Regional and Global Site
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
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
-
Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results on 100% responsive site
Has anyone experienced an issue where Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results than their Desktop site crawl on a 100% responsive website that passes all Google Mobile tests?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MFCommunications0 -
Site map creator
I have a large website with about 1300 pages. I can't find a good sitemap creator that will crawl the whole site and spit out the xml file. Any ideas or suggestions for good services? Also, a site this large, should I consider mutiple site maps?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dwebb0070 -
Merging Two Unrelated Sites into a Third Site
We have a new client interested in possibly merging 2 sites into one under the brand of a new parent company. Here's a breakdown of the scenario..... BrandA.com sells a variety of B2B widget-services via their online store. BrandB.com sells a variety of B2B thing-a-majig products and services (some of them large in size) not sold through an online store. These are sold more consultatively via a sales team. The new parent company, BrandA-B.com is considering combining the two sites under the new brand parent company domain. The Widget-services and Thing-A-Majigs have very little similarity or purchase crossover; so just because you're interested in one doesn't make you a good candidate for the other. We feel pretty confident that we can round-up all the necessary pages and inbound links to do proper transitioning to a new, separate third domain though we're not in agreement that this is the best course of action. Currently the individual brand sites are fairly well known in their industry and each ranks fairly well for a variety of important terms though there is room for improvement and each site has good links with the exception of the new site which has considerably fewer. BrandA.com DA = 73 - 19 years old
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OPM
BrandB.com DA = 55 - 18 years old
BrandA-B.com DA = 40 - 1 year old Our SEO team members have opinions on what the potential outcome(s) of this would be but are wondering what the community here thinks. Will the combining of the sites cause a dilution of the topics of the two sites and hurt rankings? Will the combining of the domain authority help one set part of the business but hurt the other? What do you think? What would you do?0 -
Only the mobile version of the site is being indexed
We've got an interesting situation going on at the moment where a recently on-boarded clients site is being indexed and displayed, but it's on the mobile version of the site that is showing in serps. A quick rundown of the situation. Retail shopping center with approximately 200 URLS Mobile version of the site is www.mydomain.com/m/ XML sitemap submitted to Google with 202 URLs, 3 URLS indexed Doing site:www.mydomain.com in a Google search brings up the home page (desktop version) and then everything else is /m/ versions. There is no rel="canonical" on mobile site pages to their desktop counterpart (working on fixing that) We have limited CMS access, but developers are open to working with us on whatever is needed. Within desktop site source code, there are no "noindex, nofollow, etc" issues on the pages. No manual actions, link issues, etc Has anyone ever encoutnered this before? Any input or thoughts are appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregWalt0 -
This site got hit but why..?
I am currently looking at taking on a small project website which was recently hit but we are really at a loss as to why so I wanted to open this up to the floor and see if anyone else had some thoughts or theories to add. The site is Howtotradecommodities.co.uk and the site appeared to be hit by Penguin because sure enough it drops from several hundred visitors a day to less than 50. Nothing was changed about the website, and looking at the Analytics it bumbled along at a less than 50 visitors a day. On June 25th when Panda 3.8 hit, the site saw traffic increase to between 80-100 visitors a day and steadily increases almost to pre-penguin levels. On August 9th/10th, traffic drops off the face of the planet once again. This site has some amazing links http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/04/algorithmsdata-vs-analystsreports-fight/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesAgate
http://as.exeter.ac.uk/library/using/help/business/researchingfinance/stockmarket/ That were earned entirely naturally/editorially. I know these aren't "get out of jail free cards" but the rest of the profile isn't that bad either. Normally you can look at a link profile and say "Yep, this link and that link are a bit questionable" but beyond some slightly off-topic guest blogging done a while back before I was looking to get involved in the project there really isn't anything all that fruity about the links in my opinion. I know that the site design needs some work but the content is of a high standard and it covers its topic (commodities) in a very comprehensive and authoritative way. In my opinion, (I'm not biased yet because it isn't my site) this site genuinely deserves to rank. As far as I know, this site has received no unnatural link warnings. I am hoping this is just a case of us having looked at this for too long and it will be a couple of obvious/glaring fixes to someone with a fresh pair of eyes. Does anyone have any insights into what the solution might be? [UPDATE] after responses from a few folks I decided to update the thread with progress I made on investigating the situation. After plugging the domain into Open Site Explorer I can see quite a few links that didn't show up in Link Research Tools (which is odd as I thought LRT was powered by mozscape but anyway... shows the need for multiple tools). It does seem like someone in the past has been a little trigger happy with building links to some of the inner pages.0 -
Our Site's Content on a Third Party Site--Best Practices?
One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Site structure from an SEO standpoint
I am fortunate enough to be working with a client who is still building their website. From a site structure standpoint, what can I look for with my SEO hat as they build their wire frames and storyboard their site? I want to make sure I don't miss any components that might be helpful short and long term
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0 -
Can your site be penalised by backlinks?
Hi, I just wanted to get some clarification on whether Google would penalize your site if you had many links coming from a questionable site. We've been struggling with rankings for years even though we have one of the oldest sites in the industry with a good link profile and the site is well optimized. I was looking through webmaster tools and noticed that one website links to us over 100,000 times, all to the home page. The site is www.vietnamfuntravel.com. When I looked at the site it seems that they operate a massive links exchange, I'm not sure what the history is and why they link to us so much though. Is there any chance that this could impact us negatively? if it is then what would be the best way to deal with the situation? I could ask them to take the links down but can't guarantee they would do it quickly (if at all). Would blocking their domain from our htaccess file have the desired effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximise0