Switch from CCTLD to .com - Am I missing anything?
-
We currently have 14 international sites. (.co.uk, .fr, .es, .com.au, etc) and (language differences aside) the content is the same on all.
I want to move this content from example.co.uk to example.com/uk/ (and from example.com.sg to example.com/sg/) to consolidate our domain authority, for brand consistency, and to reduce the overhead of maintaining 14 different domains. Our .com has by far the most domain authority (90) and often outcompetes newer smaller sites like .com.sg in local search) Other sites, however, (like .co.uk DA74) do quite well locally.
My goal is to improve the performance of those sites with a low DA, without hurting the larger sites, and also to avoid the disappearance of local content in local search. e.g. currently when a user searches for "widgets" they find example.co.uk/widgets/ but in future I want them to find example.com/uk/widgets
My plan is to redirect pages with 301 redirects, and use rel-alternate and hreflang metadata to manage indexing. So in the example above, I'd 301 example.co.uk/widgets to example.com/uk/widgets, then use the following metatag on that new page to suggest that it is the UK english version (for users in the UK) of a canonical page in the .com:
(this is in accordance with the suggestion on this page http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077)
My question is: Am I going to severely damage the ranking of, e.g., UK pages in UK search engines by doing this? Is there a better way to do this?
Any input greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Dennis
-
Actually the methodology you have described is correct.
Just two tips/reminders:
- the correct use of the rel="alternate" previews that in the .com pages (for instance) you indicate the other 13 country targeting URLs of your site. That is needed to not seeing, for instance, your .com pages outranking your Spanish ones in Google.es because of a better link profile (or Page Authority);
- for that reason I do really suggest you to implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" in your sitemaps.xml more than into the code of every single page of your site (you don't want to slow your page speed, don't you?).
About what bnspak write, the correct tip is this:
- create the new site, with the new country level subcarpet arquitecture;
- implement cross domain canonical tags in your old ccTld domains
- cancel your ccTlds sitemaps.xml files in GWT and resubmit them... doing so you are explicitly asking Google to recrawl them asap
- Googlebot crawls the ccTlds and discover the rel="canonical"
- Do the 301 page by page
Finally, ccTld or Subcarpet. The decision should be just based on SEO, but on business. Yes, you're going to loose the geotargeting strenght of the ccTlds, but you acquire a stronger domain authority for those sites which were maybe struggling alone. Then, if you plan a correct and effective Content Marketing/Link Building strategy, you can add links to those country targeting subcarpets, links which will benefits all the site as an all.
-
It's hard to argue the contrary when Matt Cutts is saying "Go with CCTLDs", but I get the feeling that his point is an "all things being equal" explanation.
My problem is that all things are not equal. I have a mixed bag. I have an old strong .com (DA 90) and a long list of newer less strong domains (down to DA 27)
Re: one site ranking in multiple countries. Our .com already does this. As one example, the .com homepage ranks on the first page for one of our main head keywords in google.fr, whereas the highest ranking page on the .fr for the same keyword is at the top of page 3.
So "losing a ton of ground" doesn't make a lot of sense here, because traffic isn't going to gravitate towards local content if it's already lingering down around the third page. Wouldn't it make more sense here, to have a french language version of the homepage on the .com and use hreflang to make sure that's the version that ends up in French search results?
I know that 301's don't pass all authority, but they pass some, my feeling is that 13 sites-worth of redirection will have a strong effect on an already strong .com.
Microsoft apply this exact model (one .com, multiple languages in subdirectories, relevant results in local search) and ok, they have a strong domain, but doesn't this show that this is possible?
It would be great to hear about actual experience of similar consolidation moves, successes or failures?
-
I wouldn't drop a ccTLD to move to a .com. There are several benefits you lose
- Most engines recognize ccTLDs as specific to a given country. This can help with ranking for those engines in that country
- Traffic from specific countries tends to gravitate towards a ccTLD (i.e. French are more likely to click on a .fr)
- Engines tend to give a pass on duplicate content to ccTLDs. See Matt Cutts on point.
You're going to lose a ton of ground doing this. Trying to make one site rank well for multiple countries is hard enough. Add in the lost rank from your ccTLDs (a 301 doesn't move all PR).
-
Any time you 301 content it's going to take search engine a while to catch up. You may run into issues with duplicate content for countries that speak all the same langue such as the UK and the USA.
However I had recently read the if you rel=canonical the old page to the new locations it speeds up the indexing process. I'll see if I can find the link for you when i get home later.
