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Category: International SEO

Discussions around international SEO tactics.


  • Hello, I am new to seo so please be easy if this happens to be a "silly" question. My company has a .com site. We are expanding into global markets, focusing on specific countries right now. General question: Would I be penalized for duplicate content if I purchased country-specific domains and pointed them to the .com site? Thanks, Jim

    | jimmer
    0

  • We run an online store with the majority of our customers coming from 4 different European countries. The site is accessible through TLD's of all of these countries. However our .com domain currently has the most links pointing to it and the highest domain authority. Unfortunately, we are unable to tell through which TLD visitors reach our site. The niche is rather competetive, and therefore I am unsure whether it would be worth it to solely use our .com domain for the English language, and try to rank for each of the seperate languages with its own country-specific domain. **Question/discussion: **Will it be worth the costs and time to spent to build links for the country specific domains in these countries, or should we focus on making our .com domain stronger and use it for all countries? I'm aware of the benefits of ranking with a domain in the country the user is in. Note: We have major duplicate content issues at this moment, due the content being available in different languages, on a handful of domains. On each domain, users can view the site in different languages. In addition, the language indication in the url is not very clear (?lang=x) so I believe this should be improved to make it easier for search engines to tell which language is presented. If I choose to use a different language for each TLD, then the language flag in the navigation on the site will point to a different domain, so each language is hosted on 1 domain and there is no more duplicate content. However, I'm afraid this will lead to lower rankings, as the (strong) .com domain will no longer host the content in different languages.

    | 1200wd
    0

  • Hi All, I have recently been given the task of working on a website that sells products in the UK and America, at the moment the site does very well in the UK but does not perform very well in America which I believe is partly down to colloquialisms and difference in language. At the minute the site is a .com and is hosted in the United Kingdom, Does anyone have any useful tips on how to have 2 different versions of the site targeting different locations but using very similar language (Probably would be considered duplicate) Thanks in advance,

    | marcelo-275398
    0

  • Hi there! We have similar websites in different countries (it's an ecommerce site). Some times, those websites share the same language and, for example, people from Mexico end up in a page from our website in Argentina. Therefore they see our products in their language buy in a foreign currency. We would like to show them a pop-up (like a shadowbox) depending on their IP to allow them to go to their local website. There wouldn't be any redirect. Would that affect our rankings in any way? Would Googlebots see that as well? Thanks!

    | jorgediaz
    0

  • 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?

    | SL_SEM
    0

  • I've watched http://www.seomoz.org/blog/intern... and read some other posts here.  Most seem to focus on whether to use ccTLD, subdomains or subfolders. I'm already committed to expanding my US-based ecommerce to Canada with a .ca ccTLD. My question is around duplicate content as I take my .com USA ecommerce business to canada with a second site on a .ca URL. With the .com site's preference set to USA, and the .ca site's geo preference (automatically) set to Canada, is it a concern at all?  About 80% of the content would be the same.  FYI, .com ranks OK in Canada now and I want .ca to outrank it in Canada. I know 'localizing' content within the same language is important (independent of duplicate content), but this might not be viable in the short run given CMS limitations.  Any direct experience to help quantify the impact here between US and Canadian ecommerce? Adding: I'm not totally confident here.  From this google webmaster central post it seems that canonical tags aren't needed.  I tend to think nothing is truly neutral and want to be confident regarding whether to use canonicals or not.  Is it helpful, harmful or harmless?  My site already has internal canonical tags and having internal and external would be a pain I think. @Eugene Byun used it successfully, but would the results have been the same without? Thanks!

