What is the best SEO site structure for multi country targeting?
-
Hi There,
We are an online retailer with four (and soon to be five) distinct geographic target markets (we have physical operations in both the UK and New Zealand). We currently target these markets like this:
- United Kingdom (www.natureshop.co.uk)
- New Zealand (www.natureshop.co.nz)
- Australia (www.natureshop.com/au) - using a google web master tools geo targeted folder
- United States (www.natureshop.com) - using google web master tools geo targeted domain
- Germany (www.natureshop.de) - in german and yet to be launched as full site
We have various issues we want to address. The key one is this: our www.natureshop.co.uk website was adversely affected by the panda update on April 12. We had some external seo firms work on this site for us and unfortunately the links they gained for us were very low quality, from sometimes spammy sites and also "keyword" packed with very littlle anchor text variation. Our other websites (the .co.nz and .com) moved up after the updates so I can only assume our external seo consultants were responsible for this.
I have since managed to get them to remove around 70% of these links and we have bought all seo efforts back in house again. I have also worked to improve the quality of our content on this site and I have 404'ed the six worst affected pages (the ones that had far too many single phrase anchor text links coming into them). We have however not budged much in our rankings (we have made some small gains but not a lot).
Our other weakness's are not the fastest page load times and some "thin" content. We are on the cusp (around 4 weeks away) of deploying a brand new platform using asp.net MVP with N2 and this looks like it will address our page load speed issues. We also have been working hard on our content building and I believe we will address that as well with this release.
Sorry for the long build up, however I felt some background was needed to get to my questions.
My questions are:
- Do you think we are best to proceed with trying to get our www.natureshop.co.uk website out of the panda trap or should we consider deploying a new version of the site on www.natureshop.com/uk/ (geo targeted to the UK)?
- If we are to do this should we do the same for New Zealand and Germany and redirect the existing domains to the new geo targeted folders?
- If we do this should we redirect the natureshop.co.uk pages to the new www.natureshop.com/uk/ pages or will this simply pass on the panda "penalty".
- Will this model build stronger authority on the .com domain that benefit all of the geo targeted sub folders or does it not work this way?
- Finally can we deploy the same pages and content on the different geo targeted sub folders (with some subtle regional variations of spelling and language) or will this result in a duplicate content penalty?
Thank you very much in advance to all of you and I apologise for the length and complexity of the question.
Kind Regards
Conrad Cranfield
Founder: Nature Shop Ltd -
Thanks Kent for your help before - yeah probably just coincidence - we had managed to remove some bad neighbourhood links and rewritten our content before we realised the currency display issue and changed that
-
Hi Conrad,
Glad to hear your rankings have returned.
I agree with Stephanie. It is unlikely the currency change played a significant role in your ranking recovery. There are numerous other factors which likely resolved the issue. The timing just happened to fit with the currency change.
-
Many thanks Stefanie - much appreciated
-
Hi Conrad,
Thank you for contacting Distilled. We really appreciate you reaching out to us. I just confirmed that we did receive your inquiry and one of our sales executives will be contacting you shortly. Please let me know if you have any further questions.
-
Hi Stefanie, That is very true - we managed to get rid of lots of the bad links, we rewrote the content to be of a better quality. However it was when we stopped the currency displaying in USD instead of GBP that literally 2 - 3 days later we jumped right back to where our rankings had been pre panda.
On a side note - I sent you guys at distilled an enquiry regarding our international seo strategy and structure through your website yesterday and I am wanting to employ your services - do you know if someone has received the enquiry as I am kind of hoping to make a bit of an urgent decision
-
Hi Conrad,
Interesting results- however, I think there may be more to that than the currency change. You mentioned previously that the company worked with other external SEO agencies that had garnered only low-quality links to the site with exact match anchor text or little anchor text variation. You also mentioned that you were successfully able to remove around 70% of those links from the link profile.
This could have played a crucial role in your recovery from Panda.
-
Hi Ryan - sorry I never answered your post - it was much appreciated. BTW - we came out of the google panda update on our .co.uk website. Turns out that we were using geo-ip software to set the shopping currency (and product mix) and as all google crawlers are US based all the pages on our .co.uk were displaying USD$ instead of GBP£. We put some code in to identify when a web spider was the visitor and set the currency to GBP£. As a result we popped right out of the poor rankings for almost all pages.
-
Hi Conrad.
