International SEO
-
We want to expand to a few new regions internationally. My question is if we register sites in different geographies and upload our exact site to these web addresses (exact duplicates) so our web addresses will then be
www.mysite.co.uk (current site)
www.mysite.com (new intended site)
www.mysite.com.au (new intended site)
and add rel=“canonical” linking elements to prevent duplicate content issues.Will our content production on our current site www.mysite.co.uk retain its value within all the other sites.
Is this the best way to do it? Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks for this response. Will migrating to a generic site let's say .com :
-
affect the current rank of my current site
-
perhaps turn off users outside the U.S. who might jump to conclusion that it is a U.S. based site
Is it perhaps better to host the blog only on a separate generic .com site and having localised micro sites sans blog in other geographies?
-
-
Hi!
The short answer to your question is: No.
The long answer is this below.
If you create new website in different ccTlds, but which are exact duplicates of the "mother" one, that is a problem.
On the other hand, though, if you use the rel="canonical", you are going to have them never being visible in the SERPs, because you are telling Google to not consider them because of the canonicalization you have set up.
As others have pointed out, you should be safe from the duplicated content issues using the hreflang annotations.
Said that, I too suggest you to localize as much as you can the different English versions and making crawlable and evident every possible local signal (eg: currency, phone numbers, local offices addresses).
Finally, though, IMHO you should not go for a multi-country international SEO, but creating a generic Global website targeting the English speaking market, giving the opportunity to visitors to change currency if they want and creating "local pages" in the about us section if you have local offices (those will be also used as Landing for Local Search).
Having a generic site (hence migrating from .co.uk to .com) will ensure also from the "blog" problem (i.e.: one generic blog for all site? What will be the one to use as content marketing platform? Or a blog for each website, with all the complication of having also "local" writers, local link builders...)
If you, then, decide to expand also to Spanish, French or any other language market, you can create a subfolder multilingual strategy.
-
That post is quite wrong IMHO, because it completely omits and forgets the psychology of the local audiences.
Apart that Country Code Level Domain Names still have a very strong influence in how Google consider a website in terms of geo-targeting, it is quite proved that, for instance, if a Spanish is asked to choose a domain .es or a generic .com (and he doesn't know the brands of both domains), he will choose the .es.
The same happens in France, Italy or anywhere else but the United States.
Even more, if you target Russia and you don't do it with a .ru domain name, in Yandex you will have a long way for ranking well.
Said that, the choice between subfolders and ccTlds should not be based on how better is for SEO, but how logic is for the International Business strategy.
-
Hi there
I definitely agree about looking into hreflang attributes to add to your site. You can also help Bing crawlers by adding language tags on your website variations.
Don't forget that you can country target each site variation to their specific regions through Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. I highly suggest utilizing this.
Moz also has a couple of great resources to look into for more information and tips:
International SEO (Moz)
The International SEO Checklist (Moz)Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
...using ccTLDs might not be worth it compared with using a folder
That's be the route I would be investigating first.
-Andy
-
I agree with Andy above that it's extremely important to markup your sites with href lang, however I would also go further and say to localize the different forms of English. Would be best to use British English on .co.uk and .com.au domains, whereas American English for .com. An added benefit of having separate ccTLDs like .co.uk and .com.au would be that users view your website and company as being UK-based, Australian-based etc., so it might be confusing for visitors if they are seeing American English used everywhere; localizing the content should also mean a better conversion rate!
Additionally, there was a good recent blog post by Liam Curley on the YouMoz blog arguing that using ccTLDs might not be worth it compared with using a folder - https://mza.bundledseo.com/ugc/why-cctlds-should-not-be-an-automatic-choice-for-international-websites. Food for thought!
-
The best way to handle international content, is to make use of HREFLANG. I wouldn't use a canonical tag though as Google suggest this isn't needed (read here) "Update:** to simplify implementation, we no longer recommend using rel=canonical.**"
Have a look at the following resources for explanations on how to do this:
https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en-Andy
-
Thanks so much for your response John
I'm also particularly interested if the content produced in our main site www.mysite.co.uk will be effective in our www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com.au sites considering that google prioritises local content. Will it be as if we posted the content directly in these urls?
thanks again in advance
-
There has been many thesis's written on this subject. A great start is google webmaster:-
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.il/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html The next stop would be Matt Cutts himself on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo - or if like me start with the video first!
If you ensure compliance with google recommendations - duplication will not be an issue.
Any queries let me know.
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
-
How do you report SEO audit findings?
Hello, Mozzers! I'm curious to know how you report SEO audit findings. Do you use a spreadsheet? A presentation? A formal report? Or maybe something else. If you have a favourite audit template, I'd love to see it. A second question: what things do you report in an audit? I currently report crawl findings, authority and trust, link profiles, and competitive analysis. I also investigate a site's security—that's not usually part of an audit, but site owners need to know about it. What do you report to your audit customers? Thanks for sharing your auditing wisdom!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
Seo for my medium.com site
I have my regular site blog at www.Guideyourhealth.org and a blog on www.medium.com, should I try to get back links for my medium articles as well that are on topics not competing with my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BuyKratomPowderInfo0 -
Job Board SEO
Hello community, Should I be using canonical tags on every job posted on my job board and also every job category page? I currently use no canonicals on my job board but I still rank well organically.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SO_UK1 -
Benefit of internal link in content
Hi, Is there a real benefit to having internal links in content other than at the bottom of a page for example and not surrounded by content. Would the benefit be 1 to 10 or 1 to 1.5 ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
What is the best SEO way for a shop
Hi there ! A client want to sell some products on its future website but just a small range (the most part of this website will not be an online shop). The idea is to add a "shop" button in the menu to redirect clients in this shop. I would like your opinion about how should I construct this shop, what do you think is the best for SEO : "www.website.com/shop" or "shop.website.com" thank you in advance for your answers !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnjinFrance0 -
CDN for SEO (or not)?
Does CDN impact on SEO or not? There seems conflicting ideas as to whether they impact positively or negatively, I realise that if the page loads quicker this is a good thing for SEO and usability of course. Does Google see CDN as just cheating and a get-around for not doing the work from the ground up and using good hosting etc? Do you have any direct experience? All constructive input much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
Ajax website and SEO
Hi all, A client of mine has a website similar to Pintrest. All in Ajax/. So imagine an ajax-grid based animal lover site called domain.com. The domain has three different Categories Cats, Dogs, Mice. When you click on a category, the site doesn't handle the URL and doesn't change the domain So instead of the domain going from domain.com to domain.com/cats, it uses the Ajax script and just shows all the cat pins. and when you click on each pin/post it opens a page such as domain.com/Pin/123/PostTitle It doesn't reference the category. However a page domain.com/cats does exist and you can go there directly. Is this an SEO issue for not grouping all pins under a category? How does Google handle Ajax these days, it use to be real bad but if Pintrest is going so well i'm assuming times have changed? Any other things to be wary of for a grid based/ajax site? I am happy to pay for an hour or two for a more in depth audit/tips if you can feed back on the above. Fairly urgent. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero1 -
Is this Negative SEO?
Hello Everyone, I have just spent the past 9 months designing, engineering, and manufacturing our first product. We just opened our web store and started selling product. http://miveu.com. I have spent zero time doing any kind of SEO. We haven't even put up a sitemap yet or any redirects. I'm just now starting to take a look at things. As soon as I start digging, I find that it appears that someone is at least attempting to do some kind of negative SEO against us. It seems to have started about a month ago. Check this out. https://www.google.com/search?q=miveu&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-beta#q=miveu&hl=en&client=firefox-beta&hs=bo2&tbo=1&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:d&sa=X&psj=1&ei=AGgBUJfJNK650QHW8YW-Bw&ved=0CE0QpwUoAg&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=335379d2f3ac2208&biw=993&bih=637 At first I was thinking this isn't so good, but it seems they are just trying to build crap content about our keywords and make it relevant to us. After taking a closer look, I'm thinking maybe this isn't all bad. They have targeted all of our exiting YouTube videos and created new videos that use all of our keywords, titles, people, etc in an effort to make our existing videos irrelevant. They have have also done the same thing with articles that were written about us, awards we have won as well as started negative campaigns about us and people who have said good things about us. Here are my thoughts. While the content is really crappy, it seems like they are actually building keyword relevance to us and our products. They have all the right keywords, the content is just crappy. "There is no such thing as bad press". I don't know if anyone has ever said this before, but I'm going to refer to their effort as "White-Hate SEO" because it doesn't appear to be a real dark effort. Am I missing something here, am I way off base? My bigger worry is that their campaign may include some much darker efforts that I just haven't found yet. I'm pretty sure I know who is responsible for this. They have made it clear that they really do hate us. Frankly, I'm not interested in retaliation, I just want to get my own house in order with some good old-school whit-hat SEO. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dmac
David0