Friday, March 12, 2010 at 7:50 AM
Webmaster Level: IntermediateDid you know that a majority of users surveyed feel that having information in their own language was more important than a low price? Living in a non-English-speaking country, I've seen friends and family members explicitly look for and use local and localized websites—properly localized sites definitely have an advantage with users. Google works hard to show users the best possible search results. Many times those are going to be pages that are localized, for the user's location and/or in the user's language.
If you're planning to take the time to create and maintain a localized version of your website, making it easy to recognize and find is a logical part of that process. In this blog post series, we'll take a look at what is involved with multi-regional and multi-lingual websites from a search engine point of view. A multi-regional website is one that explicitly targets users in various regions (generally different countries); we call it multilingual when it is available in multiple languages, and sometimes, the website targets both multiple regions and is in multiple languages. Let's start with some general preparations and then look at websites that target multiple regions.
Preparing for global websites
Expanding a website to cover multiple regions and/or languages can be challenging. By creating multiple versions of your website, any issues with the base version will be multiplied; make sure that you have everything working properly before you start. Given that this generally means you'll suddenly be working with a multiplied number of URLs, don't forget that you'll need appropriate infrastructure to support the website.Planning multi-regional websites
When planning sites for multiple regions (usually countries), don't forget to research legal or administrative requirements that might come into play first. These requirements may determine how you proceed, for instance whether or not you would be eligible to use a country-specific domain name.All websites start with domain names; when it comes to domain names, Google differentiates between two types of domain names:
- ccTLDs (country-code top level domain names): These are tied to a specific country (for example .de for Germany, .cn for China). Users and search engines use this as a strong sign that your website is explicitly for a certain country.
- gTLDs (generic top level domain names): These are not tied to a specific country. Examples of gTLds are .com, .net, .org, .museum. Google sees regional top level domain names such as .eu and .asia as gTLDs, since they cannot be tied to a specific country. We also treat some vanity ccTLDs (such as .tv, .me, etc.) as gTLDs as we've found that users and webmasters frequently see these as being more generic than country-targeted (we don't have a complete list of such vanity ccTLDs that we treat as gTLDs as it may change over time). You can set geotargeting for websites with gTLDs using the Webmaster Tools Geographic Target setting.
Geotargeting factors
Google generally uses the following elements to determine the geotargeting of a website (or a part of a website):- Use of a ccTLD is generally a strong signal for users since it explicitly specifies a single country in an unmistakable way.
or
Webmaster Tools' manual geotargeting for gTLDs (this can be on a domain, subdomain or subdirectory level); more information on this can be found in our blog post and in the Help Center. With region tags from geotargeting being shown in search results, this method is also very clear to users. Please keep in mind that it generally does not make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site target more than a single country (say, all German-speaking countries) — just write in that language and do not use the geotargeting setting (more on writing in other languages will follow soon!). - Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.
- Other signals can give us hints. This could be from local addresses & phone numbers on the pages, use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google's Local Business Center (where available).
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 geotargeting.
URL structures
The first three elements used for geotargeting are strongly tied to the server and to the URLs used. It's difficult to determine geotargeting on a page by page basis, so it makes sense to consider using a URL structure that makes it easy to segment parts of the website for geotargeting. Here are some of the possible URL structures with pros and cons with regards to geotargeting:| ccTLDs eg: example.de, example.fr | Subdomains with gTLDs eg: de.site.com, fr.site.com, etc. | Subdirectories with gTLDs eg: site.com/de/, site.com/fr/, etc. | URL parameters eg: site.com?loc=de, ?country=france, etc. |
| pros (+) - clear geotargeting - server location is irrelevant - easy separation of sites - legal requirements (sometimes) | pros (+) - easy to set up - can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting - allows different server locations - easy separation of sites | pros (+) - easy to set up - can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting - low maintenance (same host) | pros (+) (not recommended) |
| cons (-) - expensive (+ availability) - more infrastructure - ccTLD requirements (sometimes) | cons (-) - users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone (is "de" the language or country?) | cons (-) - users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone - single server location - separation of sites harder | cons (-) - segmentation based on the URL is difficult - users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone - geotargeting in Webmaster Tools is not possible |
As you can see, geotargeting is not an exact science (even sites using country-code top level domain names can be global in nature), so it's important that you plan for the users from the "wrong" location. One way to do this could be to show links on all pages for users to select their region and language of choice. We'll look at some other possible solutions further on in this blog post series.
Dealing with duplicate content on global websites
Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible for all pages and variations from the start. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both "example.de/" and "example.com/de/" show German language content for users in Germany), it would make sense to choose a preferred version and to redirect (or use the "rel=canonical" link element) appropriately.Do you already have a website that targets multiple regions or do you have questions about the process of planning one? Come to the Help Forum and join the discussion. In following posts, we'll take a look at multi-lingual websites and then look at some special situations that can arise with global websites. Bis bald!