    | gravityseo
    0

  • Hi all, Our company owns site that have over 5 millions pages in Google index. We are locating in German, but our business aimed to US market. So, recently I checked index of our site using region targeting in US and there were only 150k of pages, but when I checked targeting in German there were almost 5 billion pages. Our server/IP locating in US, all the backlinks are from US sites. So, why there it is only small part of the site indexed in US? Regards, Dmitry

    | bubliki
    0

  • Just wondering if there is any evidence or data to suggest that, all things being equal, a link from a college or university with a ccTLD has more value than another ccTLD link. I have some anecdotal evidence that several URLs with the *.edu.ph ccTLD  have domain authorities over 55. My expectation is that because only a TLD is ever truly a TLD:   ucla_.edu_ is a true .edu link, but for a URL such as  "feu.edu.ph"  the Top-level domain is the ccTLD, i.e. .ph for the Philippines, and the .edu portion of the root domain will be irrelevant to the link's value. But I'm hoping I'm wrong... 🙂

    | BrianCrouch
    0

  • We are launching in a number of international markets and I am trying to figure out if I should be launching them as folders, e.g.: /es (spanish), /br (brazil), /in (india) or whether they should be subdomains, e.g. es.mysite.com, br.mysite.com, etc. In brazil we managed to secure the tld (.com.br) but not in other regions. Whats the best strategy for us? I was thinking of doing folders as I understand that this strengthens the main domain, while subdomains are considered as separate sites. For Brazil, should we also use a folder, or launch on the .com.br? I assume that using the .com.br means we will have to build up authority from scratch, and in addition, the authority we build up on the .com.br will not help to grow the .com In addition, is there value in interlinking between verions  (the versions will have the same content but in different languages)? Thanks!

    | medico
    0

  • I have an ongoing issue with porn showing up in my crawl error report from Google Webmaster Tools. They show up like so… _ ads/adtrack.asp?id=monsterselfemp&type=2&redir=//deuxmalio.cn/m.php/BLACK-GRANNY-VIDS-612_ Domain name not found 0008-05-11 I have no idea what deuxmalio.cn is, and it doesn't show up in search. Would this negatively impact my rankings and what can I do about this? I receive A LOT of these, most of which I cannot repeat in this forum.

    | BeTheBoss
    0

  • I'm going to assist a customer with SEO and we will also have to optimize the project for arabian countries. I'm looking for any helpful tips (links, blog-posts, experiences) like relevant search engines, best practices with keyword translation/localization, impact of mobile search/usage, recommendation for partners/companies... Thank you!

    | kqkq
    0

  • Hello, We are looking at creating an eCommerce section to a website and we are just weighing up the options: Magento - host on hour own server - great but it can often be very slow when hosting a shared server. Shopify - hosted solution but hosting is in the US and we are in the UK and shop will be hosted on a subdomain as a result Build our own solution - time consuming and costly There are two issues that have arisen from this situation.... Is it worse for SEO to host your store in a different country or to host in your country but your store potentially run slower? I'm swaying to the side of the argument that says give your users a good and fast experience instead of worrying about where you host the store. Bearing in mind that the main website will be hosted in the UK anyway and it is just the subdomain that will be hosted in the US. Just wondered if anybody has had experience with this or if I'm missing something? All feedback greatly appreciated! Thanks, Elias

    | A_Q
    0

  • We would like to rank better for specific keywords in Australia. We rank pretty well in our home tld .co.uk but would like to do so in .com.au I would appreciate your thoughts and recommendations.

    | seanmccauley
    0

  • Hi SEOMoz, If I have a site that has multiple language selection, how would it be possible for my site with localized content to rank higher than the default/English content? For example, in Google.co.th, my site with English content (http://www.xyz.com/en-us/) ranks higher than the localized content (http://www.xyz.com/th-th/). How is it possible for me to turn things around and ensure that for local markets like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China etc the localized content organically ranks higher than the default-English page? Thanks! Steve

    | sjcbayona-41218
    0

  • Since relaunch earlier this year, we've had patches where our site has failed to load. It's happened every so often, but, until I receive the server logs from the company who hosts the site, I won't know exactly when this issue has occurred. Until now, we've only noticed it when someone in the company has tried, and failed, to access the site. Again, it happened today. After hassling our developers/hosting firm for a conclusive answer as to why, it emerged that their server (perhaps our site in particular because of the nature of our business) had been the target of an attempted hacking. We've now concluded that every time our site has messed around like this, it's because of a possible hack. Would anyone in SEOmoz Land be able to tell me if this is going to have a negative impact for our SEO and site performance? Would search engines be able to tell if a potential hack is, or was, occurring? Would we then be penalised? Please feel free to elaborate on the hacking process in general, too, if you can because this is the first time I've encountered it. Thanks

    | Martin_S
    0

  • I have a global site targeting many countries including the UK which is the only English language site. Does it matter whether I use /en or /uk for the UK sub-folder? If I already have /en in place, but my Google UK listings are struggling, will it benefit me to switch to /uk? I honestly don't think it matters too much, but given the choice would've gone for the /uk I'm trying to weigh up whether it is worth the effort of changing it.

