Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Category: International SEO

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  Targeting Different Countries... One Site or Separate?
  

  I have a client who has 3 ecommerce sites. They are somewhat differentiated but for the most part sell the same stuff. Luckily 2 of them are quite authoritative, old and rank reasonably well. Most of the visitors and sales come from the US. He wants to start targeting Europe, Mexico and Canada. What are your suggestions for doing this? Are we better targeting on the main domains? Not really sure how to do that? Should we use a subdomain and a new store front for each geo? Should we use a .co.uk .co.mx and .co.ca each with a unique storefront? It looks like we are moving to a Magento platform so setting up multiple storefronts on a single database is not a big issue. Anyone have any experience with this?

  | BlinkWeb

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  Internationally targetted subdomains and Duplicate content
  

  A client has a site they'd like to translated into French, not for the french market but for french speaking countries. My research tells me the best way to implement this for this particular client is to create subfolders for each country. For ease of implementation I’ve decided against ccTLD’s and Sub Domains. So for example… I'll create www.website.com/mr/ for Mauritania and in GWT set this to target Mauritania. Excellent so far. But then I need to build another sub folder for Morocco. I'll then create www.website.com/ma/ for Morocco and in GWT set this to target Morocco. Now the content on these two sub folders will be exactly the same and I’m thinking about doing this for all French speaking African countries. It would be nice to use www.website.com/fr/ but in GWT you can only set one Target country. Duplicate content issues arise and my fear of perturbing the almighty Google becomes a possibility. My research indicates that I should simply canonical back to the page I want indexed. But I want them both to be indexed surely!? I therefore decided to share my situation with my fellow SEO’s to see if I’m being stupid or missing something simple both a distinct possibility!

  | eazytiger

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  I have a site that has 65 different versions of itself.
  

  I've just started managing a site that serves over 50 different countries and the entire web enterprise is being flagged for duplicate content because there is so much of it.  What's the best approach to stop this duplicate content, yet serve all of the countries we need to?

  | Veracity

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  Multilingual newspaper website
  

  Hello all. This is my first post to seomoz. My group is in the process of creating a website for a newspaper client which will have stories in two languages Spanish and English. Basically visitors will receive the Spanish version and have an option to read the story in english. I have never optimized a website for multi-languages/foreign languages. The newspaper is located in the USA so I'm not sure how this is going to work, which is were you come in. They would like to show up in both Google.com and Spanish versions of Google. My questions are: Do I need to worry about ranking for both versions? How should I go about optimizing the website for multiple languages? How do I need to configure my pages to be indexed so duplication is not an issue? (Canonical URL Tag?) Do I need to use special tags besides the news Google news tags for index, etc? I have more questions but as you can see I'm looking for a starting point on how I should apply my knowledge of english only websites to a website that has the same content just in different languages. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

  | cubictulsa

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  Google results inverted in a different country
  

  Hi My site and a rival site are bothl UK based. If I search google.co.uk for a keyword I'm above him, yet if I search the australian results, he's on top. How come? I'd really like to put this right and grind his face into the dirt -- if only as revenge for repeatedly stealing my web content. Thanks

  | Jeepster

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  Converting to Joomla - will we lose ranking?
  

  Our Dreamweaver/manually coded website is becoming unwieldy at 100+ pages and is now being translated into four other languages, so clearly we need to move to a CMS. Given that some of us have a little experience with Joomla, that's what we're considering. My question:  with Joomla, or probably most other CMSs, I am assuming our url's will change.  Surely that will impact our google ranking, plus external links and so on. What can we do about this?

  | databoroughseo

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  International Link Building
  

  Can anyone weigh in on their own efforts to build links into international TLDs? Which tactics have been successful? Which have failed? Have you engaged any agencies to manage this for you and if so, how did they perform and who are they? We have nine ccTLDs plus our .com site to manage so it's a bit overwhelming! Fortunately, we have teams dedicated to managing day-to-day operations of each site. Each team is comprised of managers who speak the targeted language as their first language and have intimate knowledge of the targeted culture. I want to leverage them to help my SEO efforts, but I'm not sure how my advice should be different than what we do for our .com site.

  | RyanOD

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  How to improve SERP rankings in other countries?
  