96 comments:
Great post. I'm an extreme newbie at this. I have some related questions: Is it passe to have my users click on the country flag that matches their language from the English site? And then set up either a subdomain or subdirectory with gTLD for the associated content? Thanks.
Surely when you talk about this SEO's and webmasters need to think of it as a Google/non-Google world?
I don't think most mutli-region site configurations are a problem for Google these days, but what about other search engines in Europe and elsewhere?
Google does not have total market share in all regions, and other search engines generally don't have the same powerful geo-targeting capabilities and options as Google (that includes Bing). So for some countries where Google is not dominant then potentially localised domains ccTLDs are an absolute requirement.
Can you provide a link to the survey referenced to start this post? Please.
You didn't mention anything from the SEO point of view.
In my book "site.com/fr/" is better because all the sites share the pageRank gained from external links.
Is that right?
example.com/page1 has page1 content in English.
example.com/fr/page1 has page1 content in French.
This is OK right?
great post,,i am absolutely newbie for this
indonesia java international destination
In case of a estabilished localized domain name chosen because of sound association or suggestive extension (e.g. justin.tv or script.aculo.us) would it make sense to have an additional gTLD pointing at it just to be able to do geographic targeting?
Also, a localized domain of a website set in one country, but so near the border that actually servers an area on both sides of said border - a gTLD with geo targeting toward the adiacent country or a localized TLD from that country besides the original one?
One question - you'll probably get there but it doesn't hurt to ask. HTTP Content Negotiation - good or bad?
i.e.
index.htm.en
index.htm.fr
link to "/" let Apache choose.
Great post. I'm newbie at this. I start use Webmaster Tools a few weeks ago and I hope that will help me.
@Jill We'll cover language issues more in the next post, but giving users a simple way to get to the right language sounds like a good idea (though theoretically, using country flags for languages is not quite a 1:1 mapping :-)).
@Teddie I imagine that the easier you make it for search engines to determine the geotargeting for your site (eg by using a ccTLD), the more likely other search engines will take that information and use it.
@eduardo PageRank is on a per-page basis, so I wouldn't worry about the subdomain vs subdirectory issues -- use what makes the most sense for you & your users (& which is still understandable by search engines :-)).
@Brad We'll cover language a bit more later on, but generally as long as the URLs are unique, that should be fine.
@djn Using ccTLDs for non-country-specific content can sometimes be confusing, but we're pretty good at recognizing global sites hosted on ccTLDs (many "international" sites use their home ccTLD for their global sites). If you choose to have an additional gTLD with the same content, I'd use either redirects or a rel=canonical link element to make it clear which version you prefer to have indexed.
(I don't quite understand your second question -- can you elaborate?)
@Simon Content negotiation is bad because search engines will only be able to see one of the versions (and might never see the other one). Also, many users (including me) don't like it when they click on a search result that is not shown in the same language as their query (and the snippet) (actually, I personally don't just not like it, it makes me quite mad :-)).
There are some other great questions in the forum, take a look and feel free to ask more!
It is easier for a small company to gain page rank and SEO authority by having one central domain. Therefore we've decided to go for www.edicy.com/de style structure. In addition, www.edicy.de redirects there. Google itself, on the other hand uses local domain names.
Where can I found the study mentioned in the first line "Did you know that a majority of users surveyed feel that having information in their own language was more important than a low price?"?
John, great to get confirmation of the duplicate content issue not applying to similar content in different languages. How far do you take this, however? If the same content is posted at two URLs in EN-US and EN-GB, does the different language rule still apply?
Just uploaded a very complete presentation I did last week about this topic. You can download, reuse and share
http://www.slideshare.net/anilopez/seo-for-multilanguage-international-projects
Hello,
I have a website http://mysubdomain.mydomain.fr/ which offers french language by default. To swap to english, the end-user has to click on a uk flag that run http://mysubdomain.mydomain.fr/index.jsp?la=en URL.
To respect your advise, should I define the following URLs :
http://mysubdomain.mydomain.fr/fr/
http://mysubdomain.mydomain.fr/en/
If yes, should I put a 301 redirection on the http://mysubdomain.mydomain.fr/ that will redirect to http://mysubdomain.mydomain.fr/fr/? If yes, for best ranking, should I advise webmasters to link on http://mysubdomain.mydomain.fr/ or on http://mysubdomain.mydomain.fr/fr/?
Thanks for your help.
Kind regards,
Fred
hum, am wondering, if anyone can recommend a tool, framework, wiki, site builder, etc that supports a site that can generate into mulitple versions each with different language?
i have a existing site xahlee.org and am thinking expanding it to chinese lang for running at e.g. xahlee.cn
Xah Lee -- your purpose is best served with Edicy, try it: www.edicy.com
I just finished this first client prototype and intend to market it further. I can upload any product type store, build out a quickie template for it and then within a couple of hours have a complete many-language site up and running:
http://www.estorewishbook/Stores/Battlefieldlegends/
Now if I can just Google to Google it;
Correction:
http://www.estorewishbook.com/stores/battlefieldlegends/
hey that was something surely going to boost my knowledge about multi-regional websites.i am some one providing Web Hosting Services , so it will definitely going to help me.
Great timing for this post as we are just going through something similar. We are an Irish software company looking to expand in both the US and UK.
Our original site was a .com and we have done a lot of work getting this up the rankings for people searching in Ireland.
Now with the move outside of Ireland we are looking at having different website for each region and have purchased a .co.uk and .ie domain. Of course as these are all predominantly English speaking countries the content is likely to be pretty much duplicated.
This has raised a number of questions from an SEO point of view...
- Should we have one site with the URLs all 303 redirected?
- Should we have separate sites all with the same content but use Google Webmaster to specify the location?
- If we go down the multiple site route do they all have to be of significantly different content and hosted in the relevant country?
Any help would be much appreciated!
Thank you in advance.
James
@John Mueller
I'll make a real-world example: say an italian website with an .it domain, which is located at the far north-east of the country and thus does not care to serve southern Italy (thousand miles away), but does indeed serve NE Italy and neighbouring Slovenia - which is only couple miles away... What makes better sense, a geotargeted .com or a .si domain?
As form my first question - I agree that a globally reaching website is recognizable even with a localized domain. My doubts are about one with a different localized target, say a just.do.it domain targeting Bavaria or Scotland.
I'd humbly suggest that the possibility for savy webmastres to explicitly decouple the TLD from the geographical target might be useful both to the site publisher and its visitors (and would help Google to serve more relevant results). I'd further dare to suggest that there is a lot of websites around for which country-level targeting is somewhat too wide and a finer resolution might make sense too.
Excellent post, thank you.
I've been toying with making my Drupal based sites multi-lingual and this is useful information for me.
As someone who hosts a number of global sites with *.be TLDs, I have to say I wish there was an option to turn off geo-targeting. I'm stuck with being assign to Belgium but yet the sites are global in nature. The domain sin question just happened to work and sound better with the *.be extension.
I plan a two language web page. How about using
http://domainname.at for the main language, in my case German
and using for an English version
http://www.domainname.at
Is that consifered different domain names for each language?
Or is it not recomentd to have two language version using it this way?
FRANK
Hi all,
I'm using subdirectories to separate each country-relevant section within the same gTLD, but instead of country codes (fr, es) as in this post's examples, I'm using country names (france, spain):
www.example.com/france/..
www.example.com/spain/..
I feel this allows users who do not understand country code abbreviations to still understand which country's section they're under.
However, from an SEO standpoint, can I assume search engines are intelligent enough to recognize country names and to geo-target those sections to their respective countries?
@Rod - Having the same content for EN-US and EN-UK users is generally fine, though it's possible that we won't notice the fine differences and may end up showing the user the "wrong" version. If that's a problem for you, consider using something like small text banner to encourage the users to visit the preferred version.
@Ani Lopez - that presentation is awesome, thanks for sharing!
@Fred - It's not necessary to use subdirectories for different languages, but it might make it easier for you to maintain and monitor. If you do choose to change URLs, using a 301 redirect would be the correct solution.
@James - If you are directly targeting different countries (UK/Ireland), I'd recommend using separate domains especially if you have unique content for them. At the least, as a user I'd expect to see local currencies / addresses on the pages. It's ok to duplicate the content, but it really helps users to have some local content as well.
@djn - When you are a local provider for a region that includes more than one country, it's hard to make a general recommendation. I can imagine that all 3 possibilities (only local ccTLD, a gTLD or two+ ccTLDs) could work, depending on where you are and who your targeted users are (Would they accept a foreign/neighboring ccTLD? Are there language issues as well? Are you planning on expanding in the future?). Those aren't questions that I could answer for you :).
Decoupling the ccTLD from geotargeting is an idea worth discussing, but I could imagine that it has the potential of confusing a lot of users.
@Frank - I would strongly NOT recommend using the "www" subdomain to differentiate between languages. This can be very confusing to users (and potentially, search engines).
@Adel - Using country names is a good idea too; it doesn't matter to us what you use if you're using the Webmaster Tools geotargeting feature. One thing I'd recommend though would be to use the local version of the country name, eg instead of example.com/german use example.com/deutschland . It's just one of those small things that makes users feel better :).
Hi I am putting up a multi regional classifieds site, that has different user generated content for each city, but the non user generated content is shared. If a user visits www.site.com, we redirect them to city.site.ccTLD, based on their location. Or if we don't serve that location, we display a list of locations (so www.site.com does not contain the content, it just redirects).A google seach will of course take users straight to city.site.ccTLD, without going through www.site.com.