    | Red_Mud_Rookie
    0

  • Hi I'm looking to find the number of people who use different search engine sin different countries aspart of some research into an International  SEO project. I've searched Google all afternoon but can't find what i'm looking for so hopefully someone here can help What i'm looking for is the number of users of different Google versions in UK and Ireland, so: google.com v google.ie in Ireland and google.com v google.co.uk in UK Thanks for your help Jason

    | robotseo
    0

  • If a large site has multiple regions (Australia, USA, UK, France), how will IP filtering to a particular area affect SEO. e.g: Ilive in the UK an if I visit the said website I would automatically be redirected to the UK subfolder of the site whereas somebody searching in Australia would be redirected to the AUS folder. Will there be any detrimental affect on SEO and will the search engines still be able to crawl the entire site no matter which data centre is being used?

    | White.net
    0

  • I have a client who wants to put a re-direct on his landing pages based on the visitors IP address. The landing page will be a sub domain relevant to the country their IP is located in. I am a little concerned this will effect the SEO. Appreciate any advice. Dylan 🙂

    | gomyseo
    0

  • We are launching our site in Russia - and basically I have no experience in Russian SEO! Could you please recommend me some good English sources with news, tips and hints about Yandex? Basically I am looking the Russian SEOmoz 🙂 Thanks!

    | jorgediaz
    0

  • Hi Everyone, We have example.org.uk with 20K inbound links. We want to target the US as well as the UK. I would be interested to hear what approaches are best for SEO. For example is it better to keep our current domain and have subdirectories for USA for example. Or would it be better to register example.org and then use subdirectories. Or is it better to use different domains for each country? Any help with this much appreciated. Cheers

    | MarkChambers
    0

  • I guys,   i am registering a new australia targeted website that is very similar to yelp and mainly focus on reviews and guides (guides are also consist of reviews) like virtualtourist.com. this site's first priority is on australia restaurants reviews as first priority and all other kinds of businesses listings from retail to shopping, nightlife and personal services likes dentists and so on.... below are a few domains i purchased: venueexplorer.com mouthism.com (like menuism.com) venuers.com AuGuides.com Openmouth.com.au what are you thoughts and which one do you think is the most brandable?

    | usaccess608
    0

  • this has been asked before with not clear winner. I am trying to sum up pros and cons of doing a multilingual site and sharing the same domain for all languages or breaking it into dedicated subdomains e.g. as an example lets assume we are talking about a french property portal with an english version as well. Assume most of the current incoming links and traffic is from France. A) www.french-name.fr/fr/pageX for the french version www.english-name.com/en/pageX for the english version B) www.french-name.fr/fr/ for the french name (as is) www.french-name.fr/en for the english version the client currently follows approach A but  is thinking to move towards B we see the following pros and cons for B take advantage of the french-name.fr domain strength and incoming links scalable: can add more languages without registering and building SE position for each one individually potential issues with duplicate content as we are not able to geotarget differenly on web master tools of google potential dilution of each page's strength as we will now have much more pages under the same domain (double the pages basically) - is this a valid concern? usability/marketing concerns as the name of the site is not in english (but then people looking for a house in France would be at least not completely alien to it) what are your thoughts on this? thanks in advance

    | seo-cat
    0

  • Matt Cutts says on this video that you can have the same content on different TLDs and there is no duplicate content for Google. Have someone try this experience? For example : same content on "mysite.fr" and "mysite.be". And for the visitors from Belgium, will they see into the SERPs "mysite.be" and for the visitors from France "mysite.fr"? Thank you for your answer guys. Jon watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo&feature=player_embedded