I have researched this topic quite a bit recently. The consensus for the best approach is:
-
Use www.natureshop.com as your main site
-
Use geo-targeted folders for your country-based sites such as www.natureshop.com/au
-
Treat the folder pages as home pages for each country. Each of those pages should receive local links from their respective countries.
-
Re-direct traffic from the old sites to the same pages on the new sites. Do not take the easy way out and simply 301 all pages to the home page for their country.
-
Build your site for each COUNTRY, not language. For example, the US pages should use American spellings such as "center", and American measurements such as Dollars.
-
Use the meta language tag to indicate the language used on each page. EN = US, GB = England, etc.
-
Use country flags in a prominent location to allow users to find their country's pages. The flags are much more identifiable then letters.
can we deploy the same pages and content on the different geo targeted sub folders (with some subtle regional variations of spelling and language) or will this result in a duplicate content penalty?
You should not have any issues with duplicate content by following the above process. Google will understand your pages are specific to languages and countries based on your meta tags, folder structure, and Google WMT settings.
For the UK site, I would work to resolve all Panda issues and confirm the penalty is gone prior to moving that site. I would be interested to hear from others on this topic as I lack experience in this area. If the UK site was merged into the main site, would the Panda penalty only apply from Google.co.uk? Or could Google.com apply the penalty as well?
PS. I really love your business model. Free shipping, 1 year return policy, etc. shows a tremendous amount of confidence in your products. I would recommend adding some trust symbols. The BBB symbol, TrustE and Verisign or McAfee are the ones I prefer.
-
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
-
Should Hreflang x-default be on every page of every country for an International company?
UPDATED 4/29/2019 4:33 PM I had made to many copy and pastes. Product pages are corrected Upon researching the hreflang x-default tag, I am getting some muddy results for implementation on an international company site older results say just homepage or the country selector but…. My Question/Direction going forward for the International Site I am working on: I believe I can to put x-default all the pages of every country and point it to the default language page for areas that are not covered with our current sites. Is this correct? From my internet reading, the x-default on every page is not truly necessary for Google but it will be valid implemented. My current site setup example:
International SEO | | gravymatt-se
https://www.bluewidgets.com Redirects to https://www.bluewidgets.com/us/en (functions as US/Global) Example Countries w/ code Site:- 4 countries/directories US/Global, France, Spain Would the code sample below be correct? https://www.bluewidgets.com/us/en/ (functions as US/Global) US/Global Country Homepage - https://www.bluewidgets.com/us/en/ US/Global Country Product Page(s) This would be for all products - https://www.bluewidgets.com/us/en/whizzer-5001/ http://www.bluewidgets.com/us/en (functions for France) France Country Homepage - https://www.bluewidgets.com/fr/fr/ France Country Product Page(s) This would be for all products- https://www.bluewidgets.com/es/es/whizzer-5001 http://www.bluewidgets.com/us/en (functions as Spain) Spain Country Homepage - https://www.bluewidgets.com/es/es/ Spain Country Product Page(s) This would be for all products - https://www.bluewidgets.com/es/es/whizzer-5001 Thanks for the spot check Gravy0 -
International site
Hi everybody,one of my clients has a domain (www.sea-aeroportimilano.it) well ranked on Google.it.
International SEO | | vanGoGh-creative
He has a redirect 302 from www.sea-aeroportimilano.it to www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_it.html. The site has also an english version (www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_en.html).Do you think it's the right setting? What about a 301 from www.sea-aeroportimilano.it to www1.seamilano.eu/landing and after that an authomatic redirect 302 for the language (to www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_it.html or www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_en.html)?Thanks a lot.Massimiliano0 -
Any Idea for International SEO in this complex situation?
Hi,
International SEO | | teconsite
a client of mine has a site with a domain name brand.es. They are a furniture manufacturer. They has a well known brand in its sector.
brand.com is registered by a US company. (Completly different activity) This client registered its domain name 10 years ago, and its audience was in Spain.
As it is a .es ccTLD it is directly geotargeted to Spain. 5 years ago, they began to export to other countries, and today they have distributors in a lot of countries like Italy, France, England, Portugal, Germany, and many more... As they are manufacturers and they sell their products to multiple locations worldwide, the language aproach seems to be the more efficient way to reach they users. The problem is that they are using a ccTLD domain brand.es, beacuse the .com domain was registered.
Actually the international organic traffic is very poor, mostly related to queries with the brand name. My question:
Is it possible to do international seo with a geotargeted domain .es?
Should they register a .com that doesn't match exactly their brand name? (it is a little difficult, beacause brandfurniture.com would be good for England, but not for Spain or France. )
Or should they focus their strategy with some ccTLDs for 3 or 4 of the main countries? (Not sure this would be an alternative... too much cost) I know, that in this situation there is no perfect solution, but I would appreciate your opinions.
Any Ideas ?????? Thank you!!0 -
Non-Unicode Fonts and SEO
For some reason we've translated part of our website into Burmese. The most common font in use in Myanmar (Burma) is called Zawgyi and is non-unicode. Which means that if you look at it in Chrome you get a bunch of squares. That's not a problem because firefox provides support and 9x% of Burmese use firefox. So two questions Will we get penalised for using non-unicode font? Can google understand the pages and will we rank? It's worth mentioning that this is 0.001% or less of our traffic and an experiment (and market research) to find out a bit about that market than having much real BL impact
International SEO | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Targeting an Specific Country Audience - Domain Q
Hiya everyone! I know this might entail a novice SEO question, but i am having some doubts. Hope you can give your opinions. Its kind of technical question regarding domain and country targeting. I have a Steel Construction company targeting only the audience of the particular country. Last year, i bought the targeted domains for my brand (company name), as in domain.country specific TLD, Should i use these domains, redirect them, or something? Would that help?. I currently use domain.com, but i am constantly being beaten down by websites with domain specific with overly thin content, no PA or DA, and 0 links to their site. Should i use my country specific domains, would that make a difference? Note: I also run some marketing campaigns for charitable foundation i started, and i used country specific domain and server, and with little effort i ranked top 3 in most of the desired terms. Any help or comment is appreciated, Thanks!
International SEO | | JesusD0 -
How to Best Manage Multiple Domains?
Hi,
International SEO | | thealika
I am new here and this is my first question.
(so please excuse if my etiquette slightly off) I have just taken over the SEO work for a website in South Africa (.co.za) it is for an Attorney of immigration law, and naturally I would love to make it into a star on google. I have about 15 extra keyword domains at my disposal, 5 of them are parked and the rest are not doing anything at the moment. so my question is: what should I do with them to get the best SEO results for their keyword names? I was thinking to make a WordPress Multi Site, un-park the domains and create a separate site for each domain. Create a visually similar front page, but all the links head back over to the main site. Then work on optimising the SEO for each domain. (lengthy work but it's not too hard to rank in google.co.za) what do you think? I also heard that parking domains is a bad Idea, because google sees it as duplicate content; is that so? website:
www.migrationlawyers.co.za Parked domains:
MigrationLawyers.co.za
MigrationLawyer.co.za
MigrationLawyers.de
ImmigrationLaw.co.za
EmigrationLaw.co.za Keyword domains: Migration-Attorney.com
Migration-Lawyers.com
MigrationCounsel.co.za
ApplyForPermanentResidencesSouthAfrica.com
AvoidDeportationSouthAfrica.co.za
AvoidDeportationSouthAfrica.com
RetirementVisaSouthAfrica.com
SouthAfricanCitizenship.co.za
SouthAfricanPermits.co.za
StudyPermitSouthAfrica.co.za Thanks a lot,
Nikita0 -
Do non-english(localized) URLs help Local SEO and user experience?
Hi Everyone, This question is about URL best practice for multilingual websites. We have www.example.com in English and we are building the exact replica of English site in German www.example.de. On the Geman site, we are considering to translate some portions of the URLs for example last folder and file name as seen below: example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html Is this a good idea? Will this help SEO and user experience both? or the mixed languagues in URL will confuse the users? Google guidelines say that this should be ok. Would love to get feedback from SEOMOZ community! Thanks, Supriya.
International SEO | | Amjath0 -
Google Webmaster Tools - International SEO Geo-Targeting site with Worldwide rankings
I have a client who already has rankings in the US & internationally. The site is broken down like this: url.com (main site with USA & International Rankings) url.com/de url.com/de-english url.com/ng url.com/au url.com/ch url.com/ch-french url.com/etc Each folder has it's own sitmap & relative content for it's respective country. I am reading in google webmaster tools > site config > settings, the option under 'Learn More': "If you don't want your site associated with any location, select Unlisted." If I want to keep my client's international rankings the way it currently is on url.com, do NOT geo target to United States? So I select unlisted, right? Would I use geo targeting on the url.com/de, url.com/de-english, url.com/ng, url.com/au and so on?
International SEO | | Francisco_Meza0