International SEO is big business, and big business equals big websites. It can be really confusing when you have to cater to a target audience that is the entire world: you know that people from different countries and cultures are going to be looking for different things. We've had a lot of PRO members' Q&A questions come in about this issue lately, so this week, Rand helps us figure out how to deal! He'll show us the pros and cons of using subdomains, subdirectories, and ccTLDs to organize a site's infrastructure and handle different content for different audiences/countries/pandas/orangutans.
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week Casey Henry from SEOmoz brought up an interesting SEO problem that has been troubling a lot of folks through Q&A and that I think a lot of SEOs have questions about. There are some best practices though that are going to help guide us through this.
So, the first part, it's international SEO, but not just how do I target different countries, but really where do I host and how am I supposed to target these visitors and these searchers in these different countries in the most effective ways.
I'll present the basic problem. The premise of the problem is that essentially in a perfect world we would have one domain and we could have content of all different kinds, different languages, different countries on it, and the engines would easily recognize which content was targeted to which countries and we might have separate filters to make sure that there are no duplicate content issues. They'd say, "Oh, well, this is the Canada content and it is in English. This is the United States content, that's in English. This is the UK content, the Australian content, the South African content, the New Zealand content. Great." We can figure it all out. But unfortunately, the engines aren't quite this sophisticated yet. So, we have to play a little bit with the best practices and the rules around this. So walk through with me some of the options that we've got here.
First, option A. You can go with a root domain ccTLD. This would be for example, let's say our friend Roger Mozbot is starting up a blog. He has got content in lots of different languages. I assume Roger Mozbot is like C3PO or R2D2 from Star Wars. He can speak any language that he likes probably. So, Roger Mozbot, he's got his DE site. That's for Germany. Then he's got an FR one for France. A CA for his Canada stuff. A dot com dot AU for Australia. This is an option, right? He can build all these separate domains, own each of them, put different content on them according to the language and the preferences of the people there, target those currencies if he has got something to sell, make sure that they are regional friendly, that the hosting is in each of those countries so it comes up the fastest and so the engines know that that is where he is based. That could work. The frustrating part around this is that there is going to be a bunch of links that come to this one, that come to the DE one, but those links won't necessarily boost the domain authority or importance of the dot FR one, and likewise the dot FR won't boost those of the dot CA or the dot DE or the dot com dot AU. So, it can get a little frustrating. You're sort of thinking to yourself, "Boy, it'd be really nice if all of these links could count towards that one domain." There's way to do that with option B and with option C.
Option B, of course, being subdomains. You can see Wikipedia doing this. They have en.wikipedia.org, de.wikipedia.org. You use that subdomain to segment the language and country targeting. The problem with subdomains, at least as I see it, is that sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes the subdomains don't inherit all the domain authority, trust, value that you might get from separate subdomains or from all of the content being on a single root domain. So, de.RogerMozbot.com, maybe that will be interpreted the same way that www.RogerMozbot.com or fr.rogermozbot, or ca.rogermozbot, but it might not. That can be a frustrating experience as well.
Option C is probably the best way to do the domain authority collapse. We'll talk through some of the weaknesses here, too. But this is essentially saying, you know what, everything is going to be on RogerMozbot.com/DE. You can see some sites, Microsoft owns a wide variety of sites that do precisely this. They've got like an EN-US and an EN-UK, saying essentially that is our English language site targeting the UK and they do it all in subfolders, so the Microsoft.com domain is getting all of the domain authority assigned to it and hopefully that is passing through to these subfolders. In most cases, it is going to.
The weaknesses around the subfolder and subdomain, even though they have the strength of potentially inheriting some of that root domain authority, is really two things. Number one, it's called the French searcher problem, which is essentially that some research has shown that people who are searching in France really like to see dot FR in the websites. In fact, they are going to be more likely to click on those results and more likely to buy from those. This French bias in France applies to many other countries as well. I believe some research was showing that the Czech Republic has the same thing with dot CZ domains. In fact, in Canada for a long time, I'm not sure if it is entirely true now, but in Canada for a long time they would click dot CA domains particularly around e-commerce types of websites because many US sites wouldn't ship to Canada and that could be frustrating. Same problem with the UK. So, there is this inherent biasing from users saying, "Hey, I'm not sure that I am going to click on this and I'm going to be able to get what I need."
Then there is also the issue of the search engines having a very strong, especially Google and particularly over the last few years it has seemed particularly strong that essentially a dot DE website doesn't need nearly the links or authority or ranking power or metrics that a de.RogerMozbot or a RogerMozbot.com/de needs. Having this top-level ccTLD, country code TLD, essentially gives you that extra boost in the search engines when you are targeting those international countries. That is why, generally speaking, if you are a big brand, big site, and you've got a big budget, I would recommend getting these specific ccTLDs, building up those country presences around those language groups.
There is something sort of even more frustrating, which is that technically Google Webmaster Tools will allow you to go into Google Webmaster Tools and you can say I want to target de.RogerMozbot.com specifically to Germany or to Deutschland. You can do the same thing with slash DE. Weirdly, even though you can do this in Google Webmaster Tools, it seems to us, and obviously we're not perfect, we don't know everything about Google, but it seems to us and to a lot of other SEOs that this targeting inside Webmaster Tools doesn't give you the same benefits that hosting on the dot DE does, particularly if you're hosting on the dot DE and you're hosted in that specific country, meaning the IP address is coming from that country. That's another very important thing to be thinking about.
So, knowing this, there's strengths, there's weaknesses. How do I make a decision? It is a tough, tough call, but there are a few things that can help guide you through.
First off, think about the brand reach and the marketing potential. If you are a brand that is big enough or powerful enough or you have enough of a marketing presence and a budget, or you think you will in the future have that presence and budget, I would go for option A, the root domain with the ccTLDs that are separate, the dot DE, dot FR, dot CO dot UK, those kinds of things. The reason being essentially that if you can build links to those, build up their authority, they're just going to have a much higher propensity to rank well in the search engines and they get through this problem of users being picky about what they like to click on, as well they should be. They've had bad experiences in the past with domains that aren't targeted to their country, so they don't want to click those anymore. So, you really want to get these domains.
The second thing to think about is languages, and this is a really tough one, particularly for English but also for a lot of languages that are spoken in multiple countries. You have languages like French which is spoken in parts of Polynesia, parts of France, I believe in Senegal, in France itself, in Quebec in Canada. You have got this kind of diverse group of folks. You go, well, which one should we have a dot CA and a dot FR, but it's going to be basically the same language. How do we tell those people that they're getting the same thing? This can be a challenge. What I generally recommend is if you think you've got a substantial population group in that specific country that speaks the language, in multiple countries I'd build those two separate websites, assuming you're a larger brand. If you're not, if you are sort of a smaller brand and you're okay with reaching out -- SEOmoz for example, we're fairly international, we're on a dot org. We own the dot com as well. It's okay to basically say, you know what, we're just going to be the dot com and that's going to serve all of US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc. All the places where English is a primary language. This is a fine way to go if you are sort of a small to medium size brand or if you're fairly sure that there is not a big need to be separately geotargeted. Now that said, in the future it is possible that we might invest along these lines. Nothing prevents you from owning those sites and just redirecting them for now.
I'd also be thinking really hard about user behavior and preferences. So, if you know, for example, that you're targeting a country that is going to be very sensitive to an outside presence or to the particular type of domain that you are on, you're let's say Fairyland and Ogreland and those two lands just don't get along with each other very well. You're in Fairyland. You're thinking I'll make a Fairyland TLD and that will target Ogreland, and the ogres are just thinking, no, I don't want any part of that. I don't want to use real countries because I don't know, maybe everybody gets along nowadays. Let's hope so. So, user behavior and preference is another thing that I think about.
Then the last one that can be complex as well is geo detection and redirection. Here's what happens. Let's take a look over here. Oftentimes, if you've got a website that has, let's say a homepage, and you have many different homepages, many different sites targeted towards different countries, what you'll do is you'll say, oh, here comes a visitor. They're coming to my website. But, wait, I can see here that they are from France. So, whoop, we're going to send them over here to the dot FR version of the site. You'd think this would be great, but it can be very challenging. We just had a question in Q&A that I answered actually with someone who had been doing this and was finding that Google couldn't crawl any of their international sites. Why? Well because their IP address is coming from the US. So, the only site that they'd ever see is the US site. When they clicked any link that would take them to France or any of these other places, they got instantly redirected. So, you need to provide that either a splash page or a homepage that defaults to one of the language or another or that defaults to a please choose your country code or we think that you are in this place. Even if you want to redirect them, use something like a JavaScript where it won't catch the bots in that redirection loop and prevent them from indexing those separate places. What's nice is that you can use cookies to essentially say once this person has been to this website and then selected that they want to go to France, from then on I'm going to say, "Ah, you! I recognize you. You were here last week. I'm going to send you to the French version of the site." That works very well. Just be really careful that you're not doing this by default by IP address because you'll hit the search engines and you'll redirect them to all the wrong places or you'll prevent them from getting to all the right places.
All right. So, this is a complex issue. I'm looking forward to some discussion in the comments. I certainly can provide some links to other resources on this one. I hope that next week you'll join us again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
We had a very interesting yet delicate issue with one of our clients at Epiphany recently. They are a multinational retailer and wholesaler. Due to a number of business reasons, their pricing and product range differed county to country. Therefore to prevent political issues they needed to restrict visitors from other countries viewing the prices and stock range of other countries, and they did this by detecting the origin of the visitors IP and the redirecting them to the subdomain that is targeted to their country of origin.
The issue here however was that GoogleBot will always have a US IP address and so none of the UK pages (which sit on the main www.site.com root domain) were indexed.
Obviously we had a predicament here as while we had a legitimate reason for needing to guide visitors to a specific subdomain and restricting their access to all other areas of the site, we also needed to grant GoogleBot access to ALL pages on ALL subdomains.
We were entering the murky waters of cloaking! *shudders*
However our solution, even if I do say so myself, was quite ingenious!
We first removed the site-wide redirect and opened the site up so that all pages could be crawled. Using the same IP detection, we then implemented a JavaScript lightbox that would show up if the visitors’ IP was NOT originating from the UK. This lightbox would then dynamically display content specifically tailored to the visitors’ country of origin and very clearly guide them into their subdomain.
To prevent the cloaking problem, on the lightbox we also included a very inconspicuous link for foreign visitors to close the lightbox and remain on the UK site if they wished.
While this solution catered for 99% of foreign visitors, there was still 1% that could leak through and choose the link to view the UK site, and so we went one step further.
Should the visitor originate from a non-UK IP address and then decide to close down the lightbox and visit the UK site, we removed all the pricing and the ability to purchase using the same IP detection.
If you want to read up on some of the in's and out's of cloaking, IP detection and geolocation I’d suggest watching this video by Maile Ohye on the Google Webmaster Central blog.
I'd love to read a more detailed YOUmoz about this Paul. I bet others would too.
Two thumbs down may prove otherwise!
I'll see what I can do, without naming the client it may be a little tricky though!
Thanks Rand!
We run a number of multilingual websites and have played around with all three options.
After lots of testing and 301ing, we have found that subfolders accompanied with geotargeting in GWT works the best in terms of both ranking and website development. Conversion rate seems unaffected by it - so no French problem here :)
When a new subfolder is launched, we always try to build a couple of conutry specific links to give it a boost. Works very well.
(edit: fixed a couple of typos)
Totally agree! We have had the exact experience.
@Thogenhaven, i have a burning question as to what you meant by 'multilingual website'
As we all know, running multilingual websites is actually quite different to running multi-regional websites or in other words website targetting specific countries. If you have a few websites with English as the core language and you just translate the content onto, say french and intend to target all francophone countries, then yes, I agree with you that the subfolder approach can help better "in the short term" as you make use of the might authority of the main domain.
However, if what you mean is that you have been running sites under ccTLDs and didnt manage to get good rankings, my question, if you dont mind me asking, would be: " how long have you tried that for?" venturing into using ccTLDs shouldnt be something that you just try for a few months and expect to get good results. Further, if your websites happen to be in a competitive niche market, ccTLDs should be taken as a long term SEO strategy. It'd be great to hear how many local links pointing to your previous ccTLDs you managed to garner within a specified timeframe, and some more detail on your sites size, etc...
Oh Rand! That's the first post I am not happy about. That was EXACETLY the theme for my first YOUmoz post I planned to write on the weekend! Well - I will get over it :-).
The only thing I want to add is, if you use either a ccTLD or a gTLD you should use of course the language in the further urls of that specific country you want to rank. And - another item - the recognition of the language form the search enginges is via reading the content rather than the right url structure. But of course the right country-specific TLD, subdomains, folders are prefered.
I think you should still write it! Particularly if you can tell stories and show examples, because I didn't do a great job of that :-)
And yes - the language issue is important. Where it gets really thorny is when you have a single language for multiple countries and only very slightly different content pieces (currencies/British vs. US spelling/etc).
Just want to add that duplicate content for different countries (e.g. same content in English for US, UK, AU) is no problem as long as Google can clearly assign a web page to a specific country. See for example John Mueller's post https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html in section "Dealing with duplicate content on global websites".
Thanks man, you just saved me a few days of work! I have a .com and plan on geo targeting by using com.de, .com/au. Basically I will change the content a bit to make it more relative for the specific country. Again, thanks!
Hey Rand, my client already has global rankings, but I also want to geo-target (.com/de, .com/au, .com/fr). If I go to gg webmater tools > site config > settings, the option under 'Learn More': "If you don't want your site associated with any location, select Unlisted."
So if I want to keep my client's international rankings the way it currently is on the .com, do NOT geo target to United States by selecting unlisted, right? But I would use geo targeting on the .com/de, .com/au, .com/fr?
francisco
You also have to watch the search terms.
For example 'cottage rental' and 'holiday rental' for the UK vs 'cabin rental' and 'vacation rental' for the US.
Hey Rand,
First off; thanks for this post. I've referred to it countless times since you put it up, and it always helps find the best solution for the client.
So, my question :
Are you aware of any changes to this since the recent Panda/Penguin updates?
Brilliant as this post is, it's now nearly two years old, and I wondered if you could post an update, even if just to confirm it's all still relevant.
Thanks again!
Ed
Hi Ed,
answering your question, I think you could read this post here on SEOmoz:https://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust
Ciao
Now THAT is what I was looking for - Thanks!
PS: Just realised you wrote it; that's a killer post. :)
Great post.. I'm using a .co.uk tld domain and want a global campaign. I have translated the pages and used .co.uk/fr. in the domain structure. My question is, is it as effective as .com/fr?
What the best practice and more effective?
Thanks, T
Petra, you should totally still write the post! having concurrent themes actually helps me learn more as each person contributing tends to present it from a different viewpoint.
Just don't include anything about marketing from Fairie Land to Ogre Land. That will be my next post! ;)
Next? Say First :)
ROTFL. Touche. Perhaps I should have added 'in my dreams" :)
please write your post...we need more example on this topic (intrenational seo) particluarly this year because a lot of my european client what to target many countries...
please write your post...we need more example on this topic (intrenational seo) particluarly this year because a lot of my european client what to target many countries...
Oh Rand, why did you spread my "secrets" to my customers??? Joking obviously :)
International SEO is for me a daily task, being Italian and being Italian spoken just by 60/65 million people around the world and mostly just in Italy itself.
My personal experience can mirror what you say in this WBF.
Just one thing I would like to add about Hosting Location of a website. If you buy a country level domain (.it, .es, .co.uk...) the best is always to buy it with an hoster in the country you want to market. That is especially true if your website is the online presence of a retailer business with physical presence in the country (as they could be a fashion brand, a food brand or an international service provider). In fact the country level domain name and national IP seem to be a quite important factor for local search (google places to be clear).
Even though I saw it used just on couple of cases, exists also the option to have the website actually hosted in your server in your data center, but using a local IP address of the country you want to market. This can be a valid option if you have your own dedicated server.
Finally, again about hosting and IP:
very smart and complete contribution :)
I work on a large scale tourism website the best case scenario is to use various TLD's to match each of the local demographics you are targeting, then use local translators to write content specific to that region (never use crappy Google translate or online services to translate content). Using sub domains only runs into problems and leaves specific countries not been ranked. I do not like sub domains at all and I would advise clients not to use them.
In regards to hosting in each local country it is not that big of a factor one thing is speed but if your user base is in Australia and you are hosting your site in the Netherlands it is not wise.
Best thing to do with "local" hosting is don't freak out - it's actually super simple to host your site via a proxy in the local region. That way you don't have to spend hundreds of man hours setting a up a new DB / Box over wherever you plan to target. Instead, get a proxy set up and cache all requests via that proxy. I wrote about this forever ago - check out the links to the software, like the uber shiny Varnish (https://www.varnish-cache.org/. Bottom line is most large companies don't want to invest in the infrastructure required for full hosting overseas - so don't advise them to! Help them find canny work arounds to improve performance, cheaply.
Great video Rand, had a question though for all the experts here.
Say you have a UK and US version of a page. You rank well in the US for a specific keyword and you want to target the same (localized) keyword for the UK. However, your US page is already ranking for the keyword on Google UK. How would you recommend preventing this from happening or getting your UK version of the site to rank instead of the US version?
Multinational SEO it's an underestimated vexed challenge - I can attest.
The definitive way to go is option A but you don't always need a cannonball to murder a mosquito, it really depends on your market and resources.
Make use of the meta lang tag if your CMS permits it if you follow option C on a per sub folder basis. I've mulled about efficacy of the GEO tag also but have no evidence to support its effectiveness. Dedicated local IP I find works really well, although overseas hosted sites can also rank well if the link profile proportion includes powerful local and language matched links. One of the greatest challenge I find often comes in equalising the qualitative inbound links per language if you operate on a option C basis.
There is a Google statement that meta tags are NOT used as geotargeting signals: Note that we do not use locational meta tags (like "geo.position" or "distribution") or HTML attributes for geotargeting. While these may be useful in other regards, we've found that they are generally not reliable enough to use for geotargetinghttps://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html
thanks Christoph, it's interesting, however I note that venue place listing pages that heavily use geopositional tags such as FourSquare, continue to rank well. A big takeaway from this is to be active in using these services for basic linkbuilding.
And I wouldn't be surprised to see also a "collateral" geolocation impact of Google HotPot and Latitude as social signal (for instance for shops retailers).
you don't always need a cannonball to murder a mosquito
Unless you happen to live on the Australian coast Toxorhynchites speciosus
What if you have a website in, for example:
France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Austria and UK.
Due to financial reasons, one .com domain is used.
In Belgium, we target 3 languages: NL, FR, EN
In Netherlands, we target 2 languages: NL, EN
Etc...
Can we use domein.com/nl/ for Belgium and The Netherlands, or can we get problems with duplicate content then?
Maybe we should use domain.com/nl-BE/ and domain.com/nl-NL/ to specify the country? (Microsoft does it that way)
Same for French, which we have in Belgium and in France.Same for German, which we have in Germany and Austria.
What to do with the English part? Just put it under domain.com, or make different sub folders like domain.com/en-BE/ and domain.com/en-NL/ ?
What is the best solution to this?
Many thanks!
I've been researching this for a client and came to the same conclusions. It's like I ordered you to make this video to help me explain the concepts to them. Thanks :-)
Great post.
What a can of worms.
I am new here and not an SEO guy, but come from the translation agency side.
As with everything, I am not sure you can take an all or nothing approach here. The majority of our clients entered into the foreign markets the same way. They started hearing from those countries and then decided to translate their English (in our case) site. Some of the problems we saw included:
Those are just a few 'other' considerations and I would love to hear from everyone on their experiences.
What about SEO for domains that are in Kanji or Chinese? There is another whole black hole. Wowsa.
How much consideration do the experts here put on the IT side? For instance, file management, database management? Do you have a path that eventually leads to complete segregation of the site to local pros?
What about CMS SEO: WP, Drupal, etc.? Custom CMS systems?
Gads, you could ask a million questions just on this one topic.
Here are a couple of resources that may help whichever direction you go:
Wikipedia list of TLD's - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains
Wikipedia list of ISO language codes (2 digit) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes
Thanks
We moved from a .dk domain to .com, with subfolders for supported languages - and for sure there was an immediate decline in rankings. Especially for highly competitive keywords that we ranked well for before, we now see ourselves in 5th-6th position and I definetly find it harder to rank in local search results with a .com domain.
I've been thinking about adding a page (instead of a 301) to the old .dk domain, and have the page rank for a single high competitive keyword. And then make a JavaScript redirect on the .dk page, so that all visits don't bounce already on the .dk page. Is that "legal"?
They haven't really used any form of linkbuilding but got quite some nice links naturally. Allmost all the links, also the international links are pointing to the .nl homepage. Only a few links are to the .nl/en/ part of the site.
At the moment 80% of the visitors are from NL so it is impossible to ignore those visitors. But they want to put the main focus internationally because there will be their main customer base.
The issue around each ccTLD sitting in isolation and not beneffiting from links into one entire domain can be partly remedied by relevant crosslinking between the domains (in an appropriate area of the site of course).
It's obviously no substitute for having one very strong domain but I've seen many examples of networks of multiple domains benefitting from this type of cross linking.
This is a great WBF it's a tricky subject formulating a strategy for targeting international serps. It would also be interesting to factor the search filter options that are available on google.it serps as i'm based in Italy so the filter options available (on the left column of the results) for Italian pages, sites based in Italy and also translated pages. It would be interesting to know how much these options are used in various countries and how much this would influence the decision making process on how to target that country.
Personally, but it is just a perception not really based on a large data set, I believe that the average user of Google do not even know or is aware of those opportunity Google offers him...
Good post Rand. I have a client at the moment who wishes to rank better internationally and I've recently been researching into whether to go with Subdomains or with ccTLD's. I think White Board Friday today has pretty much decided that for me now.
Does having the site hosted in the country being targeted make a large difference? E.g. Hosting domainname.fr in France. If this is not possible, does it make a large impact into ranking internationally?
Even though it would be better, if its not possible (for instance, because you need someone resident in the country in order to buy an hosting space, as it is in Spain), the gap can be solved especially enhancing this other classic location factor:
Remember that GWT points automatically all the country level domain names to target the users in the country the termination refers to, so that independently from the hosting location, the website will be preferred to one with a generic termination in the regional Google.
Another great whiteboard friday. We have just fleshed out our new domain format for our new international site launch. Right now we are working on the localization piece and I was wondering if you have any knowledge around global SEO. Many people we speak with are trying to figure out how international seo and translation come together. They have traditionally been separated and the providers (translators and SEO consultants) have been separate. Should they now be brought together? If so, how would it work? We’ve built an “international seo maturity model” that helps people figure out the right approach for them. Does this model make sense to you? What do you think is missing? Any info would be helpful.
How have the relatively recent changes in how G perceieves subdomains changed the above ? Is it better now to choose subdomain route over subfolder route ?
Also if client has a .co.uk and they want to geo-target say France, is the subdomain/subfolder route still an option or is the .co.uk still too uk specific, and this route would only work off a .com ?
Thanks for a great, great whiteboard friday. And this comes at the best time since we are planning to start an international website.
Multiple languages is a problem, so is the terminology used in cities.
If people in US are searching for budget hotels in US, it can turn out to be that people outside US interpret the same search need as cheap hotels or economical hotels. People in different parts of the world use different terminologies for popular terms. Thats also a big challenge as to what I should term as being an international player.
Would you suggest hiring people to write content absed on the lingo used for that geography?
Though most of the major issues have ben addressed here, I'd like to give a word of warning about ccTLDs, in the sense that they DO promote you in a specific country at the expense of hurting your rankings in others. As I pointed out in one of my posts, this gets so ridiculous as that Amazon Germany (amazon.de) raks #1 in Germany but does not appear in the SERPs of Google Austria, despite the fact that the two countries share the same language and a same border!
I have a .com website written in Spanish, about Spain, 99% of incoming links come from Spanish websites, hosted in Spain; and this website is number 1 en google.es for many competitive keywords and beats .es websites.
I think that if a website has incoming links that come from the same country websites, hosted in that country, has authority, and written in Spanish (in my case) language - it is more important than .es domain.
Also if we take as an example Google Translator - it does not translate well, so I doubt that Google can differentiate well between .co and .es websites for example. Probably google might think that it is a duplicate content. I think it is better to create an 'international' website, concentrate all efforts on this website, than of various .co, .es, etc. websites.
Also (in my case) I want to target not only public that live in Spain but also people from colombia, chilie, etc. and I am not sure if .es website would rank well in google.co. I believe .com would have more success.
Hello Randy after listening to your great video I have many questions. The main question to my dilenma is trying to target
multiply countries India, UAE and Brazil for the lighting industry using blogs and articles. But I am not sure how to go about this.
1. Should I have these articles in their language as well as English and where would I place them. articlezine?
2. I want to direct them to a page in my site of interest. Would having 3 different domains and redirecting these domains be a good way
to drive traffic to this page, with each domain having that country as sub domain to the main keyword driven domain name.
This may be a silly question, but why do some ccTLDs have two parts to the domain (e.g. .gov.cn, .com.cn or .com.au)? Do these domains operate/optimize differently than a domain with one part (e.g. .com, .fr, .de)?
What activities do you suggest to do SEO for a .com us based website promoting for google.au.
Thanks for sharing this great post which will help getting more of a website and help all people who are thinking about launching a new website
Just something to note - if you have a country specific TLD (e.g. .ie), you can't associate domain.ie/fr/ as being French. GWT takes the .ie tld and associates that with Ireland only and doesn't give you the international options.
Rand,
In reference to your last comment, if you are referring to redirecting or geotargeting settings in Webmasters tools, what if you showed different versions to seperate countries on languages while having the US version show globally?
Would searchbots still be able to read the entire site (every lanuage)?
-Your firend & secret admirer
Thanks for a great WBF - just what I was looking for.
I do have question about what domain we should choose for a client.
Basically we have a client that operates in the UK and Ireland but is about to launch in the US. The website for both UK and Ireland is currently hosted on a .com domain.
Because of the expansion into the US market I have suggested that we use a .us domain for the US site and then split the current site into .ie and .co.uk so that we can target each country with country specific keywords better. we would then use the .com domain as the international domain for the company.
The clients want's to use the .com as the US site but I think we should be able to target the US market better with a .us domain, that is registered and hosted in the US.
I know that .com is supposed to be the company domain but do Americans see .com as the American ccTLD over .us. Would this domain choice make a difference in geo-targetting?
Does this seem like the best way to go or does anyone have any other suggestions? I think different ccTLD's are the way forward over subdmains or country specific folders from WBF and the experiences of others on here.
Thanks
I'm concious that responding to an old post may not elicit a response but it's worth a try as this is a very helpful WBF outlining my exact problem with a new site I want to have created.
My current preference is for option A but one issue I have is as raised by gssguy with regard to some of the TLDs not being available. In this case the .com is being cybersquatted. My question is would using a .org be so bad?
I notice Rand mentioned that Seomoz is on a .org even they own the .com. What is the reason for that?
I'm currently building a Real Estate website for our company in Thailand.
We will start in English and translate it to Thai later.
There is one problem.
I registered a .com and I see that there is search volume both internationally and in Thailand. Now I really don't worry to much about TLD's because 90% of the Thai real estate sites are .com and most of them are hosted in Europe or the US.
So I see a lot of opportunity. Should I try and find a host in Thailand? I'm a bit worried about that because they are usually on the slow side. Also I have a .nl site hosted in the US and I have absolutely no problem ranking in the Netherlands. I also have a .com site in dutch which is hosted in the US and I don't have any problems ranking it in the Netherlands.
If I set my site to Thailand in google webmaster tools but the website is in English and will get links from other .com's will I be unable to rank well internationally?
If the competition is all hosted in the US and Europe would I be of advantage if I hosted the site in Thailand?
If they all host outside Thailand, there may be a reason for that?
Hello Rand,
I enjoyed watching, "International SEO: Where to Host and How to Target". Thank-you for your expertise.
I am writing about a search engine optimized website that I plan to start. I reside in Vancouver, BC.
In addition to targeting the Canadian market, I need the site to also target the U.S. market. The reason being is that the primary search term the site will be optimized for gets few queries in Canada.
I anticipate that the site content will be exactly the same, save for spelling differences (e.g. travelling vs. traveling) and other factors, such as currencies.
Based on the information that you presented, I am not sure which of the options that you discussed would be the best option for my site.
I would appreciate any additional insight that you can provide.
Thanks,
PeterB1
I currently have a .UK and .COM domain for my UK business. However I plan on running a French website too, to target my French customers (it will be in French too).
Hosting the website in the country I'm targeting makes sense (e.g. I want to buy a .fr domain, so I plan on choosing a French based hosting company for the IP address).
The question I have is, do I need to BUY the domain from France? Or will my UK 123-reg account be sufficient in terms of SEO/local search? I'd rather buy using my 123-reg, then change the nameservers to a French hosting company (it will be easier to manage all domains from one account).
Any advice?
Question: I have a business that is located in Brazil and my website is developed in Magento. A friend that is a magento's expert told me to host my website with Aspiration because it's a very fast and reliable hosting but they don't offer hosting in Brazil just in the US. They do offer free access to their global content delivery network and all my images, javascript, and CSS will be located in Brazil.
If I host with them is it going to be bad to my SEO?
Thank you sooo much friends :)
It's an old article and might have got obsolete by now...considering Google changing its policies every now and then. Currently i am facing a very similar problem, when i am asked to target 4 countries viz. USA, UK, Australia & Canada; while until now it was just USA. While there is no essential change in the content language/ otherwise; I am confused as to how to go about marketing all four now. I have my existing domain hosted in USA which is ranking pretty well in google.com. Now how should i target other three countries, i can think of following three options:-
1. Buy three more domains viz. .au, .uk, .ca and get them hosted in the specific countries and put different contents in all four. Now this may have problems as mentioned in Option A of this article:- we'll have to manage separate backlinks, again writing different content for all four is also a challenge.
2. Buy .au, .uk, .ca and redirect it to .com; but then i am not sure if the other would be of any use, as google might not be able to index them.
3. Just have on domain .com and start doing off page submission for rest three. But then i don't consider offpage as results oriented as optimizing your website is.
The more in think, more confused i get. Could somebody here please help me out- Rand or any other genius??
PLEASE GUYS!! HELP!!!
Hi,
We have a .com website promoting holidays to a particular country. With all the recent changes we have noticed getting a lot of traffic from our own country instead of getting traffic from tourist who are looking to visit our country from other parts of the world.
Is there any option to tackle this issue without creating sub domains or sub folders etc? Can we simply use the .com domain to target the world. We have already done the settings in Google Webmaster Tools to target worldwide.
Also if we go for the sub domain option (because we believe this is a free option available within out Cpannel), can we create a sub domains say for 2 countries who speak English (UK & US) and then use the same content as in the current .com domain as we are unable to commit for any spend on translating the content at the moment?
BTW, we are using Wordpress.
Many Thanks.
Hi, we have just launched two versions of our website, one is a .com for the US, the other is a .com/gb for the UK
I was just wondering if the UK site should be .com/uk or if it doesn't make a difference?
Thanks
Karen
Hi Rand i want to target USA,Australia,Uk, Europe and i am ready to buy ccTLDs for USA,Aus,Uk,and Europe, but in Europe 28 countries i also want to target all Europe countries. i want to Use same content for all USA, Australia,Uk and Europe. is this Fine way ? and and .Eu ccTLD want to make sub folder for rest 28 countries with Same content Please suggest me the best way. Thanks
Any comments on how relevant this is today?
I'm working with a US site at .com and our international set of the same site which is all under .info/en_UK or .info/en_FR, etc.
I've set the geo-target for the US site to US and each of the international subdirectories to their respective geolocations but I still can't seem to get our US site to rank above the international home page when just searching for our brand name (while in the US). Any ideas?
I should specify that the US site has a different URL than the International set.
I have watched this video several times now and still cant fix what happened to me. My site about living in Thailand https://www.livinginthailand.net/ was running along perfectly, receiving visitors from all English speaking countries "proportionately" up till September 22 2012 at that point, I started to get near no visitors from all countries except the USA. Metrics on all countries where similar, 7+ page views time 10 min + BR < 35% As my site is extremely relevant to all countries but no regional variation are needed, how can I indicate to Google my content is designed for all readers from all English speaking countries?
Even if I was to go with regional sites, .ca .com.au etc I'm at a loss to see how I could rewrite for a different audience as the language is the same and no regional variations would exist except prices. I can not see how I could avoid duplicate content issues if I just reproduce for each country.. Either in folders, sub domains or top level domains.. any ideas or comments would be strongly appreciated.
Hello!
I have a question about the results in Google.
The domain company.com has three languages. When you go to the website you automaticly go to the language of your browser (EN, NL or DE). This is the following: company.com/en/ , company.com/nl/ or company.com/de/. The url company.com has only a redirect function to those pages.
When you search in Google for "company" you find as the first result: company.com. And not company.com/en/ or those other extensions. Searching in Google.de make no difference.
I want to influence that when you search i.e. in Google.de with "company", you find company.com/de/ and not (only) company.com.
Can I influence that? And how?
We use subdomains so we can host the regonal e-commerce sites in the specific coutry for speed (ranking factor, user experience) because our domain is our brand. So all printed materials are branded the same way and we use geo targeting for the specific subdomain. We also built links from local websites to the local subdomain.
There is a great icrossing article about it:https://greatfinds.icrossing.com/international-seo-best-practices/
Thanks Rand, great video!
You didn't really clarify the issue of where to host, ie server locations. So from what i understand, Google tends to favour sites that have a local server in their desired geo targeted area.
So if the decision was to go with a sub directory, the pro would be a more authoritative link profile, but the tradeoff would be a centralised server? (ive been told that all sub directories would have to be under the one server)
Thoughts?
Dear Aaron,
Thank you for explaining international seo in detail with a video. It really solved many if my questions. But i am having one problem. I own a site . I target that site to united states in google webmaster tools. So if i create a subdomain or a sub folder targeting to other countries so do i have to unlist my main domain from targeting to United states or will it be ok. I mean let me explain you in detail.
My site is touchwebsitesolutions.com that i target to United states in google webmaster tools.So if i create in.touchwebsitesolutions.com and target to india and i another subdomain and target to another country .so my domain is targeting US so do i have to unlist it from US in webmaster. Looking forward for your early reply.
Thanks
Hi
You recommended option A but at the same time you are saying that its a costly solution for small businesses. If I choose option C Rand then do I have to copy the whole .com domain content to the subfolders or only a landing poage can work? SEO for multiple countires is a challenge really but I just need a small clarification from you as you know that having whole site copied multiple times is not possible so can you suggest me something for this?My concern is- If I hav a website for Australia that is getting awesome traffic from Australia dn now I am going to target UK and India, what should I do?
