILL saying my website is breaking the Google guidelines... mainly around links. Can anyone take a peek at my site and see if there's anything on the site that may be breaking the guidelines? (because I can't) Website in question: http://www.yourjigsawpuzzles.co.uk UPDATE: Just to let everyone know that after multiple reconsideration requests, this penalty has been removed. They stated it was a manual penalty. I tried removing numerous different types of links but they kept saying no, it's still breaking rules. It wasn't until I removed some website directory links that they removed this manual penalty. Thought it would be interesting for some of you guys.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 24, 2012, 5:38 PM | RichardTaylor
              0
            • knowyourbank

              URL Structure for Directory Site

              We have a directory that we're building and we're not sure if we should try to make each page an extension of the root domain or utilize sub-directories as users narrow down their selection. What is the best practice here for maximizing your SERP authority? Choice #1 - Hyphenated Architecture (no sub-folders): State Page /state/ City Page /city-state/ Business Page /business-city-state/
              4) Location Page  /locationname-city-state/ or.... Choice #2 - Using sub-folders on drill down: State Page /state/ City Page /state/city Business Page /state/city/business/
              4) Location Page  /locationname-city-state/ Again, just to clarify, I need help in determining what the best methodology is for achieving the greatest SEO benefits. Just by looking it would seem that choice #1 would work better because the URL's are very clear and SEF. But, at the same time it may be less intuitive for search. I'm not sure. What do you think?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 6, 2012, 8:10 PM | knowyourbank
              0
            • adresanet

              Backlinks from Chinese Big sites

              Hello, I wish I know your position regarding backlinks from chinese websites. I am able to get a text link(from homepage) from a very big site in chinese. It has PR8 and over 10M users monthly. My site is in english. Will it help me ? Will I be penalised (my site is 5 years old, PR4) and some decent traffic(6-7k daily) Thanks!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 11, 2011, 9:46 AM | adresanet
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.