International SEO

[moon-boots]

Okay, so I have read through the following link in respect to International SEO (https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo), and I believe that the way forward it a ccTLD.

My thought was to have .com, .co.uk and .eu.

Currently my site is .com, but receives most of its traffic from UK sources. I'm concerned that when I switch over to ccTLDs, the .co.uk in particular, that my UK traffic could dry up. Switching from .com to .co.uk and then using the .com to target the US market makes sense, but I would like to know others opinions on the potential dangers of doing this.

Also, are ccTLDs kept on the same hosting or would they require individual hosting? The link doesn't cover this question.

[fatetmpwcosl]

You can try by approaching the top brands in your niche to get the high quality and authority link insertion for your website SEO. There are many website examples that doing the same for guest posts.

[katemorris]

Perfect candidate for geo-targeting! You can keep them on one domain though if you're interested. You can do subfolders and geo-target each, but not sure if that works with your setup. Regardless, if you do the .com, and want that to be US only, make sure to claim that domain in GSC and Bing WMT as the US. .com is a general TLD, so it doesn't auto-geo-target. ccTLDs like .co.uk do automatically take care of this.

Keep in mind that in best practices, if you have two pages with the same content across two domains, usually the SEs will pick one, the older stronger one. Try to find a way to differentiate the content that is the same across the two sites. You can also use hreflang between the two sites to help the association, but that is really meant for translated content only. However, people have seen it help.

To ensure people are getting to the right content, I recommend detecting the user's location by IP and ASKING if they live in the US, UK or others you might geo-target. Then set a cookie. They will always get to the right content. Google will crawl from the US, ignore the JS for the most part, and will index everything.

Think about the .com and subfolder idea, that might be better for you.

[moon-boots]

Hi Kate,

Thanks for the reply.

We have a warehouse in the UK and USA and the products sold on each site vary, so we need to keep them seperate. We want our efforts to be pushed towards SEO best practice, that is to say that the hosting we want regionally and also to merge the brands together (they're currently under two different brand/domain names).

The site we have operating in the US currently isn't doing great and is taking a lot of effort in terms of SEO, effort we could be putting towards the .com. If we bring the US site under the flag of the .com our hope is that it will benefit from the .com's authority and receive a boost (we would also 301 redirect all traffic from the previous domain as not to lose any juice).

[katemorris]

Hi Moon boots!

First be aware of the .eu TLD, it isn't a geo-targeted TLD as the EU isn't a country. Keep that in mind, you can't target regions, just countries.

Can I ask why you want to go down the route of ccTLDs? Does your content need to be different in each country? There is no problem with keeping everything on a .com, but let me know if there are external factors at play here.

Where you host the TLDs doesn't matter much. The localization is a signal, but not a huge one. If you can give us some insight into your situation, we can help better. Thanks!

[moon-boots]

Any follow up?

[moon-boots]

Also, if I am using hreflag tags, am I still able to have both sites on different servers with their own localised IPs? This is necessary for SEO.

[moon-boots]

Thank you for the response, Nigel. A few follow up questions:

Using the lang tag in a link, i.e. www.website.com/?lang=en, isn't that a detractor for SEO? I was under the impression that the route to the product should be as short as possible for SEO, i.e. www.website.com/product, as opposed to www.website.com/?lang=en/product. Or will google ignore the ?lang in terms of SEO?

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi spacecollective

As long as you tag the sites correctly then you will not have a problem.

Add Hreflang tags to the pages. They can be identical pages on the same server in if you wish but this is how I would do it. As long as they are separated like this.

website.com for the US
website.com/en for the UK

Any other country would then have its own directory.

This avoids you having to mess with the various country TLDs like .co.uk or any other you'd wish to set up.

Then add Hreflang tags to tell Google which country is targetted and the relationship between each one.

 https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

(The first part en is the language and the second, the country)

The combination of search console and Hreflang tags is enough for Google to know that there is no duplication.

You would move UK users on to the gb version and US users would see the .com. It would all resolve pretty quickly as you are telling Google the alternative country versions in the Hreflang tag.

I hope this helps

Nigel

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