Now - Is it possible that all the sites share pagerank? What type of redirect should be used?
Hi everyone,
I've just stumbled upon this site - absolutely awesome this information.
However, too much stuff for a newbie like me. I'd rather NOT redirect, change here and there, I'm definitely NOT used to these technical challenges...
My question: Wouldn't it be much easier to use completely different domains like: www.xyz.de for German sites and content, www.xyz.com for US sites with content in English, www.xyz.hu for Hungarian sites and content by using the appropriate keywords for Search Engines?
I'm a bit confused about all the stuff in the Forum regarding Google's penalty when using a .com site with subdomains for each language but the same content in let's say 3 languages. I'm not stricktly related to countries but to people speaking those languages... That's what I was planning to do for my online business.
But what about SEO in this case? How to get the language specific content found not only the main page (home)?
Your help is higly appreciated -
thanks so much!
Margareta
Margareta, yes, if you have those separate country-code domain names with your content in the appropriate languages, then all will generally be fine & you won't have to do anything special to target users in those countries. That's the simplest solution :).
Extremely useful post :D
Thnks
I run multiple language websites all with their own TLD from 1 cms system, this means that I can dynamically link each page to the exact page on other sites. Great but my concern is that I am breaking the rules regarding reciprocal links, as all my websites are linked to each other from every page (I am currently running on about 1200 pages). I have not to my knowledge been penalised by Google or any other search engine but I do have other websites due to come online soon so these links will increase. The sites are genuine and do serve the local languages very well.
Should I use the "no follow" attribute on the links from one domain to another? Or do you think that the search engines are clever enough to work out what is going on. All the sites have the same domain name just different country codes and they are all served from the same server. The same database in fact.
The last thing I want to do is upset the search engines.
Is it essential to translate URLs (e.g. directories and parameter names) into the local language to rank high in each region?
e.g. can we use www.site.de/women/dresses/ or need to switch to www.site.de/frauen/kleider/
We have a site, www.tdm.com.mx,it is in english and spanish. We have already invested a lot on it, optimizing it for SEO and adding rich content. Our markets are Mexico, Texas and New Mexico in USA. I want to become number one on what we do on thess markets, videoconferencing, phone systems, security cameras and telecommunications. We are starting to see results in Mexico, We are already number one on some keywords, we had on March 1000 visits, potential customers are starting to call us, about 60 in March and 65% of our sales in March came from new customers who found us on the internet. However, I am not seeing the same in the USA, very little visits, no potential customer have called us, not sales at all who are coming from the internet. What I would like to know is what should I do to be found in the USA? Should we keep adding rich content in English and Spanish to our existing site or should create a new site just in English for the USA market and keep with the existing one in Spanish for the Mexico market? In the future we would like to be number one in other English and Spanish speaking countries? How much effect is the mx on our existing site affecting us to be found in the USA? Is there a way to overcome the mx? It does not matter how much rich content we do if we keep adding rich content to our existing page we will never be number one in the USA because we have mx? Your advice will be really appreciated. Thanks very much. Arturo
We are building a multiple language support website that will be added to our existing website:
portal.ourdomain.com/support/
we will have different local domains for each language/country e.g.
portal.ourdomain.de/support/ (guess support should be in german)
portal.ourdomain,fr/support/
we are worried about our Australian and new zealand (and other english speaking sites)
if .co.uk, .com.au, .co.nz + more will sometimes have different content; but much of the support content is generic enough to not need localization. We were worried about being 'downranked' for pointing to the same content (duplicating links) from different domain - will this happen?
would you recommend having one domain portal.ourdomain.com/support/ with a banner informing the user that content maybe available better suited to them or is it ok to have lots of english speaking ccTLDs pointing to the same content?
Hello everyone,
I have few questions, about multilingual sites and geotargeting.
I've had ("regional") site in Serbian (Latin) language with ccTLDs domain ".rs" and automatically targeting audience in Serbia and that is OK. On former Yugoslavia we have National identity issue. e.g. Serbian and Croatian peope have same language, Bosnian and Montenegrian either and they claim that is different language, but that is nonsense. Similar situation is in e.g. Latin America they speak Spanish not Argentinian, or Mexican... American people speak English not American language and thay don't have that problem
Our site content cover Interesting topic and issues from all that states. Because .rs geotargeting my audience in Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia can't get same or similar result as audience in Serbia. I made little research and go to google.me, google.hr, google.ba and google.rs and got all different results for same query.
Create a multilingual site doesn't make sense. In Google webmasters tools I can't change settings for geotargeting. Changing domain is not solution and if I change domain to gTLDs, how can I target both audience.
One more question:
By language code "ISO 639" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes. Serbia has sr, srp abbreviation which we can use in HTML language attribute. Since <em>"Google ignores all code-level language information, from "lang" attributes."</em>
And Serbia has new TLD .rs (Republic Serbia) we got it since we separated from other republic 4 years ago. (We are the only republic in the world that has prefix "Republic" because .sr is reserved for "Republic of Suriname" and other variations TLD are also reserved.
