Country Specific Domain
-
Guyz, we are new startups and have one very simple question regarding domain name.
Should we use example.com or example.com.au ?
Our Goal initially would be to target customer from Australia and gradually go global. So if we opt for .com.au we may have an edge in terms of local SEO in the beginning but lose out in the long run. What is the best way to tackle this?
Thanks
-
Google has recently made this super easy: check out the rel="alternative" or "href lang" tag, as it is often called. You can provide the "same" content for UK, US, Aus and not run into duplicate content problems.
The same goes for Spanish in lots of countries, French, German for Germany and Austria, etc. Very handy.
-
He can certainly buy both domains and that would be a good option (301 one to the other), but he will likely need to serve different stores or dynamically change pricing etc. due to the different currencies and possible shipping / returns differences. It's also worth noting that if he's targeting North America, some of their spelling is different to Australia (US vs. British English).
He can use the href lang tag to show Google that even though both stores are in English, one is English for the US and one is English for Australia, one is Spanish for Spain and one is Spanish for Mexico, etc.
-
Hey +Edmond Hong,
Since both countries "speak english" i would not build different stores unless you have different pricing (even then there are better solution).
As to the domain, i would buy both of them to keep you authority intact and avoid copycats but i would
invest time marketing the .com one which is global.Google or to be exact matt cutts did say that Google is geo associating site according to their domain so
its best to buy something that would serve you in the long run. -
Hi jane
Say we have an ecommerce store selling shoes. Should we create different stores for each country and geotarget it for best results? Since those items are similar, wouldn't it create duplicate content?
For example:
www.example.com/us/sling-bag-white
www.example.com/uk/sling-bag-white
Aren't those the same? How to tackle this duplicate content? Any Moz article that i should read to get an idea of the whole thing and best practices for this situation?
-
Hi Edmond,
Sure thing - it's actually very easy. I'll show you here. Log into Webmaster Tools and go to the account you want to geo-target. Click on the "settings" button where the arrow is in this screenshot:
<a>http://i.imgur.com/ziFanER.png</a>
Click "site settings": <a>http://i.imgur.com/j65txrk.png</a>
Choose "Australia" (or wherever) from the drop-down: http://i.imgur.com/6KNNOVb.png
You can only do this with non-country specific domains, so you can't geo-target a .com.au domain to the UK, etc.
You can then add site.com/nz/ as a new project in Webmaster Tools so it shows up in the initial list with all your domains. That subfolder, you target to New Zealand and so forth.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Hi Jane
Can you show me a tutorial on how to do this in webmaster tools?
Thanks
-
Hi there,
If you are definitely planning to go global or multi-national, go with the .com. You can rank well in Australia with just a .com - go into Webmaster Tools and geo-target the domain for Australia, changing this if and when you need to. If you want to target Australia, New Zealand and the US (for example) one day, you can have sections of the website targeting each, and you can target a specific subfolder to each nation. For example, site.com/nz/ can be added as a separate project in Webmaster Tools and set to New Zealand.
I hope this helps!
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
-
English and French under the same domain
A friend of mine runs a B&B and asked me to check his freshly built website to see if it was <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> compliant.
Technical SEO | | coolhandluc
The B&B is based in France and he's targeting a UK and French audience. To do so, he built content in english and french under the same domain:
https://www.la-besace.fr/ When I run a crawl through screamingfrog only the French content based URLs seem to come up and I am not sure why. Can anyone enlighten me please? To maximise his business local visibility my recommendation would be to build two different websites (1 FR and 1 .co.uk) , build content in the respective language version sites and do all the link building work in respective country sites. Do you think this is the best approach or should he stick with his current solution? Many thanks1 -
Move from 4 Domains to 1
Hey Moz Community We are running 4 domains at the moment. www.rapturecamps.com www.surfcamp.travel www.surfcampbali.com www.surfcampinportugal.com We started of our business with 1. after a view years in business we got the option to buy the other 3 domains which have ranked quite well with certain keywords. As its quite allot of work maintaining all these websites with two languages, we where thinking of actually moving number 2, 3 ,4 all to number 1. All domains receive still some good rankings as well as daily hits. So we kinda like would like to keep the SEO Juice. Therefore we where researching for some time what would be the best practice todo so. For us there are two possible options We go trough all posts/pages on the domain 2,3,4 and copy the content over to domain 1. After thats done we create 301 redirects on the domains 2,3,4 linking them back to domain 1 posts/pages. We do do so by manually adding the 301's into the htaccess file, so we are able to delete the Wordpress installations. Our we just copy the Pages/Posts from the domains 2,3,4 to the domain 1 and then kill the 2,3,4 domains afterwords, and let google index these Pages/Posts on the new domain. This way we think we would loose the whole SEO Juice from the old domains. The reason we are asking this one here, we have been reading that this method could lead to red flags at google if we redirect to much Pages/Post back to Domain 1. Hopefully someone here can help us answer that question.
Technical SEO | | 5Gates0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Redirect typo domains
Hi, What's the "correct" way of redirecting typo domains? DNS A record goes to the same ip address as the correct domain name Then 301 redirects for each typo domain in the .htaccess Subdomains on typo urls still redirect to www or should they redirect to the subdomain on the correct url in case the subdomain exists?
Technical SEO | | kuchenchef0 -
Domain Hosting
I'm currently working with a client who provides products in Ireland Is it massively beneficial for the sited to be hosted on an irish server or will there not be much difference with it being hosted in England?
Technical SEO | | Sandeep_Matharu0 -
Conserving Link Equity When Purchasing a Domain
Suppose you were interested in buying a successful blog with lots of powerful links and they offered to sell you the domain but none of the content. Do you have any tips for conserving the link equity when buying the domain? (Note: about half of the inbound links are to the homepage and the plan is to relaunch the site with new content.)
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs0 -
Lots of Domains Going Nowhere - Point to a Real Domain?
I have hundreds of domains that I have purchased over the years that arent going anywhere except GoDaddy's Cash Parking system, which returns very little revenue, if at all. I wonder if it would make more sense to just point these domains to actually e-commerce sites that I own. If so, how best to take these domains and point them so that SEO credit is given properly. Most of these available domains dont have anything to do with the e-commerce stores. So not sure it would help. Furthermore, if I were to purchase new domains that were more relevant to the keywords to our e-commerce sites, how best to set them up so we can generate traffic on them and point them over to the actual domains? Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | findachristianjob0 -
A client will be translating their entire site into French in addition to English. For SEO purposes, should I host it on the same domain or create its own dedicated domain?
The current site is a long-standing site with good authority and a good number of links. Thanks....
Technical SEO | | JamesBSEO0