Redirected traffic and SEO problem
-
Hi all,
I have a bit of a search engine predicament and I can't find the answer anywhere. It's a bit of a complicated one so please bear with me ...
I'm a Freelance Copywriter, I recently started the business, I've also recently moved to New Zealand. As such I'm looking for business back in the U.K. (As that's where my network is), but also locally, in NZ.
I've purchased both the .co.uk and .co.nz domain names (http://www.inspirecontent.co.uk and http://www.inspirecontent.co.nz)
The way that the domain provider / host has set these up is for one to redirect to another. Currently if someone visits www.inspirecontent.co.nz it redirects to the U.K. Site.
That's less than ideal for me, because I dont want NZ traffic (i.e potential leads) to think I'm a U.K. Based business.
my questions are as follows:
1. Will the redirect to the U.K. domain prevent me from appearing in NZ search (I.e if someone searches via google.co.nz) I'm really struggling to rank at the moment, I'm working on more content but if the redirect is a problem then I need to know about it so that I can find a work around.
2. Any suggestions on the best approach to the work around? It would be great if the URLs didn't change! So that you wind up from the U.K. on the U.K site, and if you're from NZ, you land on and stay on the NZ domain, but I'm not sure how to achieve that. One option, I think, would be to have two different websites, hosted separately, but I hear that duplicated content is bad for SEO?
Thanks all in advance
Kind regards
-
Hi Andrea,
To answer your questions:
-
The redirect you mention will impact your rankings for keywords that are locally based (New Zealand copywriter, for example) or for folks using specific search engines (google.co.uk/google.co.nz) which will identify your website according to relevancy (UK to UK, NZ to NZ). The redirect should probably point from your UK site to your NZ site, since your contacts in the UK can still find your site using google.co.uk, which will redirect them to your NZ site. Meanwhile, your NZ leads will be able to find your NZ site more easily if it is optimized for New Zealand. What that redirect is currently telling Google is that you moved from NZ to the UK, and are carrying forward your domain, which is essentially the opposite of what you have actually done.
-
There are a few ways to move forward:
a) You create 1 website which optimizes for both NZ and the UK. Create a "locations" page of sorts which optimizes the same keywords for different geographic areas. (i.e. have a "New Zealand copywriter" page and a "United Kingdom copywriter" page). You can remove the redirect if you like, or keep it. This would be best utilized on whichever page currently has better rankings, although ideally you would use your NZ domain since that is where you are based. Not an ideal answer since keyword relevancy will be lacking for one country or the other depending on your choice of domain.
b) You cancel the redirect and optimize both websites. This is probably your best option but requires twice as much work. Duplicate content is an issue to some degree, but it won't really hurt you. Duplicate content is more of a "you won't gain any benefit from your content, but it won't hurt you" issue. You can use canonical tags to minimize the damage you do to your rankings for each site, or you can create unique content for both sites (this is your best case scenario). It would probably be best to separate your hosting (at least have these 2 sites on different servers) in order to avoid any cross-contamination if/when you conduct linkbuilding for your site.
In an ideal world, you create unique content for both sites. In a pinch, you duplicate your content from the site you plan to use most to the site you plan to use least, providing canonical tags for content on your main website.
There will be a lot of work on your plate when it comes to optimizing both sites, but that is the best way to move forward, in my opinion. I'm sure other Mozzers will have more to say on that.
Hope this helps and feel free to follow up with me if you need any more help!
Cheers,
Rob
-
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
-
I am based in the UK. I want to appeal to a UK and US market. One of my keywords is 'generalised' which gets way more traffic in my keyword phrase when spelt with a z and not an s. What do I do?
Hi folks. I am based in the UK. I am about to launch a new blog, and I want to appeal to the UK and US markets. One of my primary keywords is 'generalised', which gets way more traffic (as seen using Moz's keyword tool) in my keyword phrase when spelt with a z and not an s. What do I do? Any guidance would be great. I note this has been discussed before, but seemingly without a conclusion. I would really appreciate any help you can provide.
International SEO | | Nobody16165422281340 -
International SEO question domain.com vs domain.com/us/ , domain.com/uk etc.
Hi Mozzers, I am expanding a website internationally. I own the .com for the domain. I need to accommodate multiple countries and I'm not sure if I should build a folder for /us/ for United States or just have the root domain .com OPTION 1:
International SEO | | jeremycabral
domain.com/page-url -- United States
domain.com/de/page-url -- Denmark
domain.com/jp/page-url -- Japan OPTION 2:
domain.com/us/page-url -- United States
domain.com/de/page-url -- Denmark
domain.com/jp/page-url -- Japan My concern with option 2 is there will be some dilution and we wouldn't get the full benefit of inbound links compared to Option 1 as we would have geo ip redirection in place to redirect users etc. to the relative sub-folder. Which option is better from an SEO perspective? Cheers, Jeremy0 -
US traffic falsely inflating traffic figures and bounce rate.
Hi fellow Mozzers! We're handling the digital marketing for a UK-based franchise of a Canadian SaaS company, and I've noticed that a large proportion of their traffic has been coming from the US (not the majority, but enough to skew the figures). The Canadian arm of the business deals with the US market, but the majority, if not all, is direct traffic which seems to suggest they've seen the web address somewhere (not sure where though). Is there a search-friendly way to move this traffic back to the Canadian site? I know I can set up a filter for US traffic so it stops distorting the stats we're seeing (which I have now done), but my worry is this is causing a high bounce rate that may be impacting Google's perception of the site quality. The traffic has a 100% bounce rate (not surprisingly), so if we could find a best practice way of sending them to the Canadian site, that would be great. My first thought was a screen that appears for US traffic prompting them to the Canadian site, but presumably this would still count as a bounce as they're only on one page? Any help much appreciated! Cheers guys,
International SEO | | themegroup
Nick0 -
What are the best practices for translation of city/state names for international SEO? (ie. New York in English vs. Nueva York in Spanish)
I'm working on international SEO / translation of a global travel site. While we have a global keyword research and translation strategy in process for each market they serve, I've run into a unique question. Overall, we are translating (and localizing) content for each market but aren't sure what to do with location names. Each country/state has cities and locations that have their own dedicated pages. I see three options for these location names (when titling a page and writing content): keep them in English, translate the names in the market languages, or use a combination of the two. The challenge with altering the location names to the market languages is that they are truly not known by those names. Though there are some instances where it may make sense…for instance **New York **in Spanish would be "Nueva York" with **‘**Nueva' being the Spanish translation of ‘new’. There are other instances, where no translation exists. If you’ve had a similar experience I'd love to hear your approach/recommendation.
International SEO | | JonClark150 -
3 month old site lost almost complete traffic overnight
Hi All, I started a Indian coupon and deal site http://www.couponspy.in/ around 3 month ago and traffic increased almost daily. But yesterday my site lost almost all of its traffic. Keywords which ranked 1-5 lost around 4-15 places and keywords which ranked 6-20 lost ca. 20-50 places. The Moz Crawl Diagnostics doesn't indicate any mayor issues. Has there been a Google Panda update in India? Reasons why my site has been affected? Please help!!!! 😉 I have seen the same traffic decrease on other coupon start ups, eg https://www.cuponation.in/ and https://www.cuponation.in/ Did we all make the same mistake? Any guesses?
International SEO | | ParvatiSingh0 -
Sudden drop in rankings after 301 redirect
We recently merged our old webshops to one big webshop. The new webshop is mutlidomain/multilanguage so the English version is at the .com extension and the germand version at the .de extension etc. etc. We redirected the 2 best old webshops to the .com extention with a htaccess 301 redirect. The other old webshops we divided over the other extensions. We redirected the 200 most importent pages with a page to page redirect and redirected the other indexed pages to the new index page. (300K) Everything went well and the new website started indexing. All extentions are doing well and even the .com version had very good rankings for a few days. After a few days we almost lost all rankings to the .com version. We did always clean seo, had 100% unique content written by our own writers and translated by our own translators. Our old webshops have very good branche related backlinks and i can`t find anything else then the 300K redirects to the homepage that might be the problem. Hope somebody will help us, or know someone we can hire to check our webmaster account, and check everything we did.
International SEO | | snorkel0 -
Is it worth to have a DNS manage service like easydns or ultradns in terms of seo ?
I have a HTML site hosted in Netherlands, i use Could Files from Rackspace and Cloudfront from Amazon as CDN. My target audience are in Portugal Is it worth to have a DNS Manage service in terms of seo? If so what are the benefits? Thank you Paulo
International SEO | | paulogoncalves0 -
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