Which is the right way, if I had gTLDs . example.com and i want multilingual site e.g. English example.com/en and Serbian, example.com/rs or example.com/sr ?
That is all for now. tnx
I have a .co.nz domain that i purchased because the .com, .net variations were taken. My content is however international. If i set my geographic location to none in webmaster tools & and all other things are equal, can i compete with .com? will i be 'penalised' in any way?
Thanks.
We have a franchise network of Financial Advisors across the UK. To represent the local presence of Finacial Advisors in each city, we are considering city-specific URLs (e.g. www.FinancialAdvice-Bristol.co.uk, www.FinancialAdvice-Manchester.co.uk, www.FinancialAdvice-Birmingham.co.uk etc). The majority of the content will be the same on each of these websites, with the addresses and phone numbers being local. If we go down this route, will we be penalised by Google (i.e. duplicated content filtered out)?
Então, o meu site vem de uma grande empresa francesa que possui o seu site em 13 idiomas. Então, o site é em português mas ele é ".fr"
e no seu código-fonte esta marcando pt-pt. Esta indicação influencia muito na hora dos motores de busca encontrarem meu site no Brasil?
desde já agradeço.
Nina
A very helpful post indeed :)
Just have a confusion whether Pakistan ccTLD is .pk or .com.pk
If .pk then what about .com.pk
Great Thanks !!
It is now clear for me that subdomains for geotargeting is my best option.
+ no extra costs
+ webmasters tool geotargeting
:D
I have a .com web site in Canada and we sell to Canada and USA. I want potential suppliers from Asia to find us so I keep the .com international. However, even if most of our site is the same for Canada or US (company mission, contact us...), I would like to differentiate the products pages between US and Canada. So I thought I could use a .us domain for all US pages so search results in the US would show those first instead of pages with canadian prices. However, that would mean a lot of pages would be near duplicates except for the fact that on top it would be written US or CA to select country because I want to retain the country in case the user goes to the product page. For example, a US customer could go find Contact Us for USA in Google (which is the same as the canadian one except for the country setting on top) and then he could click products on the US contact us page and see US products and prices. What is the best practice to handle that kind of duplicates ?
Dear Googlr,
let us point them in the webmaster central please. A double confirmation can make sure we only do it if we want to /know what we're doing.
They are many cases like .md or .mn where we can use easily use them for USA states or .la for Los Angeles.
This stuff is beyond me as a business owner. Who do I trust? Will it work? Is getting my site viewable worldwide worth the investment? We have name recog. worldwide and get orders from all over the world but I know there is a ton more out there. Trust wise, do I let someone set us up as viewable in Brazilian search engines for example? I don't know if spending 5k to do this is wise, a huge risk. www.n-ccarpet.com
I'd like to create a multilingual website, but ccTLDs are already taken. Can I buy several .com domains for each language? So I'll have several websites with the main - 'name.com' in English, 'namefrancias.com' in French, 'damedansk.com' in Danish etc. Is such strategy possible?
Hi if you have a current website in UK at .co.uk, the client wants to create a new website for .ie Ireland, the content will be duplicate. It is advisable to have one website and 301 redirects or can you have two seperate websites with say the contact details different and image layout etc...
Thanks
I'm currently developing a site that has duplicate content but I want to target both Ireland and the UK.
The options are:
A) Two separate sites (.ie hosted in Ireland and .co.uk hosted in UK). Set the google geo targeting to each location.
B) One main site (.ie hosted in Ireland) with the .co.uk 301 direct to the .ie.
Which one however is the best?
For languages depending on country what if you did this -
Have a subdirectory with gTLDs example.com/de and then direct your example.de to that page.
Then you can control it easily and still have the site separation.
Firstly would that be feasable.
And by having the .de extension would you still be able to have strong search presense of the translated /de subdirectory in Germany?
Thank for great post,I am absolutely newbie for this.
How does this work the other way around?? I read so much from the US point of view.
Lets say I have a .com website to engage with US visitors, in english, with links from USA websites, currency in $ en geo set to USA in webmaster tools .. BUT the server is in Europe.
How much would it affect my ranking/competition with other sites of ALL is great except serverlocation?
thanks
I have recently been developing a multi-region or Adaptive Internationalized (AI) website. You can visit the website and look at implementation or leave comments and feedback by logging onto:
http://co-project.lboro.ac.uk/users/coth
We are currently launching a new .com site in the USA and will eventually launch new sites for the same business in several other countries using ccTLD's. In the meantime, what is the best approach on the already registered ccTLD's? Is it best to do 301 redirects of the ccTLD's to the main .com site and then stop the redirect when we create a specific site for a ccTLD? 302 redirect? Park? Do nothing?
We us subfolders /en,/fr,/ge for our language sites. I added these subfolders to Google webmaster tools as separate sites(mysite.com/fr) and then set up the regional targeting to France.
Will this hurt us for targeting French-Canadian users? Or other french speaking visitors outside of France? We want to target French speakers and browsers, not just France.
In our case, is it better for us to avoid the regional targeting? Any insite?
can any body tell me how to set my blog
http://tech-caffe.blogspot.com/
so it always browsed in regional language default?
Dear All,
This is a great blog post on multi-regional websites.
If we create domains (ccTLDs) like "www.xyzindia.us", "www.xyzindia.com.au using the existing domain name "www.xyzindia.com" and geotarget the two domains (i.e., www.xyzindia.us, www.xyzindia.com.au) to respective country locations "USA" and "Australia".
If we don't geotarget the main domain "www.xyzindia.com" to any country (which will be global one) and use the same content of "www.xyzindia.com" in the USA and Australian domains, then will it be considered as duplicate content issue (as same language content will be used in all these domains).
Looking forward for your suggestions.
Thanks,
Nagaraju.
Hi,
I have noticed recently that Google is not always accurate to return geo-location. I live in the UK and I was looking for "house plans" in google.co.uk, on the 1st page Google return 8 out 10 results that are not doing any business in the UK but in the US. We are not short of architect in the UK so why would google return only US results??
Dear Sir,
If we place the different content(not exactly same one) in the domains of Australia and USA (using the ccTLDs domains like domainname.com.au, domainname.us).
Will it be sufficient if we use one BLOG for all the domains to write articles/blogs as per SEO or do we need to create a blog for each domain?
Thanks,
Nagaraju.
I am opening stores around the UK for TShirt Printing
Each store needs its own website in the form of
www.manchester.thetshirtman.co.uk
The majority of content will be the same only address and phone number will change along with keywords and descrition.
Will google penalise me for this
Not speaking on behalf of Google but I can't see any reason why you would be penalised, just make sure you have enough unique content on each of those sub domains and no verbatim duplicates.
Great info here and amazed that I still cannot get clear answer to my own issue. :)
I have a site with English content under a /en sub-directory, and Chinese content under a /cn sub-directory. So far no problem and in line with Google advice.
But, as content, when translated, is the same, is it ok to have page names the same? URL is not strictly unique due to /en and /cn.
For example, now have:
example.com/en/same-page-name.html
example.com/cn/same-page-name.html
Is that clear? Is it Ok? Or should I have very-different-page-names.html with a little more maintenance overhead?
Thanks all.
Richard
Hong Kong
Okay,
my problem: We've a Dutch site (.nl) and a Belgian site (.be). The Belgian site is mainly a copy of the Dutch one. The problem now is that our Dutch site ranks better on Google.be than our Belgian site.
my question: Can we 'delete' our Dutch site from Google.be?
Same question as guy! We have two dutch versions of our website (for Belgium & Netherlands):
www.website.be/nl
www.website.nl
but most of the content the same on both versions! Could rankings suffer from duplicate content issues on Google.be and Google.nl respectively?
If yes, do you think changing a few elements (titles, descriptions & heading tags for example) would be sufficient to solve the problem?
Hello. Thank you for this great post. It's very usefull for all newbies like me. In spite of your advice I still have a question. I have 2 sites: www.site.fr (for French people) and www.site.be (for french speaking Belgian citizens). If I publish the same content on 2 sites, for Google it is a duplicate content or not?
Thanks
@Olivier.
Hi Olivier. have you received the answer to your question? I ask you because I have the same question.
Thanks
I have both general and country-specific (and continent-specific) content on our website (hostyetu.com), i.e. when one visits http://www.hostyetu.com what gets displayed depends on the country (and sometimes continent) the user is browsing from. E.g. a viewer from Kenya will see different content compared to a viewer from , say, Australia.
However, when seaching what get displayed is the general content. The country-specific content doesn't get displayed.
How can I make make search engines (search bots) display country specific content? i.e. how can I ensure that users searching from Kenya gets the Kenya-specific result and not the general result? Should I have to use sub-directories for country-specific content, i.e., http://www.hostyetu.com/kenya for Kenyan content?
Please note that only the home page (http://www.hostyetu.com/) has country-specific (and region-specific) content. All other pages don't translate to different country-specific content. Also note that the content is country-specific (or region-specific) and not language-specific.
Thanks.
Mugoma
In case I use ccTLDs, "server location is irrelevant".
Ok, but something is still unclear for me:
What if i got on my server a .com for english (global), and a .fr for french, all that with the server being on a french ip?
What would tell google the .com is for english? And so, is the ip location still irrelevant in that case, or should I have an english speaking country located ip?
Thanks !...
Hi John, this post is very relevant to our specific situation and I was hoping you could help us.
