US site vs New Canadian site for Brand
-
Hi Everyone,
My company decided to create a Canadian site for Canadian customers. How do I slowly transition the US site for ranking in Google.ca? I was thinking of using robots.txt to block Google.Ca from crawling the US site? Can anyone provide some advice oh how this should be managed?
Thank you!
-
Hey Jonathan! Definitely don't recommend blocking your US site in robots.txt--you want to preserve any authority and pass on equity from your US site to your CA site if possible, so let's leave that out of robots.
Are you fully deprecating your US site, or will it continue to exist alongside your CA site? If you're deprecating it, I'd recommend 301 redirecting the domain to the new CA one. If not, you should preserve the US site, as-is, set up your CA domain, and implement hreflang tags (information here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en). That'll tell Google that these sites are linked, but that they serve different regions.
I do recommend also having a link in your nav or somewhere in your header (like flag icons) that can let users choose which site to navigate to. This will allow for internal linking between both domains.
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
-
/en-us/ Outranking Root Domain and other hreflang errors
I'm working with a new site that has a few regional sites in subdirectories /en-us/, /en-au/, etc and just noticed that some of our interior pages (ourdomain.com/en-us/interior-page1/ ) are outranking the equivalent ourdomain.com/interior-page1. This only occurs in some SERPS while others correctly display the non-regional result. I was told we have hreflang tags implemented correctly in the meta information of each of our pages but have yet to research deeply. Should we even have a /en-us/ version when our root domain is the default version, in english, and targeted to US primarily? Any help would be appreciated as I am a little lost. Cheers, Andrew
International SEO | | AndyMitty0 -
Opening Up Webmaster Tools Geo-Targeting to Everyone Instead of US
Hi Mozzers, I wanted to get everyone's opinion on this. We have an e-commerce site that was targeting 3 different geo-locations. The main one is a .com. The other two were Canada and UK based. We recently turned off our Canada site and 301 to the .com. The .com site had been targeted towards United States in Google Webmaster Tools. Should I remove the Webmaster Tools geo-targeting now that Canada is pointing towards our main site? I don't want to lose rankings for US since that is our main market and the .com site is our main revenue driver and focus. I'm inclined to leave it as is because I still see our .com site ranking when I search in Google CA. From what I've seen is that it can take months for something to change and I definitely don't want anything to go awry. Just wanted to get everyone's thoughts on this. Thanks in advance.
International SEO | | SylviaH0 -
E-commerce : 1 site per country or 1 site per language?
I'm working with an European e-commerce; they already have a French website with a .fr domain. They want to target the Belgium with a .be domain and the Nederland with a .nl domain. Belgium = 50% dutch, 50% French. Is it better to do 3 websites, one per country, or 2 websites, one per language ? Thinking to SEO, costs, VAT management, what is your opinion?
International SEO | | johnny1220 -
Multilingual Site with 2 Separate domains and hand-translated
I have 2 separate domains: .com & .jp
International SEO | | khi5
I am having a professional translator translate the English written material from .com. However, the .jp will have same pictures and videos that I have on the .com which means alt tags are in English and video titles are in English. I have some dynamic pages where I use Google Translate and those pages I place as "no index follow" to avoid duplicate issues and they are not very important pages for me any way. Question: since I am doing a proper translating - no machines involved - can I leave pages as is or should I include any format of these: ISO language codes
2) www.example/com/” /> Even though hand translated, the translation will probably be 85% similar to that if I used Google Translate. Will that potentially be seen as duplicate content or not at all since I have not used the Google Translate tool? I wonder from which angle Google analyses this. Thank you,0 -
Huge increase in US direct visits to a UK site, why?
Hi all, My UK website usually gets around 10,000 direct (Direct in Analytics) visits per month however for August this has shot up to 24,000! However the majority of these direct visits seem to be coming from the US and as a result the bounce rate is through the roof, 84%! Why would my UK based site suddenly be receiving huge amounts of US visits? Any ideas?
International SEO | | MarkHincks0 -
Homepage URL for multi-language site
Hi, We are setting up a new site, and currently considering the URL and folder structure of the site. We will have 2-3 different language versions, and we have decided to use sub folders for this. My question is regarding the homepage URL. We want the English language site (en) to be the default one, from where you can then change the language. Should I have a folder for each of the language versions (as described below)? www.mydomain.com/en
International SEO | | Awaraman
(this would be the default page where everyone would always come if they type www.mydomain.com to webrowser) www,mydomain.com/ru www.mydomain.com/es Or, would it be better for SEO to have www.mydomain.com as the default URL where we would have the English version of the site, and then have two other folders (as below) where we would have the 2 other language versions: www,mydomain.com/ru www.mydomain.com/es Thank you in advance, BR Sam0 -
New web design targeting UK & France
Hi I have a couple of topics I would like to clarify. My existing website is on .ie & we are now expanding into France & UK We have decided to take the route of example.com with subfolders for example.com/ie example.com/uk & example.com/fr just like thishttp://app.wistia.com/stats/278112 provided by SEOmoz Should we 301 redirect our existing .ie site to the .com or the .com/ie? When building links should links be built to .com or each .com .com/fr etc Also are there any good resources out there about International SEO? Thank you 🙂
International SEO | | Socialdude1 -
How can I replicate India SERPs from US
I was recently checking out our analytics keywords stats and I am seeing traffic noted as google organic traffic coming from India. When I do a search on http://www.google.co.in/ for those terms using a "incognito" browser with no cookies, and not logged in I don't see our site in the first 100 results. The same thing happens on google.com if I try to set the account in india. I am trying to see if this might be an issue with an adwords campaign not getting auto-tagged (auto-tagging is turned on in adwords), or if there is something else going on. The keyword campaign gets many more clicks than analytics shows for this organic option so perhaps it is an odd rare occurrence. I am glad to have the traffic, but I want to be sure it is actually tracking correctly as organic, or if PPC is not tagging for some reason 😉 Any suggestions or thoughts?
International SEO | | SL_SEM0