    | JonathanLeplang
    1

  • I'm wondering what would be the best approach for further expanding the online presence of the business I work for. Let me start off with the resources at my disposal. We own visafirst.com and run the business for 7 years. All that time we had the domain online. There was a penalty back in 2005, I think (for hidden text). I've been dealing with the domain since 2007. In the last few years we got translations in French, German, Italian, some pages in Japanese, and recently we got it translated in Spanish. The translations don't hold all the products the English version has. We translate only products which we can offer to the targeted audience. So far, I use language folders /en/, /fr/, /de/ etc. I have the settings in Google's Webmaster Tools set to the most appropriate country (the one we want to attract customers from). We own a lot of local domains .co.uk, .ie, .fr .de, .es, .jp, etc. Currently we either use them for small projects, like AdWords (to improve CTR) or have them point to the .com version with canonical. I like nothing more than the idea of having the local domains appear in local search results, without that inflicting damage on the .com version. If I decide to go with the local domains and redirect (probably I will use canonical to avoid the redirect mess) the existing portions of the site to their relevant local domain - visafirst.com/fr/ to point to visafirst.fr etc., I'm afraid that I would take too much away from the domain in terms of content and backlinks. So, I'm faced with the following question - Should I risk it with the local domains where we have physical presence, or should I continue using the flagship domain. Also, would local domains improve the CTR a lot? I will test that with AdWords in the days to come, however it would be nice to know if someone has faced this before. Thank You, Svet Stefanov

    | Svetoslav
    1

  • What if we published an address in the UK as the contact/WHOIS details but wanted to target the USA market? The server resides in the UK, the domain WHOIS resides in the UK - but what are the best methods to target the US search market?  The domain is a .com domain.

    | Peter264
    0

  • The question is in the title: Does publishing your physical company address increase your Google Trust? I.e. on the contact page of the website, providing a physical address.  The address would match the WHOIS entry for the domain, and allow customers to contact you via post.

    | Peter264
    0

  • Hey guys, this is the website: www.mediavideoconverter.de We need to optimize this website for a bunch of keywords such as: VIDEO CONVERTER in google.de which is highly competitive and some others for ipad, iphone software's. Can someone give me a advise where should I start? I know the design isn't great, unfortunately in this part there is nothing I can do about it. Thanks in advance 😃

    | augustos
    0

  • Today I noticed a big change in the PR of our websites and our competitors. We have gained a lot of PageRank. This changes took place in the Netherlands. Did you guys noticed any fluctuations in PR?

    | PlusPort
    0

  • Our business was in US and planed to start new business in UK. From our research,  *****.co.uk domain get higher ranking in google.co.uk. So, we choose domain *****.co.uk. We can set up target area in Google Webmaster tool.  Is it necessary to choose local server in UK? Thank you in advance! Leo

    | LeoWu
    0

  • Hi, I'm trying to target my SEO to several English spiking countries (Canada, UK, Australia, South Africa and so..) and I came across a big dilemma: should I tray to build a local version of my website for each country, or perhaps I should stay with my one .COM website and re-direct all the English-local-countries with 301 (if anyone will tray to go into the local domain)? The thing is that obviously the best practice to get high ranking is to be local, but what should I put in those sites and who can I avoid duplicate content and user confusion? On the other hand, do you think I can really get high ranking with one website for all those countries, and how? Thanks, Itay Drory.