Australian site is also in English obviously so do you think if I do some offpage for same Austrlian .com.au domain for google.co.in and google.co.uk then I can rank the same site in india and UK?
Any clue? I usually saw that if your site is already ranked well in a country and now you want to target it on same keywords in other countries with same language then its easier.
Amit
Rand and/or Mr Fiorelli,
My apologies if this has already been asked/ answered. (I couldn't find it if it has been)
Currently our website owns the international root domains to our website, but they redirect to the main URL which is a .com, where we have the international pages set up as sub folders that can be found by clicking on the country's flag.
At this time we do not have the time or resources to set up the individual root domains... Would it be better, or worth our time to redirect the root domain directly to the corresponding countries sub folder instead of the homepage?
Thanks!
Jaime
At the end of the video/transcription Rand mentions the old IP detect and redirect issue where US bots don't get to see the non-US sites.
Even if you want to redirect them, use something like a JavaScript where it won't catch the bots in that redirection loop and prevent them from indexing those separate places.
This morning we discussed a potentially snappier alternative to the Detect-IP-and-show-a-message solution (like Amazon use):
Domain.co.uk/ -> detects a US IP address & redirects user/bot -> domain.com/home.htm
Domain.com/ -> detects a UK IP address & redirects user/bot -> domain.co.uk/home.htm
On both sites the /home.htm page (and all other inner pages) don't have any redirects, only the root domains.
Using a country-selector menu would provide links to each domain/home.htm to cross-link and ensure they are all indexed.
At the moment (perhaps I need another coffee), I can't see any drawbacks with this approach, provided that the content is sufficiently different across the sites.
Just wondered if anyone else had tried this?
Thanks for the informative video! Really learned a lot about setting up an international website. However, I have one question that I can't find an answer to through countless hours of search.
I know the following is not best practice but due to upper management, this is what we are planning to do.
We are planning to buy a .hk ccTLD and create multiple service page under that domain. Each page under the .hk ccTLD domain will be a blank page and simply redirected to a same service page under a .com domain.
Now my question is, will the .hk domain give us the benefit in the search engines in HK and will Google recognize this as targeting audience in HK. Please advise.
I tried convincing to simply create a new website but failed.
Realize this was posted a while ago, but just encountered this issue for the first time and found this video incredibly helpful. Thanks for that!
I'm still a little fuzzy on the duplicate content issues of a ccTLD, though. When the languages aren't necessarily different (I'm looking at you Canada), what's the likelihood of a duplication penalty? Seems like the ideal world is a completely country-targeted version of a brand's site, but the reality seems to be a lot closer to copy and paste w/ a few slight changes. From what I can tell, search engines aren't freaking out about this, but running the risk feels like playing with fire (sure, I'm thrilled, but I think my eyebrows are singeing).
Anyway, great video, as per usual.
Hey Dave,
I've also been doing a lot of research on this today. This is what I found from Google about geotargeting.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399
Hopefully it helps get you the answer you were looking for in regards to avoiding duplication.
Hi Dave,
I needed some clarification recently and was pointed to another (more recent) post which is really helpful: https://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust
Think you'll find your answer here, on the rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” attribute (which allows you to specify the target country as well as the language, so en-US for example), along with some other good tips for Bing, and your sitemaps.
Cheers,
Ed
hi seomoz addicted,
i totally agree with randfish,
especially when he talk about redirection; i inserted a php redirection on my site homepage that redirects visitors to the right domains. everything it was working fine when i realized that googlebot was no more able to index both sites becouse it was redirected only to one.... i think that i'll create an home page where visitor could select their language and then by setting a cookie that redirects only the returning visitors ... what do you think?
I've just one doubt, shall i put this home page on both domain, and what will be the new url adress of my current home page?
hope to have been clear
thanks,
Guido
It's really great to see Rand doing a video on this topic, because it's one which always gets brought up and there's never any conclusive proof as to what works best. I've experimented with all three scenarios and each has performed in its own way, quite honestly, no one strategy has shone more than the others - I can say that buying multiple domains was harder, because links had to be built to multiple sources, which took a lot longer than allowing authority to flow onto sub directories..
Hi, a great post.
But what is better for a country for example in switzerland are 4 Official languages.
German ( 74% )
French ( 21% )
Italian ( 4 )
Rumantsch ( 1% )
And the cctld for a switzerland is: .CH , and now what is better, domain.ch/fr / domain.ch/it / domain.ch/ de , or on subdomains?
Thanks
I would do it like this:
.com/ch-italian
.com/ch-german
.com/ch-whatever-language
EDIT:
Since I can't toggle between screens when replying to a post, I have to adjust my reply.
.ch/it
.ch/de
.ch/whatever-language
This is a problem quite common in Spain too, as here we have Spanish, Gallego (a mix of Spanish and Gaelic), Basque and Catalan (and Valencian).
The websites of the Ministries tend to use the subdomain solution. Check the Ministry of Education website as example: hhtp://www.educacion.es
I believe that's the best solution in cases where more official languages are spoken in a country, as classic acronyms like fr, de, it are too much related to country/language. In your case I would use the plain name of the language to avoid confusion.
Other option, almost impossible... ask to the Swiss government to promote with ICANN the creation of .chit / .chde / .chfr / .chro domain names, as Catalunya did with the .cat domain name (which is a generic domain name, attention, not a territorial one).
On the hosting side, what about the CDN approach of just using a CDN to host your site and serve up content from their servers in the country that requests the site? This way you don't have to pay for hosting in each country and manage different servers.
Great Post Rand! Well I am thinking of an experiment here!
If I purchase a domain lets say (rogermoz.com.au) and put some links on it and then redirect this to my origional website(subfolder) like xxx.com/au so here do you think that search engines will only pass links value via 301 redirect or we might get an advantage of 301 redirect from Australian Domain as we want to rank xxx.com/au in Google Austalia . (Not sure!)
Thanks!
This is great information. Thank you for posting this. I dont know when I will use it be I will book mark it for when that time comes.
As always another great quality WBF! I always wondered if it would be OK to provide content in other languages in the /es/ structure but now I have the answer!
I guess my question is a little bit more basics then what was gone over. But if using "option C : subfolders" do you create keywords for each languages?
The answer is obvious too... if you mean optimize a page with the keywords in the subfolder languages: yes. But the right keywords, not a simple translation of the one you use, because a plain translation maybe can lead to a total incomprehensible mess.
Rand
This WBF is one of the most interesting and one of the most useful of this new year...I really feel that seo is going global and i can confirm the change the end of SEO disregard in my clients minds.
So i find also interesting the 40 comments and + above here and i can't add much, except to say that in my experience i've observed that LOCAL CONTENT is something which is very important.
