When it comes to the search engines and country-specific content or searches, there are several obvious variables the engines use to determine the geography of a particular site or company:
- TLD (.com or .co.uk or .ca for example)
- Hosting (Is the site hosted in the UK, the US, Canada?)
- Inbound links (Are they primarily from US sites, UK sites, Canadian sites?)
- Spelling and grammar (Do they use the metric system? Is color spelled with a "u"? Do they put "eh?" at the end of sentences? - kidding, Canadians, only kidding.)
- Language (if specific to a country/region, which excludes English, French or Spanish)
- On-site addresses, phone numbers (which only works if your site doesn't list lots of International addresses as well)
- User base (does the majority of traffic to the site come from a particular geography?)
- Address verification (if the company opts to be listed in Google local or similar)
There are probably several others as well, but, as 2K has pointed out in the past, search engines are not overly responsive to even the strongest of these input criteria and appear easily confused about what country or region a site is actually targeting.
So, let's work from a hypothetical... Assuming you had an English-language site that had content for Canada, the US, Australia and the UK, would you opt for:
- A: One TLD (.com) serving all the different content on subfolders (i.e. site.com/ca, site.com/au, etc.)
- B: 4 unique TLDs, all serving their unique content (i.e. site.au, site.co.uk, site.ca, etc.)
- C: Another option...
In scenario A, you lose the geo-targeting, but gain the value of all links providing authority to a single site. In scenario B, you spread out authority and link value, but have successfully geo-targeted and maintain that advantage should the search engines ever get more serious about regional results.
p.s. Sorry for the long delay on posting; Matt and I have been galavanting in Vancouver :)
Actually it's pretty straight forward for most countries as the local TLD usually works fine and is a better option in terms of hitting the general and local indexes, but the problem gets really bad when you want to have both international .com content and US only content, becuase google.com doesn't have a US only option.
Chinaman 123 - Hosting location only makes a difference when you are using a .com,.net or .org address. Again this is a knock on effect of the misinterpretation that International = US.
I noticed that the Hosting location is rather influential. Especially MSN is pretty big on this.
I understand some part of the reasoning of it, but in a virtual world it shouldn't actually matter where you host.
I'm going to launch a new website for a brand new product hopefully this week which will run into all/many of these problems. The website is on one .com TLD mainly because the product could be of international interest, but also because it can't be on a Norwegian TLD. The primary language will be English, secondary language Norwegian (subfolder), with options for adding several languages later. Primary target will be Norwegian and the website will be hosted in Norway. Most of the links will probably be international links.
Each language will use different xml:lang and meta content language (as 2K has done without "luck"). And the reason for targetting my country with English as the primary language is because of some stupid (IMO) Norwegian laws. This shall be interesting....
This is a stupid problem.
Another option i use is if there is a main country and ideally harder to rank locally in then the other countries you need to target, host the site in that country with a .com and create a unique mini sites for your other countries TLD.
This way you have strong site that ranks well internationally and in you country of chose and then you can pick the lower GEO targeted fruit (yummy) with your mini sites.
In my experience there are only two things the really influence you country specific and thats the hosting location and TLD.