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
-
SEO audit for ccTLD sites
Hi.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOSanna
My customer has sites with Country code TLDs (e.g. https://sample.fr, https://sample.fi and https://sample.en) and I'm supposed to perform SEO audit for them. Is there any way to perform audit at the same time for all versions? Can I perform audit e.g. just for https://sample or do I have to run every .fr, .fi and .en separately in multiple tools I use? Thanks much in advance!0 -
DeepCrawl Calls Incomplete Open Graph Tags and Missing Twitter Cards An Issue. How important is this?
Hi, Let me first say that I really like the tool DeepCrawl. So, not busting on them. More like I'm interested in the relative importance of two items they call as "Issues." Those items are "Incomplete Open Graph Tags" and "No Valid Twitter Cards." They call this out on every page. To define it a bit further, I'm interested in the importance as it relates to organic search.I'm also interested in there's some basic functionality we may have missed in our Share42 implementation. To me, it looks like the social sharing buttons work. Also, we use Share42 social sharing buttons, which are quite functional. If it would help, I could private message you an example url. Thanks! Best... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945011 -
Something happened within the last 2 weeks on our WordPress-hosted site that created "duplicates" by counting www.company.com/example and company.com/example (without the 'www.') as separate pages. Any idea what could have happened, and how to fix it?
Our website is running through WordPress. We've been running Moz for over a month now. Only recently, within the past 2 weeks, have we been alerted to over 100 duplicate pages. It appears something happened that created a duplicate of every single page on our site; "www.company.com/example" and "company.com/example." Again, according to our MOZ, this is a recent issue. I'm almost certain that prior to a couple of weeks ago, there existed both forms of the URL that directed to the same page without be counting as a duplicate. Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wzimmer0 -
Should we host our magazine on a subdomain of E-com site or its own domain?
We host a online fashion magazine on a subdomain of our e-commerce site. Currently we host the blog which is word press based on a subdomain ex: stylemag.xxxxxxx.com First question is are all the links from our blog considered internal links? They do not show in the back links profile. Also would it be better to host this on its own domain? Second question Is my main URL getting credit for the unique content published to the blog on the subdomain and if so is it helping the overall SEO of my website more then if it and the links were hosted on its own wordpress.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kushvision0 -
Client has been COPYING blog posts to wordpress.com for years. Now what?
Just discovered my client has been copying all her blog posts over to her wordpress.com blog account. So she has duplicate content to what is on her site. She has roughly 700 posts on her main site but doesn't look like that many on the wordpress site. There are no inbound links coming off the wordpress site that I could find. Here's an example: http://thevanillaqueen.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/is-canola-oil-a-healthy-choice/ http://vanilla.com/is-canola-oil-a-healthy-choice/ What are you recommendations for what should be done? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse0 -
Is there anything wrong with this 301 redirect?
I'll keep this one short and sweet 🙂 Many moons ago we used to have several different methods of sorting our products and this change in sort order was achieved by having ?dispmode=list or ?dispmode=grid after the product URL. Best part of a year ago we decided to scrap this feature and 301'd all the ?dispmode URL's back to the base URL. The funny thing is that Google don't seem to have dropped a single one of the old URL's from their index and a search for site:www.refreshcartridges.co.uk dispmode returns almost 8,000 results. This isn't a massive problem but I'd have expected in the past year they'd have picked up on a couple of the 301's and would have started removing the old results. I'd hate to think we were getting any kind of penalisation for duplicate pages. I know the answer to this question is going to be 'just be patient, the old results will disappear' but just to ensure we're not missing anything stupid. I'd really appreciate it if someone could check out www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/brother-c-223.html?dispmode=list to confirm there's nothing more we could be doing to get these old results removed from the index. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Any advice for my website http://cvcsports.com?
I run the website http://cvcsports.com for myself and my parents. We offer custom varsity jackets for athletes/companies/etc. We rank first in Google for "letterman jackets" and near the top for "varsity jackets". I really want to reach #1 for "varsity jackets" (we were briefly #1 a few days ago but didn't stay there). Does anyone have any advice on what I can do to achieve that? Thanks in advance for the tips!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandonDoyle0 -
Organic SEO impact of switching from Dedicated server/IP to cloud?
My client wants to move from a dedicated server with unique dedicated IP address to a cloud server. We have great rankings for competitive terms. I believe their motivation is to cut costs. What is the risk to the rankings in switching from dedicated to cloud? I don't believe unique static ips are available on a cloud platform. I told him I would strongly advise against it, don't risk it, but would appreciate others' feedback and experiences to take into consideration. Thanks, Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen0