Country Specific Domains

[ShippingContainer]

Is there any type of "best practice" for country level domains?

I run a TLD .com, and have a few country specific domains (.co.uk, .eu, ...).  Right now, I'm not doing anything with them.  Previously, I had them redirected to the main .com, but didn't want to anger the Google gods with any type of duplicate content, redirects, or anything of that nature.

Any suggestions on how to best utalize these domains?

[Hannah_Smith]

Hey,

It really depends on what you're looking to do - are you wanting to actively trade via those other ccTLDs?

For example - with your .co.uk; do you have the ability to offer your product in the UK? If so, then it's absolutely fine to set up as a separate site.

However, if you're just going to replicate your current site you will need to do a little work to avoid that content being seen as duplicate.

You can geo-target via webmaster tools see - http://www.seo-chicks.com/1463/geotargeting-on-the-same-domain-using-xml-sitemaps.html

You can also implement rel-alternate hreflang via your sitemaps see - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/multilingual-and-multinational-site.html

As Fidelityim says - I'd also recommend you including other signals e.g.

• Local phone numbers
• Local bricks and mortar addresses
• Local currency

This helps the search engines understand where you're trying to target.

Please note, that whilst this activity will help in terms of geo-targeting your content in order to actually rank in these countries you'll likely need to do some link building for each of these sites too.

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[stevefidelity]

Good point from Highland.

If you're not looking to build out largely different/unique sites for each ccTLD, just re-produce your main .com site on the other ccTLDs and start off by adding in a country flag and maybe a 'local' phone number just to send some signals to users that this is a more 'locally' relevant site.

[Highland]

There's nothing wrong with doing that. ccTLDs can be duplicates of their .com brethren because it's understood that they're localized. As Matt Cutts said, spammers are not using ccTLDs like that and Google is pretty smart at figuring that out.