Urgent: Any point having /au version of the website for Australia?
-
Hi,
We just migrated our website from /uk to the global one (but we still kept /us). We are expanding our business to Australia. Is there any point having the global .com site duplicated as .com/au provided the content will be identical?
What's the /au impact on the domain strength and rank in Australia in comparison to having just .com.
Is there any point? Anyone has direct experience? What's the best practice?
Many thanks for the answers.
Katarina
-
Duplicate Content
I have experience facing problems like these ones. In the past, I worked with sites multilingual and multi-region and even multi-location (same country but different cities) websites, mostly for Hotels, Restaurants, and Business related to the tourism.
First of all (probably you did it. But is ok keeping it in mind)
Add Every domain and every variation of your domains on Search Console- http:yoursite.com
- http:www.yoursite.com
- https:yoursite.com
- https:www.yoursite.com
Talking about your questions
It's common for websites to provide similar or the same content in different languages when targeting different regions while having different URLs. Google is okay with this as long as the users are from different countries. Your website will not be penalized when translation is manual and accurate. Even though Google still prefers unique content for each version, it understands that having unique content can be quite tough. Google clearly states that you don't need to hide such content by not allowing Google to crawl it using a robots.txt file or no index robots meta tag.
The circumstances are entirely different if you're providing the same content to the same audience through two URLs. Let me explain this with an example. Imagine you've created yourbusiness.com and yourbusiness.com.au. One targets the USA and other targets Australia respectively. Since both are in English, this will cause duplicate content. Luckily, it can be easily solved using an hreflang tag, which is widely accepted by all search engines globally.
The hreflang tag protects international SEO campaigns from being penalized with duplicate content. It's usually required by businesses that cater to different languages or countries through sub-domains, subfolders, or ccTLD. The hreflang tag also is important if you have multiple languages for one single targeted country.
Here's what I do to implementing it:
Step 1: First, we must handle language targeting. You'll have to list out the URLs that have equivalents in different languages. Any stand-alone or non-equivalent URLs would not need the hreflang tag, so don't list them.
Step 2: Now comes setting up the tag. This is what a general hreflang tag looks like:
All you need are the country-wide codes
http://www.mathguide.de/info/tools/languagecode.html
For having a site that targets different countries in same language, you'll use code like:**Step 3:**Here the hreflang="x-default" is used to create a default common page for all countries. This is generally the homepage or another neutral page for all countries.
After implementation, you can check that what you've done works properly by logging into your Google Webmaster Tool account. Proceed to "Search Traffic" and then "International Targeting." If the hreflang tags were placed properly, you'll be able to test them utilizing the feature presented there. When problems ensue, try using the hreflang tag generator tool to make things easy.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Incorrect use of language codes: All tags should contain codes as per ISO 639-1. Using incorrect ones will negatively impact your international SEO.
- Missing confirmation link: If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A with a proper hreflang tag.
IF THIS ANSWER WERE USEFUL MARK IT AS A GOOD ANSWER
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
-
Please have a look at my website. I am stuck here.
Here might be the reason. I had loads of unnecessary content so I given them the noindex tag. I tried to change the robot.txt file but that shouldn't be a problem in SEO. First my site had a country specific domain and then a year later I changed it to .Com, as to target globally (Mainly US). My site is ranking well in that specific country (never been close to page 1) on page 3 almost every time. It's not ranking in other countries, despite the fact that I've not targeted it to any specific country since the domain was changed. A month ago, I deleted 404 pages and all the thin content which was indexed in the SERP and also deleted the duplicated contents and as well as the copied contents. Meanwhile I've also tried changing the headings in some of the products articles as they were causing the duplicate heading issue. I've recently switched my hosting from the UK based server to the Us based server because the last hosting has bad downtime. So far until now nothing seems to be working in my favor. I'm just tired of resolving issues and in return finding a zero result. This is my devil site: 10stuffs.com plz check it out and tell me why my site is not ranking at all and what sould I do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anshu14320 -
How to manage user profiles in your website?
We have a real estate website in which agents and builders can create their profiles. My question is shall we use h1 or h2 tags in business profile pages or make them according to web 2.0 standards? In case header tags are used, if two agents have the same name and we have used h2 tag for them, then search result page will end up having two same h2's. Can someone please tell me the right way to manage business profiles in a website? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dailynaukri1 -
Relaunching a website - SEO implicataions
Im looking to relaunch a current website, that will undergo a complete makeover. Can you you tell me what factors I need to consider in doing this, particularly with regards to maintaining seo and migrating the current site in general
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aplnzmarch180 -
Can I define that one area of my website is a regualr news (no subscription) and the other part of the website is news that only subscribers can read?
Hi I have a client that have a news website, he asked me if he can define one area of his website to be a regular news that google can show on google news search results (no subscription) and the other part of the website is news that only subscribers can read? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
We are changing ?page= dynamic url's to /page/ static urls. Will this hurt the progress we have made with the pages using dynamic addresses?
Question about changing url from dynamic to static to improve SEO but concern about hurting progress made so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | h3counsel0 -
2 Language Versions on Same URL
A site we are working on is a large gift retailer in Canada. They have a language option for French, but the page URLs are the same. If you click 'French' in the header, a cookie is set and then all pages are dynamically served the French content (and all nav/site elements of course change to French). The URLs then are exactly the same as it's the cookie that determines the language option to serve. e.g. www.site.ca/index.php?category=7&product=99.... would be the same regardless of if I'm set for English or French. Question: Does this setup have a negative impact on any SEO factors? The site has several thousand pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMGSEO0 -
One Website - Local + National Ranking
If a client (e.g. a winery) wants to rank both nationally and locally, what are some best practices for doing this on one Website? So the goal is to: Rank nationally for their wines, wine varietals, etc.so they're found by restaurants, distributors, customers (could include national directories, content creation ,etc.) Rank locally for their tasting room and wines for people looking locally or looking at that specific region (this could also include include Google places, local directories, etc.). I'm wondering if the site would need to be subdivided (or "siloed") where one section is heavily focused on national and another is on regional? Also, for the home page, which focus would be most important (maybe national because it's harder)? Thanks a for any ideas! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DirectionSEO0 -
What To Do For A Website That is Mainly Images
I have a website that is a desktop wallpaper script. People can come and upload 100's of wallpapers to share with the community. This is were the problems comes in. Files are normally called 27636dark.jpg or whatever and come with no description. This leads to 2 things. no text content that google can use to know what the page/image is about. Meta descriptions, URL's just look like spam. Example: /car-wallpapers/7636dark.jpg If a text description was added, it would still only be like "Green Trees in the distance". Which as you may guess, with 1,000's of wallpapers... would end up having a lot of descriptions the same. Is there any advice for sites that focus on image driven content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhysmaster0