As promised, here's the first in our series of Whiteboard X-day videos direct from the floor of SMX West. Our first victim is our good friend and extremely active SEOmoz member, Will Critchlow of Distilled. Will and his business partner, Duncan Morris, came in from London for SMX West and it was great to see them both.
As a London-based firm, they have a number of international clients and the ranking discrepancy between .com rankings and those for country-specific TLDs (.co.uk, .ca, .fr, etc) can be dreadfully inconsistent and more than a little frustrating. In this video Will and Rand discuss what causes these differences, how to work around them, and what the engines might try and do to help correct them.
Enjoy!
Tomorrow's guest for Whiteboard Tuesday: ShoeMoney himself, Jeremy Shoemaker!
By: Scott Willoughby
Whiteboard Monday-SMX West Interviews: Will Critchlow on Ranking Foreign Domains
Whiteboard Friday
The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
The accent comes through much better in video than it does in blog. ;-)
I was thinking this exact same thing! I mean I know a bunch of the guys around here (Duncan, Ciaran, Will, Tom and Rishil) are from the UK - but I forget about the accent because when I read their blog posts in my head they sound.... well, like me.
As I'm watching this I was going "why is he talking like that?".
I am loving this Whiteboard series!
It's funny - you guys all sound British in my head (or at least those I haven't met do).
Also - when in the US, I sounded quite American to my ears - I picked up on everything around me.
Imagine what it's like to be me :|
No, you didn't :) - as far as I can hear now.
And as the one who speaks English with Russian accent, I would say that British English seems far more difficult to understand...
Vin - we don't have accents, we're English (or at least I don't as I'm from the South of England).
;)
lol... I wonder what people make of mine, I am a west Indian born and raised in East Africa, studied in Wales (3 years) and work in London? I cant decide what accent I have.
A London accent - definitely...
I always thought you were French, so I was doubly confused when we met at Pubcon. You Europeans all look alike to me ;)
And I was very confused when you weren't a Brit.
I was actually born in France....
Here we are picking on Google's algos, and we can't even figure out which country each other is from :)
Phenomenal interview, Will. What a great tip re: the subfolder submission to WMC.
Question: Will comments on this interview count as credit toward Will's 'thumb war' with Dr Pete?
Thumb wars are so last season darling. Whiteboard friday wars are where it's at. Right, let's see.
Will - 1
Pete - 0
Looking good so far ;-)
Technically, this was a Whiteboard Monday, so it doesn't count :)
You know, come to think of it, Scott gets all the credit for the videos, even when he's not in them. It hardly seems fair. I mean, all he does is the planning, filming, editing, and hours of other thankless work.
I KNOW! And it's making it so much harder for me to catch him!
;)
That sounded dangerously like a 'thank'! You're destroying the thanklessness of being the behind-the-scenes video guy!
Get back in your box!
;)
Is this the new Will-Pete rivalry?
What? Scott vs. me? I don't have a chance!
;)
You're only saying that cos you're losing :-p
Who has the least points in this discussion, Critchlow?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Talk to me when you're in the top 20 Tommy boy!
;)
Thanks for the kind comments, guys. Thanks to the 'moz for asking me to do this - it was loads of fun (though a lot more nerve-wracking than you might imagine).
It's a complicated issue and we have barely scratched the surface here, but at least it's a start.
Incidentally, we only have a very small sample-size for watching the effects of webmaster central localisation - would be interested in hearing others' experiences...
PS also - turns out I was wrong about apple.co.uk - although Apple Computers don't own it, it's not the record label (of beatles fame) either - I can't actually find their site! Apple.co.uk is owned by an illustration company.
I think the advice was somewhat sound here, but using big websites like Amazon and Apple to discuss this issue is really a moot point. These big guys hardly ever need to think which is better:
a seprate tld
a subfolder
a subdomain
It will usually will work either way. It is the small to medium size companies that have tothikn about this carefully before proceeding. Considering how competition is doing it and such
You are absolutely right. It's always the small guys who have this hardest - we wanted to discuss with a examples that everyone would understand.