In summary, we (http://www.designerseven.com) were position 3 for our favourite keyword "lunettes de soleil" on google.fr. Overnight we were sent to position 65. Believe me we did not engage in any dirty tricks, we are manually doing all our linking on relevant websites, no cloaking, no hidden text etc.
However, we do have subdomains and we use geo-ip location. So Googlebot does see a different, customised version of our site (prices in USD, no tax, etc), than a human user such as yourself located in Switzerland. I doubt that Google would consider this as cloaking - is this the case?
We are desperate to discover the reason of our demise, and we can't afford this for long, so I would appreciate any help with our specific problems.
Thank you
We have a domain.com site that was orginally geo-targeted for the UK. We also have a domain.us and domain.ca versions for US and Canada.
We now are thinking of creating a domain.co.uk and geotarget this site for the UK.
And then geotarget the domain.com for the US.
What's the best way to manage this w/o losing all the SEO? The domain.com site is currently ranking well for some keywords.
But if we now geotarget the domain.com for the US, would it lose rankings for UK?
In response to Olivier:
You should redirect one of both to each other, otherwise they will be considered as duplicated.
i.e. make example.be/nl redirect to example.nl
John,
Thank you for the article - I read carefully and couldn't find information about whether to use a rel=canonical tag for ccTLD sites with the same content as a gTLD site.
I have an domain.com and I'm launching in Canada at samedomain.ca with the same content. From what I see, it sounds like I'm all good, though any localization I can do in regard to Canadian English vs. American English would be helpful.
A peer tells me I need to use rel=canonical to the corporate .com site. Is this good, bad, or null?
Thank you in advance
@UpDog If these are separate sites, for separate purposes, then I'd recommend not using the rel=canonical there. The rel=canonical would tell Google that the sites are equivalent -- in your case, it sounds like the .ca is not equivalent, as it's meant to specifically target Canadian users.
It's sometimes hard to draw a line between having one site (or one site indexed) and having multiple ones. One thing I'd really recommend is to make sure that they're not just different with regards to the user's location, that they really have some unique content & value of their own. That helps search engines to better separate the two sites past just your geotargeting.
Hi John,
Since there is no feature on google.com to search "pages from the US", is there any downside to geotargeting a US website to the United Kingdom in order to show up in the "pages from the UK" results? We have a .co.uk url that does not do as well as the .com, even though they are pointing to the same site.
Kelly
Greetings. I am the webmaster for a company making braille translation software with worldwide reach www.duxburysystems.com. Our single flagship product contains braille software for 135 languages. I have recently added software to automatically localize based on the best nation/language information I can gather automatically. I still stuggle trying to figure out how to get serarch engines around the world to notice our site; since we can offer a produce useful and unique.
I am having some concerns especially in Europe with people in the UK being redirected to our German site.
currently we have several English version of our site. What is the best way to structure these?
Mysite.com/en-gb or UK?
Mysite.com/en-ca CANADA
Mysite.com/en-us
Mysite.com/en-de? GERMANY
Mysite.com/en-in? INDIA
This is a great article, but I still have an unanswered question
Does google like automated redirection (using the language set in the browser)?
'm running a website in French and soon the content will be also available in english.
By using the language set in the web browser, I would like to redirect automatically the traffic to the /fr or /en , a link will also be available on the top of the page and the user will be able to change at anytime. (using php, very simple to do)
My main question is:
Will google and/or other search engine will like this kind of practice ? My understanding is that link to switch from one language to an other one will be awailable on every page so it should not matter, but I don't want to get it wrong and affect by ranking if google believe this is not a good way of doing things.
Thx for you help, trying to write user/bot friendly website.
(http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=768ae7897bf1fe37&hl=en)
Hi, I have a question concerning duplicate content on a regionalised one language website. Our website covers the whole of Canada and is regionalised to each province but for the most part each page is the same in each province content wise. Would we be penalised for this, and should we address this by restructuring our entire site (it's a huge site), or are there other methods we can use to address this issue?
Hi John,
This is a great blog article, and I would like to read more on the same topic. However, I could not find any subsequent blog posts by you...maybe I'm looking at the wrong place! Very interested in "some other possible solutions further on in this blog post series." Thanks Richard
Hi Guys,
I could use some help in this regard as well.
we have a website http://www.clickhome.com.au which is well ranked in Australia. Now a couple of months ago we launched the same website for the New Zealand market as we service them as well, buit we didnt show up on any pages. http://www.clickhome.co.nz .
This website is a copy of the first but as this has a different country domain it should rank in NZ. However it doesn't rank at all. Google doesn't even seem to find any pages.
what would be my options to have the same site rank well in both countries? would I be better off having just one top domain and no geo-targetting (.biz) or would it be better to have two separate country specific domains with the same content?
Thanks for your post. Our company has a .com site and a .ca site, both with the same content (in English). In September we saw a 30%decrease in traffic to our Canadian site, and now our US site is displaying in Google.ca's results. How can we fix this problem? Our Webmaster Tools settings are geographically targeted for the correct country. Any advice?