    | RAN_SEO
    0

  • Hi there superMozers! I´ve read a quite a few questions about multi-lingual sites but none answered my doubt / idea, so here it is: I´m re-designing an old website for a hotel in 4 different languages which are all** hosted on the same .com domain** as follows: example.com/english/ for english example.com/espanol/ for **spanish ** example.com/francais/ for french example.com/portugues/ for portuguese While doing keyword search, I have noticed that many travel agencies separate geographical areas by folders, therefor an **agency pomoting beach hotels in South America **will have a structure as follows: travelagency.com/argentina-beach-hotels/ travelagency.com/peru-beach-hotels/ and they list hotels in each folder, therefor benefiting from those keywords to rank ahead of many independent hotels sites from those areas. What **I would like to **do -rather than just naming those folders with the traditional /en/ for english or /fr/ for french etc- is take advantage of this extra language subfolder to_´include´_ important keywords in the name of the subfolders in the following way (supposing the we have a beach hotel in Argentina): example.com/argentina-beach-hotel/ for english example.com/hotel-playa-argentina/ for **spanish  ** example.com/hotel-plage-argentine/ for french example.com/hotel-praia-argentina/ for portuguese Note that the same keywords are used in the name of the folder, but translated into the language the subfolders are. In order to make things clear for the search engines I would specify the language in the html  for each page. My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´ although most travel agencies do it in their site structure. Any Mozers have experience with this, any idea on how search engines may react, or if they could penalise the site? Thanks in advance!

    | underground
    0

  • Why you dont have SERBIA in  engines for google - www.google.rs You have Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina and Slovenia and Serbia is missing 😞 Best regards kasa

    | stamparija
    2

  • Dear SEOmoz team, I’m an in-house SEO looking after a number of sites in a competitive vertical. Right now we have our core example.com site translated into over thirty different languages, with each one sitting on its own country-specific TLD (so example.de, example.jp, example.es, example.co.kr etc…). Though we’re using a template system so that changes to the .com domain propagate across all languages, over the years things have become more complex in quite a few areas. For example, the level of analytics script hacks and filters we have created in order to channel users through to each language profile is now bordering on the epic. For a number of reasons we’ve recently been discussing the cost/benefit of migrating all of these languages into the single example.com domain. On first look this would appear to simplify things greatly; however I’m nervous about what effect this would have on our organic SE traffic. All these separate sites have cumulatively received years of on/off-site work, and even if we went through the process of setting up page-for-page redirects to their new home on example.com, I would hate to lose all this hard-work (and business) if we saw our rankings tank as a result of the move. So I guess the question is, for an international business such as ours, which is the optimal site structure in the eyes of the search engines; Local sites on local TLD’s, or one mammoth site with language identifiers in the URL path (or subdomains)? Is Google still so reliant on TLD for geo targeting search results, or is it less of a factor in today’s search engine environment? Cheers!

    | linklater
    0

  • hi i have a small blog on ( blogger/blogspot ) with more than 5k/day visitors it was doing well in google through 9 months and was appear in more than 2000 keywords but ,today when check google i found my blog not appear in any keyword !!!!! when i put my blog URL in google i found it ,but when i searched for any post title it not appear !!! i not changed any thing ,so it is a penalty from google ? and why ? thanks penalty

    | activeacts
    0

  • Will soon be starting to do SEO for a client in the UK and wondered if there was anything I should do differently for what I do in the United States?

    | hwade
    0

  • i.e. Google.com v.s. Google.co.uk This relates to another question I have open on a similar issue. So if I open the same e-commerce site (virtually) on company.com and company.co.uk, does Google really view that as duplicate content? I would be inclined to think they have that figured out but I havent had much experience with international SEO...

    | BlinkWeb
    0

  • There have been changes in the traffic of big websites in Spain, France, Germany and Italy, spread rumors about the Panda Update. Anyone can to support it?

    | IEmpresas-92933
    0

  • We are currently working on a project which involves 3 separate .com domains in relation to a UK company selling/renting residential, commercial and investment properties within the UK. We are now working on producing a .hk site for the overseas customers. Can anyone advise what the best practice is for a .hk domain and where best to start? Should the domain be hosted in that geographical location for example? We are relatively new to this so any advise would be greatly appreciated.

    | SoundinTheory
    0

  • I was doing some competitive link research and one of the sites I was looking at has links in multiple Google Directories of other countries. By that I mean a listing in: www.google.pl www.google.hu www.google.pt www.google.co.nz www.google.ie www.google.com.sg www.google.vg and a few others It seemed kind of odd because the site getting these links is a ranch in Oregon. Here is the Open Site Explorer info. I'm a bit of a noob so I've never seen this before. Are these kinds of links worth pursuing? If so, how did they get these multiple listings?