Unfortunately there is no easy answer for small businesses - they are far more likely to fall foul of problems with one of their domains not getting enough weight if they split it up but also need the localised TLD in order to rank in the local SEs much more than the big guys. For small businesses, I would consider sticking with one domain (primary country tld if only one target or .com if multiple) and localising on-site as necessary, but above a reasonable size, the benefits of local domains becomes ever stronger.
If there are other languages involved (something we didn't get into at all) then it gets more complicated (as you would expect).
I'm not sure I fully agree with this. While you're right that it's a big issue for the small guys it's still a pretty big issue for the big guys as well.
Despite the fact that Apple have apple.com/UK often it's the .com site that ranks for searches ending you up on the US content.
Similarly with Amazon, it's often the .com domain which outranks the .co.uk even in google.co.uk searches.
Trying to fix that across multiple languages can be tricky.
"Despite the fact that Apple have apple.com/UK often it's the .com site that ranks for searches ending you up on the US content."
Well...not much you can do with this since everything resides under the .com
"Similarly with Amazon, it's often the .com domain which outranks the .co.uk even in google.co.uk searches."
I would love to look at specific queries on this. Probably just the case where the pages are so simialr that Google is ranking the .com over the UK because of link value.
I think I figured out why the Apple geolocation is so bad. Compare these two pages:
https://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/
https://www.apple.com/itunes/
You see how similar they are? That means that when someone searches from the UK for itunes the US version will always outrank the UK version.
There's actually quite a lot you can do to help this problem but of course it's a bit beyond the scope of a moz comment!
Sure that is part of the issues and because it resides under the .com domain name. You are right the first move is to differentiate the content and go from there.
Yes Tom I saw it, but then how come they save their pages from falling into the sand box for content duplication?
Nice whiteboard Will :-)
Re the webmaster central thing - you had it right you can register a sub-domain or a sub-folder in the usual way and then geo-locate from there.
Note that it's only possible to geo-locate witha generic domain (like .com or .org etc) it's not actually possible to have apple.co.uk/US to target the US market which I think is a little unfair.
Both Will and I could talk for hours about the whole geolocation issues thing but this was an informative 7 mins :-)
I had a lot of fun - far too much fun - investigating the differences between UK and US results when I was over there. The most interesting thing was that I no longer ranked #1 for my own (full) name!
Will, it was great to meet you in person finally. And that sure is a nice shirt you have.
Will - nice thumbs up at the end - very Cheggers Plays Pop!
Really interesting point about the subfolders. In terms of the content duplication, rewriting is really the only solution - we've got a client with two sites just in the UK which essentially offer the same services and have had to extensively edit one of them - so long as your site isn't huge (<100 pages) it shouldn't be that much of an issue.
On the .com, .co/uk thing, my experience recently has been that typing Google.com into the address bar gets an automatic redirect - the issue lies, as you said, with the search bar in Firefox & the like..
When you type in google.com that's what we see too..... somteimes. Not sure entirely what the difference is but about 17% of the UK search market is done through google.com rather than google.co.uk so it's certainly worth paying attention to!
Totally....
17% market share - not far off of Firefox's share of the browser market....
And way ahead of Y! and MSN - Google.com is definitely the 2nd largest SE in the UK - and therefore worth paying attention to as far as the differences go...
Good point on the FF market share.
Wait, Will's British?! Who knew? ;)
Nice interview, guys. There's a lot going on in localization and internationalization, and it's nice to hear what we can expect in 2008.
You mean localisation & internationalisation right?
;)
If I had to call it a "zed" I wouldn't use it either :)
You can't tell me that "dot co dot en zee" doesn't sound stupid.
So change it to "dot co dot em dee" (.md=Mordor)
Grumble.
And what if US states ever get their TLDs? What's Maryland going to do? Don't tell me that we can use .co.me (Middle Earth) because then Maine's out of a TLD, too.