Hi, I have a .com site that ranks well when searching for my important search terms in English on google.com / .de / .nl / .ch etc (usually page 1). But it ranks badly when seraching for the same search terms using google.co.uk (currently page 4, but was page 6, although it was page one like the other country googles before), so I am proposing to use the cctld .co.uk for the UK market. I am concerned about duplicate content as both sites will be in English .co.uk for the UK market and .com for the international market so I can’t use canonical re-directs as I will loose one of them. What are your thoughts solutions regarding this, many thanks, Ashley
I'm working with an eCommerce site that supports 130 countries through local offices and or distributors. We are looking at taking the multi-regional approach with sub-domains ex de.site.com ca.site.com etc. I'm still worried about the duplicate content issue as the only content that changes is the price, availability, and sometimes distributor/contact information. Any suggestions, resources, or examples of site that have pulled this off would be helpful.
Hi
I really do need some help with this topic.
We provide project management training the the UK market using our http://www.parallelprojecttraining.com/ and have developed very nice PR4 site and top of page one rankings over the past few years in the UK. Our UK courses are based on standards reliant to the UK. We also have also started to rank on page one in the USA and Europe but currently have a very high bounce rate because don't have the products to serve this market yet, as they have different standards (PMI). We are about the launch a range of distance learning courses for the USA and rest of the world based on the PMI standards.
Should we
1) Set up a new .co.uk for the UK products and .com for the rest of the world. If we do this should we redirect or UK relivant pages from the existing .com site to the new .co.uk to maintain our current UK rankings.
2) Use sub domains on our existing site www.parallelprojecttraining.com/uk/and www.parallelprojecttraining.com/us.
If we do this will I am worried what Google will see as it crawls from the USA. Will it not see our UK based courses advertised on the /uk domain as if could always be redirected to the /us pages.
Any advice would be much appreciated as I have seen many different sets of conflicting advice.
use canonical tag for your post and link it to your help
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=182192
as the content is almost same ! but with different title ;)
Great article ! I still need some clarification though.
How about a website providing local services and trying to geo target some cities in the area. They basically have THE SAME THING to comunicate to many cities. Would there be the issue of duplicate content with the only thing different being mostly the name of the city? How can the website still target some cities but not run into problems with google for duplicate content? Thank you very much!
Hi yea,
I was following all your tutorials etc on this and am most grateful, I did get a bit lost as regards the ISO Language Code Table for each country code with regards languages, I did a search and find others might also find this link as useful.
cheers
k
http://www.lingoes.net/en/translator/langcode.htm
Great post! We have learned a lot from this post and are trying to find the others in this series... I know it's been a while, but does anyone know what are the other posts in the series? Specifically the one that discusses multilingual (Global) sites? Thanks in advance!
Great post indeed. However, can you please explain why choosing Subdirectories with gTLDs implies harder separation of sites ?
thanks
Muriel
Hi,
I have a boat classifieds website under a .com domain. This site was marketed only to an argentine audience. The site has now more than 200 users and 200 argentine classifieds. I've been working on the site seo specifically for Argentina. Now, I want to expand and open the same site but for other countries as chile and Mexico. The .com.ar (Argentina domain) is not available. What is a recommendable way of working this out? Considering the seo work I have done and user Commodity.
Thanks for any advice.
Federico
hi
google Indexed my pages but not showing in exact location. For Example my UK related articles I cannot find in Google.co.uk. I find my links in google.com, google.fr and all other google regional search engines. I checked by google position checker. They show my links are in google.co.uk but i could not find.
my site is http://www.footreview.net
keyword: RKC Waalwijk 1-0 Excelsior
and these are not showing in Netherlands but showing all of google region because it is Netherlands related article.
Please advise me. Thanks in Advance
The geo target does not work at all.I have setup geo target for our corporate website on various international tld's as .co.nz .com and .co.uk keeping the contents same and geotarget for different countries .It was simply waste of time and effort and google has listed it as dublicate website.I have ended up redirecting all the international website using 301 redirect as one of the international website itself became primary and started to show up in all search engines like google.com.au google.com google.co.nz and other sites google declared as deuplicate.
Hi,
I have two domain in Fr. and .Lu.
Both domains have the same content in French. Is that create problem for duplications?
I have implemented rel canonical but I am confused that my website rank on both location or not?
Please clear me on this.
Great post. I've just set up separate sub directories for US and rest of the world (e.g. xxx.com/us/ and xxx.com/) with a direction tool which diverts browsers based on their IP address. My only concern is down to duplicate content and whether search engines will penalise me for having two copies of each page on my website with only minor changes between them.
Is there anything I can do in the sitemap to differentiate between the pages? I have used Google webmaster tools to set that the two sub directories are aimed at different locations.
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