    | AaronParrish
    0

  • I was hoping Webmaster Tools geo targeting would prevent this - I'm seeing in select google searches several pages indexed from our Australian website. Both sites have unique TLDs: barraguard.com barraguard.com.au I've attached a screenshot as an example. The sites are both hosted here in the U.S. at our data center. Are there any other methods for preventing Google and other search engines from indexing the barraguard.com.au pages in searches that take place in the U.S.? dSzoh.jpg

    | longbeachjamie
    0

  • I have a HTML site hosted in Netherlands, i use Could Files from Rackspace and Cloudfront from Amazon as CDN. My target audience are in Portugal Is it worth to have a DNS Manage service in terms of seo? If so what are the benefits? Thank you Paulo

    | paulogoncalves
    0

  • Hi Everyone, All my websites are dutch, and i have the idea that the farmer update hasn't been in the Netherlands yet? Not i single huge change have been here in the Netherlands in the SERP's. Is there a timeline when the Farmer update should come by in NL, or is it just waiting? I own quite a few websites(>100), and i haven't seen any change in positions? Regards, Yannick

    | iwebdevnl
    0

  • Hello, We are an international company, based mostly in Romania and Hungary, but we also launched some websites in Ukraine. The interesting thing in Ukraine that we are facing heavily, is how they are doing link building. Basically the only link building that they do is buying links through a platform: sape.ru (http://www.mainlinkads.com/ this is English version). Local SEO consultants also advice to buy links. It wasn't so much a problem, but when you have a good site with good content, but have competitors that are buying links and then overcome our good keyword positions, we started to questions whether to start buying links ourselves. What is your opinion on this? Is it possible that Google will penalize a big bunch of sites, now in sape.ru there are: 487 069 sites? Can we adopt the same strategy as our competitors as long as it is working? Thanks, Irina

    | InformMedia
    0

  • If I go to Google.com I get redirected back to Google.co.uk and search results have a UK bias. I'm trying to research the US market and have a  hazy recolection of Rand demonstrating how you can add a few characters to the google.co.uk url to see US results - just can't remember what video I saw it in. Any ideas? Thanks a lot

    | trbaldwin
    0

  • Hi, We are trying to position a specific site for a big sport event that will be played at the end of May. We only care about Google UK. It had no relevant content until last week. The site is a almost a year old but we just started to get links for it (all from the UK). They worked so fast: we were in page 2 of SERPs in the UK within a few days. But suddenly the site has disappeared and we're not even in top 100 anymore. However, we are ranking extremely well in the US (first page for the keywords we wanted to rank for). The site is a .com and it's hosted in Wordpress.com (with a custom URL). I understand that that can be a problem, but we have already told Google that our business is in the UK through Webmaster Tools. I guess that with time and more UK links, Google would ultimately understand that our focus is the UK audience, but unfortunately we have no time and we can't wait due to the date of the sport event. What do you think that we can do to rank well in the UK and not in the US as fast as possible? Thanks!

    | jorgediaz
    0

  • Hi, We run a site which has slightly different versions targeted to different countries/ language groups and have just recently re-launched the site for two of the locations we currently target. Is there any way of specifically restricting SEOMoz reporting to a particular section of the site (perhaps based on URL structure) so that we can investigate the performance of the new sites without interference from the old sites? Thanks!

    | sgraceware
    1

  • If I search Google.co.uk from the United States, will I get the same or different results compared to searching from the UK? If different, what can I use to see the same results as if I am in the UK? web proxy? Thanks for the help!

    | GSWInbound
    0

  • We have a blog on each of our country sites, but the content on the English speaking sites is shared i.e. locally produced in US is mixed up with stuff produced in UK and vice versa. I'm not concerned about duplicate content because we have taken the necessary measures to let the search engines know that we have a US site for the US and and UK site for the UK. My question to you is whether we should develop the blog independently in each country or develop one blog to satisfy our global sites. I believe a local blog for each country is better because the content would speak to the audience better and any reference points or product and price points would be 100% relevant to the audience.

    | Red_Mud_Rookie
    0

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