WOW fantastic interview. Will is a great guy, I think I freaked him out in one of the sessions, I had my boss on the phone and I was trying to get him to let me go so I could meet him so I just blurted out his name when he was 2 feet away from me :) He walked away visibly confused... oh well... great interview will, thanks for the info :)
Sphinn It!
I'm easily confused! Thanks for the sphinn and kind comments - hopefully catch you at another conference...
Props to Will for revealing you can register subfolders as well as subdirectories in web master central. I didnt know this ;-(
And I am really curious as to why they want to sync .com results wit .co.uk I think thats unfair on UK searchers!
To be clear, I meant syncing in the other direction (i.e. making google.com searches look 'more UK' when searched from the UK much like google.co.uk ones are now).
Great advice Will, I didn't realise you could register sub-folders either so that could be very useful.
Hopefully Apple will take notice as apple.com is hosted in the US and at the moment has to buy it's brand traffic from AdWords for a UK only search.
I have been using multiple WMC accounts for subs for some time, it's great to address the specific needs of each folder. As an aside and for similar reasons, I also was able to create seperate Analytics profiles under one account for subdomains, but they have made it harder to do so, but not impossible.
In terms of location, i can confirm that my company's '.com' ranks over all the other of our TLDs with various country specific searches on Google.
Nice interview.
My default search is always google.com historicly it has always given me more relevant results. I only ever go to google.co.uk if i am using google maps, or I am looking at something specific to the uk.
I feel sometimes Google match locational relevance to topics where none should be used.
One thing to also consider is the use of .us domains and the possibility that Google might launch a Google.us search engine. While I think this is well down the road, in theory, it makes perfect sense -- and adds another revenue channel for Google. I am seeing more multinationals support the .us domain, but right now Google hasn't really supported it well on Google.com.
I tend to like Will. Great job. I didn't know the difference in results served, that was pretty crazy.
I'm just about to embark on designating a newly created subfolder to a region in Webmaster Central... and when Rand stated "well, you can't do that", I started freaking out that I've had unnecessary work done to site structure... thank god for Will jumping in with, "Actually, you can".
Whew. Heart-rate going back to normal... Tom, could you "jump in in the comments" to discuss further when you get a moment?
Great interview and insight! It is helpful to gain an international perspective :-) Cheers!
I was thinking about this point, and haveasomhat related questi- how do you get a site that does well in the US do well in the UK? (and vice versa)
Seeing SEOmoz down to something like page 10in UK results kind of made me think - you do get a lot of visitors from the UK - but it must be all long tail?
While that guy from you have a website now what corners UK small business a well... if SEO moz'z strategy is to focus on growing premier membership, surely its worth your while to lookin at ranking here for SEO considering the recent growth (I have seen personally) of small busnesss loking for SEO resources?
I had the opportunity to briefly meet Will and Duncan during the conference. An absolute pleasure to meet you both.
Thank you both for an informative whiteboard.
Cheers.
Thanks for a Great Interview and sharing a great piece of Knowledge!
Search Bar in the Firefox thingy, I have noticed that firefox has default UK search box in it, and we can change the default settings from the option.
Also, if you look at the top 100 websites results in Alexa you can see google.co.uk are there in UAE and India. I don't think people will type in G.UK and search from there, it's more from the browser search tool bring G.UK comes in top.
Whatsay?
Aj
I'm sure people can change the FF settings, but most people don't...
Great Interview. It's pretty cool to get to put a voice and everything on someone like Will who contributes so much here.
BTW, production is starting to look downright professional. Good job Scott.
good interview, and good point, especially regarding that little search box that is on the top right of the screen.
I have noticed (in France with Firefox) that the google search box on the top brings me results from the G.com, although my keywords are in French, and I get different results from the G.fr.
For instance, I have one client who's got 7 different sites, all ending with their different country codes, and there is also a dot com site. When you do the search thru the top box (so the G.com), I have their dot com site appearing first, then the dot fr . If I do the same search from G.fr, I get the opposite : dot FR and then dot com. So, G.com did not identify my geographical position on the first search, and thought that dot.com was the best result, but did give me the FR site first position on the G.fr, because I was on the french one.