International SEO: What to do when you're using a ccTLD and want to go global
-
I'm hoping someone in the Moz community can help me with this one! Essentially, we have a .co.uk brand which wants to have more of an international presence. My question is, purely based on the fact that we're a .co.uk, will we find it more challenging to develop a search engine presence in European/BRIC markets? In a perfect world, we'd have a .com/country or a .es/ etc, but if this isn't possible, how hindered are we if we stick with the .co.uk and want to build a presence in Spain?
-
Hi Jimmy,
Great to hear from you. My initial reaction is that it might be trickier to rank with the .co.uk, as well. Context wise, I hope this helps... this would be for a B2B website that sells into various countries, including the likes of Spain, Italy, Germany, as well as China, Vietnam, Thailand and more.
Primarily we'd be looking to rank for our brand name in various different languages, e.g. simplified Chinese, Thai, German, all from a .co.uk.
My initial suspicion is that a .co.uk may be trickier than getting a .com or country specific TLDs ranking (e.g. brandname.cn brandname.de), especially with Baidu which doesn't seem to have a lot of love for .co.uks.
Based on this, would you stick with .co.uk, go global with a .com or country specific with ccTLDs for each target market?
Holly
-
Hi Holly,
I think you might struggle with the .co.uk to be honest - in theory, getting links from spanish websites will help, however you would have to ask yourself why someone would link to your UK site from a local one. To help you further I'd need to understand a little more. Can you give more context to the situation? Also, are you trying to rank for English or Spanish queries in Spain?
Jimmy
-
That's super helpful, thank you. American markets aside, are there any other countries where it would be a hindrance?
-
Its not as much of a hindrance in other European countries as it would be if you're trying to expand into American markets. Not having that country's TLD does hurt your SEO in that country somewhat but the way to get around this is to work on getting links from websites in that country. If you can get the domain great, if not it's not the end of the world.
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
-
404's being re-indexed
Hi All, We are experiencing issues with pages that have been 404'd being indexed. Originally, these were /wp-content/ index pages, that were included in Google's index. Once I realized this, I added in a directive into our htaccess to 404 all of these pages - as there were hundreds. I tried to let Google crawl and remove these pages naturally but after a few months I used the URL removal tool to remove them manually. However, Google seems to be continually re/indexing these pages, even after they have been manually requested for removal in search console. Do you have suggestions? They all respond to 404's. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tom3_151 -
Magento SEO question
Hello Moz Community, I am wondering if these magento settings are correct for seo. www.domain.com 301 > www.domain.com/main-language www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword (index & follow) www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword/shopby/size-m (index & follow & canonicalized to www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword) All layered navigation links are no-follow
Technical SEO | | mhenze0 -
So many internal links to the same page
Hey guyz,
Technical SEO | | atakala
I'm working with a client that has a page which has many internal links to the same page .
Let me illustrate it.
So as you can see I have a page which is called in the image "page" :D.
As you can see, the **page **has many links to the solutions.htmls' anchor links which mean they are basically the same page ( solutions.html)
Is it going to be a problem for us to do that ?
And is there anyway to handle this problem?
Thank you for you patience. And sorry for my bad english 😄 4deRc1W.png0 -
SEO for Interspire Relic
Hi All, Does anyone know of optimization best practices for the now largely defunct Interspire Web Publisher? Specifically, I'm looking for a canonical plugin or workaround to try and get rid of a few duplicate content issues (most importantly root vs. index.php). I'd like to just redo the site with a cms that has better support...unfortunately client budget constraints are a little tight at the moment. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | G2W0 -
What if I point my canonicals to a URL version that is not used in internal links
My web developer has pointed the "good" URLs that I use in my internal link structure (top-nav/footer) to another duplicate version of my pages. Now the URLs that receive all the canonical link value are not the ones I use on my website. is this a problem and why??? In theory the implementation is good because both have equal content. But does it harm my link equity if it directs to a URL which is not included in my internal link architecture.
Technical SEO | | DeptAgency0 -
Should I use www. or not in my main URL?
I have backlinks coming into my homepage, which has both a www. URL and one that's merely http://mysite.com. Which is the preferred URL for best optimization for search engines and how do I find this out?
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0 -
Should we use Google's crawl delay setting?
We’ve been noticing a huge uptick in Google’s spidering lately, and along with it a notable worsening of render times. Yesterday, for example, Google spidered our site at a rate of 30:1 (google spider vs. organic traffic.) So in other words, for every organic page request, Google hits the site 30 times. Our render times have lengthened to an avg. of 2 seconds (and up to 2.5 seconds). Before this renewed interest Google has taken in us we were seeing closer to one second average render times, and often half of that. A year ago, the ratio of Spider to Organic was between 6:1 and 10:1. Is requesting a crawl-delay from Googlebot a viable option? Our goal would be only to reduce Googlebot traffic, and hopefully improve render times and organic traffic. Thanks, Trisha
Technical SEO | | lzhao0 -
Sub Domain SEO
I am thinking to Add Sub Domains to get better rankings for Local Searches. So I will develop City Specific Sites with Specific Language. For Example qatar.wisnetsol.com. IT will be in Arabic. If my Good standing and Ranking on Google for wisnetsol.com will help my subdomain to rank better? if we setup wisnetsol.com/qatar, how it can target Qatar in Google Webmaster tools? Will links for qatar.wisnetsol.com and wisnetsol.com are seprate? What do you think about this strategy? Is it good or bad?
Technical SEO | | Khuram0