  We have a .com website in English targeting global visitors. We have good rankings on Google USA for our targeted keywords But we do not rank well in APAC e.g. Sigapore and Australia. What could we do to get ranked in these countries? We received a recommendation to sign up for .sg and .au domains and replicate our Website for Singapore and Australia. But wouldn’t it contribute to duplicate content Issue? We are in software industry and do not have locale specific content. Please advise.

  | Amjath

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  International (greek) characters in the URL
  

  For one of our sites we are considering restructuring the urls. This is about a Greek site and we are toying between the following options: a) English URLS e.g. www.domain.com/cars b) Greek URLs e.g. www.domain.com/αυτοκίνητα c) "Greeklish" URLs (Greek words spelled with latin characters) www.domain.com/aftokinita Normally we would imagine option b is the best since it would reinforce the main and most relevant keyword that is already present within the page content. We see many people search in google using greeklish (e.g. they are lazy to switch the keyboard locale all the time). Since we would also like to capture this part of the SE traffic but cannot obviously write in "greeklish" within our main page content maybe option c is a good compromise?

  | achatzakis

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  Outsourcing development to external agencies
  

  We are a large charitable organisation which has not paid too much attention to SEO guidelines in the past and as such have a number of websites that have been built by external development agencies. The question that we would like to ask is how this is affecting our SEO. The sites that have been built previously have been created on subdomains and we know that this is an issue. Subdomains are considered separate sites by the Search Engines and not all equity is passed from the subdomains to our main sites, especially as our internal link structure is poorly constructed. However if we had put the sites under our main website URL in subfolders would we still be reducing our page rank and link equity as the pages are hosted by the companies that built them often in a different programming language (Open Source rather than Enterprise) and sometimes in a different country. One company that we asked to build pages for us recently said that it was no problem with SEO because they would put the content in an iFrame to one of our main domain URL in a subfolder but I know that iFrames pass all link equity to the company where the site is actually located/hosted. What are the brilliant SEOMOZs communities thoughts on this? Thanks very much. EDIT - 1100hrs. Thanks to all the responses so far, but we've not quite got to the root of the issue - sorry it's probably the way I've phrased the question.  Essentially we host our own website but our internal team does not have the resource to build all the functionality required by the business.  So if we need a platform that manages our events or a platform that manages our community it has to be built externally then integrated into our existing structure as it would cost too much / take too long / potentially don' t have the expertise to do internally.  External companies tend to have the best functionality but then we are directing our visitors to their sites.  So we are asking them to integrate their sites into ours for an extra fee but what we are trying to find out is whether or not this is worth it in terms of search equity for our site if we only lose visitors once they have arrived at our site and are then directed off...?

  | tgraham

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  Do non-english(localized) URLs help Local SEO and user experience?
  

  Hi Everyone, This question is about URL best practice for multilingual websites. We have www.example.com in English and we are building the exact replica of English site in German www.example.de. On the Geman site, we are considering to translate some portions of the URLs for example last folder and file name as seen below: example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html Is this a good idea? Will this help SEO and user experience both? or the mixed languagues in URL will confuse the users? Google guidelines say that this should be ok. Would love to get feedback from SEOMOZ community! Thanks, Supriya.

  | Amjath

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  Est ce qu'on peut poser des questions en français ?
  

  (can we ask questions in a language other than English?) Pour le SEO est ce qu'il faut mieux un domain avec les tirets ou sans ? Les américains aurait tendance a faire les domaines sans tirets 
  Par exemple goodseoconsultants.com Et bcp disent qu'utiliser les tirets fait "spammy" ; En France il y a plus tendance à mettre les tirets mais est ce qu'il y a une risque négatif pour le sites qui le font ? Par contre il y a plus de chances que les moteurs et les humaines comprennes les mots avec ; good-seo-consultants.com Qui a raison ? Neil

  | NeilInFrance

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  Australia specific SEO tips?
  

  For those who are conducting SEO here in Australia: A lot of the info I read, and there is a lot, is generally from the States or UK it seems. Are there any things in particular I should look out for when doing SEO in Australia? Are there any SEO tips that are particular to Australia only? What directories are a must in Australia?

  | iSenseWebSolutions

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