US domain pages showing up in Google UK SERP
-
Hi,
Our website which was predominantly for UK market was setup with a .com extension and only two years ago other domains were added - US (.us) , IE (.ie), EU (.eu) & AU (.com.au)
Last year in July, we noticed that few .us domain urls were showing up in UK SERPs and we realized the sitemap for .us site was incorrectly referring to UK (.com) so we corrected that and the .us domain urls stopped appearing in the SERP. Not sure if this actually fixed the issue or was such coincidental.
However in last couple of weeks more than 3 .us domain urls are showing for each brand search made on Google UK and sometimes it replaces the .com results all together. I have double checked the PA for US pages, they are far below the UK ones.
Has anyone noticed similar behaviour &/or could anyone please help me troubleshoot this issue?
Thanks in advance,
R
-
As your own agency told, I too consider that when the hreflang will be implemented, this kind of issues should terminate.
Regarding the sitemap error, it was surely something that could be confusing Google about what site to target.
However, I see that you have also an .eu domain name...
I imagine that that domain is meant for targeting the European market and I suspect that it is in English.
If it is so, remember:
- In countries like Spain, France, Germany, italy... we don't search in Internet using English, but Spanish, French, German, Italian... Therefore, that .eu domain is not going to offer you those results you maybe are looking for;
- The .eu domain termination is a generic one, and cannot be geotargeted via Google Search Console. This means that - by default - it targets all the world, hence, you probably can see visits from English speaking users in countries like South Africa, UK, IE, Australia, New Zealand or India, where English is the main language or one of the official ones;
- When it comes to domains like .eu and hreflang, it is always hard to decide how to implement it. In your specific case, as you are targeting UK, US, AU and IE with specific domain names, the ideal would be to implement this hreflang annotation for the .eu (the example is only for the home page):
<rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.eu" hreflang="x-default"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.eu" hreflang="en"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.com" hreflang="en-GB"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.us" hreflang="en-US"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.com.au" hreflang="en-AU"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate">
With those annotations, you are telling Google to show the .com to users in Great Britain, the .us to users in United States, the .au to Australian ones and the .eu to all the other users using English in any other country.
That will mean that your .eu site surely will target also users in others European countries, both using english when searching (hreflang="en") and other languages (hreflang="x-default").
2 notes about the hreflang="x-default":
-
People living in the UK and searching in Spanish will see the .eu domain name, because it is the default domain name for searches in every language but English in GB, IE, AU and US;
-
Again, even if you pretend the .eu domain to target only European countries, that is impossible, because the .eu termination doesn't have any geotargeting power (and regions like Europe or Asia cannot be geotargeted via GSC). So it will be normal to see visit also from countries in others continents.
-
You're very welcome. Either way I'd be interested to see how this one progresses.
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your quick response and detailing out this well.
I have backdated and noticed that this occurs almost every six months. The US domain urls pop up in the UK SERPs for about 2 weeks and disappear after that. We are yet to implement the href lang tags on site and our SEO agency confirm that this should fix the issue.
Will keep this thread updated on the outcome.
Cheers,
RG
-
Whether or not this is an issue kind of depends on what your product or service is. If you provide a local-only service like a restaurant then your US site ranking in the UK would be unusual.
On the other hand, if you sell a physical product this may not be so unusual. For example, here in Australia we're quite limited when it comes to finding men's online clothing stores, most of it comes from the US or the UK so it's not uncommon to see something like the US Jackthreads show up in the SERPs here.
Since you do have separate domains for each location, this might be an indication that search engines aren't really understanding the different jurisdictions for each site; maybe they're not geo-targeted enough for the algorithm to comprehend the fact that each of the 3 sites server a unique area.
Some of the elements that can help define this, in no particular order:
- Server location
- HTML language ( e.g. lang="en-US")
- Regional language differences (e.g. US spelling vs UK)
- Location markup - on your location pages at the very least
- Location mentions throughout your content
While not specifically on-topic, Rand's Whiteboard Friday about scaling geo-targeting offers plenty of great advice that can be applied here as well.
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
-
On page vs Off page vs Technical SEO: Priority, easy to handle, easy to measure.
Hi community, I am just trying to figure out which can be priority in on page, off page and technical SEO. Which one you prefer to go first? Which one is easy to handle? Which one is easy to measure? Your opinions and suggestions please. Expecting more realistic answers rather than usual check list. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Duplicate website pages indexed: Ranking dropped. Does Google checks the duplicate domain association?
Hi all, Our duplicate website which is used for testing new optimisations got indexed and we dropped in rankings. But I am not sure whether this is exact reason as it happened earlier too where I don't find much drop in rankings. Also I got replies in the past that it'll not really impact original website but duplicate website. I think this rule applies to the third party websites. But if our own domain has exact duplicate content; will Google knows that we own the website from any other way we are associated like IP addresses and servers, etc..to find the duplicate website is hosted by us? I wonder how Google treats duplicate content from third party domains and own domains. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Do we take a SEO hit for having multiple URLs on an infinite scroll page vs a site with many pages/URLs. If we do take a hit, quantify the hit we would suffer.
We are redesigning a preschool website which has over 100 pages. We are looking at 2 options and want to make sure we meet the best user experience and SEO. Option 1 is to condense the site into perhaps 10 pages and window shade the content. For instance, on the curriculum page there would be an overview and each age group program would open via window shade. Option 2 is to have an overview and then each age program links to its own page. Do we lose out on SEO if there are not unique URLS? Or is there a way using metatags or other programming to have the same effect?
Algorithm Updates | | jgodwin0 -
Fetch as Google in GWT - Functionality
Hi, For example, some of the HTML improvements notices from GWT, says dupe meta descriptions or titles, for pages that have since been 301 redirected or had a canonical tag added. So, my idea is to force google to read it using "Fetch as Google" - hoping that it will now see 301 redirection or the fix we have implemented. Does this work? How long does it take? Lastly, should I just click the "fetch as google" or should I also click on the "Submit to index" button? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | bjs20100 -
Domain Name search in google not appearing
My hcg domain doesn't show up in google search. Shows up in new sand image search. If I wrap the domain name in quotes it shows up
Algorithm Updates | | noork0 -
Title of home page is changed to domain name in SERPs
Hi, We have a unique problem, we are getting a totally different title in Google serps for a large site. When we search with domain name with space in google.com. We are getting title as domain name with space. We don't have any Open Directory listing. We don't have any cannonical issues and other pages with title as domain name. Can you please tell us what we have to do get our original title back in SERP ? Thanks, With Regards,
Algorithm Updates | | semshah1430 -
How is important domain age now?
Just as topic states, how important do you think domain age is? Do you think getting old domain for the new website will do any difference? Lets say website A used to sell apples... went out of business after 5 years of business. If I would get that domain and will star selling apples again can I expect some extra boost because of the age? Cheers
Algorithm Updates | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0 -
Classifieds and Google Panda
It seems Google's Panda update is targetting low quality sites with little unique content (I know there's more to it than that). It makes sense that they may want to do this but what about classified sites. They may use some scraped content as well as unique ads, and the ads may lack content as they rely on the users writing the ads. However, they are helpful to the people that use classifieds. Because of these factors, these sites are suffering with the release of the latest Panda update. Any advice for classified sites and how they can combat the rankings drops???
Algorithm Updates | | Sayers0