It's very difficult to base an international seo strategy without add some local terms, local adress in page, phone number...To me if you have a local link building strategy+local content + local hosting + option 1 of Rand WBF (ccTLD) you'll probably win
i would also like to share this interesting piece from Vanessa Fox blog (she wrote this article in 2008 but it remains extremely relevant)
https://www.ninebyblue.com/blog/making-geotargeted-content-findable-for-the-right-searchers/
How about using ccTLD and sub folders in one URL? For example, please go to bmw.com and select a country. Country: Canada. URL: https://www.bmw.ca/ca/en/
it's bad to do that! it's better to keep url simple :)
Even in the case you have 1 category, any page url is going to be far away from the home page; imagine with subcategories...
Yes, but... it always depends on the type of the business you're in, as well as on the business model, which may differ between your markets... In my opinion, the biggest challenge is always a competition between sites that use same language, but are targetting different regions, resp. countries - classic example English for US vs. English for UK, English for CA, English for ZA , AU, IN etc. etc.
Or French for FR vs. French for CA, BE, CH and so on.
The issue is actually, in most cases, Google's own inabilty to know exactly or to believe, that this particular site is for that particular region; if site is hosted not on the relevant TLD, but on .com etc. Webmaster Tools are not good enough (or Google's believe in own tool and its settings is not hard enough) to make it work smoothly. I mean, always smoothly.
Anybody has any good experience with link rel=alternate lang= href= ? (just a question).
Thanks.
And thanks to Rand for entering this unique area of SEO expertise, so different from US, or UK, or English only world!
Andrei
Thanks Rand,
We have taken a number of approaches, including subdomains, employing the domain in the target country e.g. instantatlas.fr, instantatlas.nl. However we have found that one the best performing approaches for us was to create multilingual pages on our .com site and setting Content-Language and charset for each target country. It might not be perfect but it they have driven lots of leads from these countries and they do rank very high in the search engines of these locations.
We know it does not appeal to every visitor but for those people who are bilingual, the can find us in their native language and then use the software in English. Overall it gives us a small foot hold in places that we would not normally be able to reach.
Examples below
Italy https://www.instantatlas.com/Software-di-visualizzazione-di-dati.html
Portugal and Brazil https://www.instantatlas.com/Instantatlas-visualizacao-de-dados.html
Japan - https://www.instantatlas.com/whatisinstantAtlas_JP.html
China - https://www.instantatlas.com/WhatisInstantAtlas_CN.html
Korea - https://www.instantatlas.com/data-visualisation-software-kr.html
David
The only problem with that method is if your page is in French and targeting the population of France, it may also pick up traffic from Canada, Switzerland, and other countries where French is a major language.
It would be fine should you be Global company, however if you are operating in just one country that has multiple languages or only servicing selected counties around the world, I'd much prefer another method - one that you have much more control over and you arn't leaving it all up to Google to work out!
You mentioned that the big search engines aren't great at picking up languages and making their minds up about where a site is geo targeting. I was looking at this yesterday and I found a bunch of sites that had gTLDs and foreign language content that were being ranked higher in their respective Google engine.
Google can read and translate, surely they would use content language as a big signal?
If Google bases its recognition on the datasets of Google Translate... I would have my doubt about the real ability to recognize the different pattern of multi countries languages (for instance Spain Spanish, Mexico Spanish, Argentina Spanish and USA Spanish...), especially when they suggest to not use those tools that use Google Translate for the creation of multi language website.
Surely they recognize linguistics patterns, but mostly because the use of one word instead of another or its ortography can differ from versions (e.g.: carro > mexican spanish for coche > spain spanish or canonicalisation > uk and canolicalization > usa) and therefore are typical of one geo or another.
Better to show to the bots exactly what language are you using (EN-GB, EN-US...)
There are definitely ambiguities. My response to that is why can't websites written in Spainish rank well in all Spainish speaking countries?
And what about where language is clear cut? Imagine a website is hosted in Holland, it has outbound and inbound links to and from Dutch websites and the content is written in Dutch. These are all legitimate signals to rank a gTLD in Google.nl.
I guess my point is that ccTLDs, subdomains and pages referencing your country code are just a part of a much bigger picture. I would probably suggest a very significant part, but if all of your other signals are up to speed then I doubt its influence.
We've been looking at this for some time now, and whilst we were heading towards the gTLD/subfolder route, our gTLD doesn't mean anything in any of the foreign language countries we're trying to target. Even the US spelling is different to the UK one so we're stuck for English too! Unless you're a big enough brand, or your name is transferrable, like algogmbh says you need to consider the domain language in the countries you are targeting.
Is there any reason to believe that a xxx.de website will rank better if the site is hosted by a German (vs US) provider?
As a primary effect - possibly, Google has been using IP address hosting as a signal. But, even stronger is likely the speed/load issues, which will have some direct impact (though GG says site speed is a very small factor) and a great second order effect, with more people loading pages faster, you'll likely get more engagement, more links, more UGC, etc.
My experience is that the geographic location of the hosting server does not matter at all.
There are many .in domains we have which are hosted in US or UK but rank equally well on Google.com, Google.co.in, Google.co.uk, Google.com.au , etc.
The uptime of the server and the page load speed are more important. Of course the (ccTLD) matters a lot but a (ccTLD) will give priority for the rankings for that country Google domain and then the other country specific domains of Google.
Not just a single language in multiple countries but multiple languages in a single country, like Canada, Switzerland and even the U.S. in some cases when a site wants to be able to offer services in Spanish as well as English. It's tempting to think of language and country as one variable but they are actually independent and both have to be dealt with.
The physcial server location seems to be a stronger influence than I previously thought. I'm not quite sure if page speed is really an even stronger factor. I have a really speedy website on a DE domain here. German language content, hosted in the UK with loading times < 1,5 seconds. However, we are still having trouble to rank the .DE website in Germany on top of its international counterparts, all international sites are hosted on the same UK server.
So from my experience IP location is equally important as the right cc TLD. Even more important than both server location and domain is language. It's going to be difficult to rank a .DE site without proper localization including completely translated content but also titles, alt tags and all the other onpage factors you can think of.
I also agree with it. IP Address play very important role when you targeting any geo location. I think you will get good trust rank for that in point of Google. Search engines use several metrics to determine the authority, the trust and the strength of a domain. Those metrics are very important since they can heavily affect the search engine results.
A colleague of mine was managing some sites in Indonesia that were hosted in an Indo datacenter. Upon making a switch to a DC outside of Indo they experienced a significant drop in the SERPs. They moved back to an Indo DC and regained their rankings over time. Now, is the location of the DC a direct impact on the algorithm? Not sure as correlation != causation, perhaps the move affected their page load time or some other factor I'm not aware of. However, that case at least strongly suggests that there may be benefits in geo targeting to hosting a site in the region for which you are geo targeting.
i had the same problem but this was just switching servers within the same country.... We didnt hade much trouble get higher up again.
Very interesting, we have refrained from going multilingual over the years partly because of this very issue. On a side note, has anyone any opinion on the benefits/drawbacks of (for example) using say a .hk domain specifically for adwords landing pages that target Hong Kong?
If in case you have offices in the countries that you want to target then you can use hCards with different Ids on the contact page.
For example if you want to target India, UK and UAE then you can have the 3 office addresses on the contact page using microformats and give headings as India Office , UK Office , UAE Office and the title of that page can be:
' UK, UAE and India Office Contact Details | yourdomainname.com' and the relevant meta description tag.
You can add the contact details using the hCard in the footer of every page also.
I actually tested (by "mistake") the server location vs ranking with a do co.uk domain and the signals are pretty strong - it matters were the server is located. It doesn't make any sense however but it looks like it matters.I have a dot at domain that is hanging in the wind and I will do a test with it - to start with I will host it in the US and place a german text landing page on it then I will place it on a german server and wait to see what happen and then move it to Austria and see what happen.Overall there is the server quality factor that is somehow hard to track... and maybe I will just waste a few days of my life with this test :)
What will be best practise if you allready have a site with a ccTLD that is targetting both the visitors of that country and international visitors. most of the links are pointing to example.nl/ and there is a example.nl/en/ page targetting international visitors.
If you redirect the /en/ page to a .com you lose all the domain thrust, but with .nl it is very hard to target international visitors.
That really depends by the link building strategy you have followed. All the links, even those ones from not NL sites, are pointing to the main root example.nl?
Because in that case things can be a little bit harder than having the "international" links pointing the /en/ subfolder.
Depending on the markets' priority, I would probably choose between these two options:
Great video, Rand. You mentioned some research about searchers preferring to click on sites with country-specific ccTLDs - could you point us to any of that info?
Many thanks! - Amy
With all the changes Yahoo has gone through the past year does paying to be included in the Yahoo Directory have any possitive impact on international & domestic ranking or is it no longer considered a factor???
Knowing that right now the only still interesting Yahoo! Directory is the US one (as all the other regional directories have been dismissed since a long time)and that it accepts only sites in english (or with an english version included), I would not use it as tactic for not english based sites.
Very interesting whiteboard this week Rand.I deal with a lot of local tourism clients in (South Africa) that target English-speaking overseas customers. In my experience the COM has always been the stronger than the ccTLD co.za. However, I've noticed a changed in the SERP and more and more ccTLD are climbing through the top positions. IMO this has a lot to do with the combination of organic and Places results. Does anyone else have noticed this too and what do you recon is the best practice?
Great Post. Really helped sort through competing ideas and information on international SEO.
This is a fantastic summary of what is quite a big subject in the industry. I’ve done work on a number of sites with an international focus over the years, and a lot of research into this issue as a result, and this is the clearest summary I’ve ever heard of it. Thanks Rand.
Great info Rand :)
I am in a very similar situation for one of my customers right now and after thinking about what they are trying to achieve, I will be recommending that we go down the route of purchasing the individual .de, .fr, etc domains, get hosting within that country and the best possible chance to achieve a brand and reputation of being international.
Regards,
Andy
I would add one thing - try to avoid usage of drop-downs for language switch. These are indexed much harder than other ways to make it.
I would say ccTLDs works fine. Not necessay hostings needs to be local i have several ccTLDS hosted in US but ranks well .es, .com.my, .in etc. Ofcorse local content and local backlinks matter a lot.
Thanks for this good summary, Rand !
Great job
Hey, how about getting 2 options in the same time? For example, i would go for option A and get all the cc TLD-s i need, and on the main site, let's say a .com, i would make country targeted subfolders. Then, permanent redirect each of those subfolders to the coresponding cc TLD.
This way, the cc subfolders would pass link juice and authorithy to the cc TLD;s, and visitors from specific countries would see the coresponding TLD in search results, etc ...
Of course,the cc TLD's would be hosted in specific countries and have a specific country IP...
Do you see any bad parts in this deal ? :)
anybody has any comments with regards to this proposal?
I have a .co.uk domain with backlinks from all over the world.
I would like to have more international visitors, yet I have 75% from the UK.
On the advice of numerous SEOs I am instigating a 301 from my (very valuable TTLD) to a new .com
I also have various 301's from .com.au's to this new .com.
My goal is to get higher ranking in google.com, and google.com.au and not just google.co.uk
The reason is my site applies to all three countries, mainly the US, then AU, then UK. It is just I have had the .co.uk for 13 years and have good profile.
The server has always been in the US (because of resellers).
No one has suggested this, but why not purchase .de .fr .ca .whatever and 301 to the main domain you want traffic for, then create backlinks for the country related domain?
As far as I could test meta tags are not used as geotargeting signals but optimizing social profiles related to a site works like a charm
International seo webinar with more examples on this topic https://www.vkistudios.com/webinars-international-seo
I have a website written in English with a .com domain. I want the website to be available and rank well in Google for all English speaking countries (US, Candada, Australia, UK, etc).
However, the website is hosted in the Czech Republic. Do you guys think this could have some impact for ranking?
Considering everything discussed here, I would like to share with you some ideas and doubt :)
Let's take as example one random website, abcd.com , already live since years with good ranking in different languages. The structure so far, for the different languages is:
abcd.com/ English
abcd.com/it/ Italian
abcd.com/es/ Spainish
abcd.com/de/ German
abcd.com/fr/ French
Every languages has its own XML sitemap and it's geotargeted on Google Webmaster Tool.
We have also this domains:
abcd.it -> 301 redirect to abcd.com/it/
abcd.es -> 301 redirect to abcd.com/es/
etc. etc.
Now the question/idea... Since Google said it's possible now to use the canonical tag across different domain, I was thinking to remove the 301 and use, instead, the canonical to avoid the duplicate content issue.
Basically now the scenario is this:
acbd.it/pizza.html it's redirected to abcd.com/it/pizza.html
I would like to change it in this:
abcd.it/pizza.html reachable and tagged with the rel=canonical to abcd.com/it/pizza.html
I think this can help in terms of ranking and maybe it will increase the CTR avoiding the "French searcher problem"… Am I wrong?
if my comprehension of the google canonical tag is good, i think that 301 redirect is more powerful than use the canonical tag for the same purposes...
We've observed that canonical tag works better on duplicated content issue inside the same website particularly to avoid bad effects of dynamic urls.
We've also observed that when we add the canonical tag in affiliates pages or into the source code of some shopbots we have deal with, the original page (our site) remains strong and preserve its ranking.
So i don't want to assume that i know how Google could deal with scenarios you've presented above, but in my experience canonical tag is better (with strong results) to avoid duplicated content inside the same website.
Hi Rand
Just to follow on about your comments regarding xxx.com/fr/ - subdomians. If you have an international site, you tell google this via webmaster tools by NOT setting the Geographic target. How do you tell google via webmaster tools the the xxx.com is international, xxx.com/fr/ subdomain is for France, xxx.com/de/ is for Germany, at the same time? It appears there is only 1 setting per domain.
thanks
Warren
It is posible to target different subflders to different regions by setting up different sites in webmaster tools. You have to setup in webmaster tools www.yourdomain.com/fr/ for france, www.yourdomain.com/de/ for germany and so on. Then, you are allowed to target each of those sites to a separate country. Just add them as different sites in webmaster tools.
Whiteboard friday, always proposing great ideas and concepts! Alot of learning, still the whiteboard on Interlinking is my favorite.
Wow, that was a fascinating WBF. Thank you.
Seo is going to rule the industry.