Country Specific Domain
-
Guyz, we are new startups and have one very simple question regarding domain name.
Should we use example.com or example.com.au ?
Our Goal initially would be to target customer from Australia and gradually go global. So if we opt for .com.au we may have an edge in terms of local SEO in the beginning but lose out in the long run. What is the best way to tackle this?
Thanks
-
Google has recently made this super easy: check out the rel="alternative" or "href lang" tag, as it is often called. You can provide the "same" content for UK, US, Aus and not run into duplicate content problems.
The same goes for Spanish in lots of countries, French, German for Germany and Austria, etc. Very handy.
-
He can certainly buy both domains and that would be a good option (301 one to the other), but he will likely need to serve different stores or dynamically change pricing etc. due to the different currencies and possible shipping / returns differences. It's also worth noting that if he's targeting North America, some of their spelling is different to Australia (US vs. British English).
He can use the href lang tag to show Google that even though both stores are in English, one is English for the US and one is English for Australia, one is Spanish for Spain and one is Spanish for Mexico, etc.
-
Hey +Edmond Hong,
Since both countries "speak english" i would not build different stores unless you have different pricing (even then there are better solution).
As to the domain, i would buy both of them to keep you authority intact and avoid copycats but i would
invest time marketing the .com one which is global.Google or to be exact matt cutts did say that Google is geo associating site according to their domain so
its best to buy something that would serve you in the long run. -
Hi jane
Say we have an ecommerce store selling shoes. Should we create different stores for each country and geotarget it for best results? Since those items are similar, wouldn't it create duplicate content?
For example:
www.example.com/us/sling-bag-white
www.example.com/uk/sling-bag-white
Aren't those the same? How to tackle this duplicate content? Any Moz article that i should read to get an idea of the whole thing and best practices for this situation?
-
Hi Edmond,
Sure thing - it's actually very easy. I'll show you here. Log into Webmaster Tools and go to the account you want to geo-target. Click on the "settings" button where the arrow is in this screenshot:
<a>http://i.imgur.com/ziFanER.png</a>
Click "site settings": <a>http://i.imgur.com/j65txrk.png</a>
Choose "Australia" (or wherever) from the drop-down: http://i.imgur.com/6KNNOVb.png
You can only do this with non-country specific domains, so you can't geo-target a .com.au domain to the UK, etc.
You can then add site.com/nz/ as a new project in Webmaster Tools so it shows up in the initial list with all your domains. That subfolder, you target to New Zealand and so forth.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Hi Jane
Can you show me a tutorial on how to do this in webmaster tools?
Thanks
-
Hi there,
If you are definitely planning to go global or multi-national, go with the .com. You can rank well in Australia with just a .com - go into Webmaster Tools and geo-target the domain for Australia, changing this if and when you need to. If you want to target Australia, New Zealand and the US (for example) one day, you can have sections of the website targeting each, and you can target a specific subfolder to each nation. For example, site.com/nz/ can be added as a separate project in Webmaster Tools and set to New Zealand.
I hope this helps!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Domain Change
What is the average organic traffic loss one can expect after switching to a new domain? We went from .com to .org and are seeing 50% decline in organic traffic and 25% in Google news traffic. 301s were implemented from site.com/some-page to site.org/some-page and change site was completed in WMT. This traffic drop seems excessive...
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Disavow links and domain of SPAM links
Hi, I have a big problem. For the past month, my company website has been scrape by hackers. This is how they do it: 1. Hack un-monitored and/or sites that are still using old version of wordpress or other out of the box CMS. 2. Created Spam pages with links to my pages plus plant trojan horse and script to automatically grab resources from my server. Some sites where directly uploaded with pages from my sites. 3. Pages created with title, keywords and description which consists of my company brand name. 4. Using http-referrer to redirect google search results to competitor sites. What I have done currently: 1. Block identified site's IP in my WAF. This prevented those hacked sites to grab resources from my site via scripts. 2. Reach out to webmasters and hosting companies to remove those affected sites. Currently it's not quite effective as many of the sites has no webmaster. Only a few hosting company respond promptly. Some don't even reply after a week. Problem now is: When I realized about this issue, there were already hundreds if not thousands of sites which has been used by the hacker. Literally tens of thousands of sites has been crawled by google and the hacked or scripted pages with my company brand title, keywords, description has already being index by google. Routinely everyday I am removing and disavowing. But it's just so much of them now indexed by Google. Question: 1. What is the best way now moving forward for me to resolve this? 2. Disavow links and domain. Does disavowing a domain = all the links from the same domain are disavow? 3. Can anyone recommend me SEO company which dealt with such issue before and successfully rectified similar issues? Note: SEAGM is company branded keyword 5CGkSYM.png
Technical SEO | | ahming7770 -
Spam flags for sub-domain
Hi Moz Community, I am reviewing our website via MOZ and found the following issues: http://shopwindowcleaningresource.com/ 1. No Contact (please refer to the attached image). However, we have an up to date contact info on our website. We have social buttons at the footer, our telephone number is at the top and we have a contact us page. Any idea, why we are being rated as such and how to resolve it? Any help will be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance. 327M9Fc
Technical SEO | | Shop-Sq0 -
Redirect root domain to www
I've been having issues with my keyword rankings with MOZ and this is what David at M0Z asked me to do below. Does anyone have a solution to this? I'm not 100% sure what to do. Does it hurt ranking to have a domain at the root or not? Can I 301 redirect a whole site or do I have to do individual pages. "Your campaign is looking for rankings for the www version of the campaign but the URL resolves as a root domain. This would explain the discrepancy. Since there is no re-direct between the two, you can have brickmarkers.com 301 re-direct to www.site.com which will prevent you from re-creating your campaign to track the root domain. Once the re-direct is in place it will take a while for Google to show the www version in the results in which your campaign rankings will be accurate." Thanks
Technical SEO | | SeaDrive0 -
Followed Linking Root Domains and No Followed Linking Domains
If you have more NoFollowed Linking Root Domains than Followed Linking Root Domains is that a problem?
Technical SEO | | INN0 -
Linking domains on the same C Block together
Hey, I have an online store selling dj equipment, sound & light products such as speakers, lasers, decks, pa systems, karaoke systems etc. I just bought a new domain but I registered it under a different name and address (my personal details). And I plan on hosting the website on a seperate server so it has no connection with my eCommerce store. The main purpose of the website will be to review the products I sell, write detailed how to guides for DJ's, party planners, mobile DJ's etc. There will be links on the current ecommerce website (which currently gets around anything from 500 to 1000 unique hits a day) going to the new blog website. But would I be better off keeping it on the same C Block even though they are going to be two very different websites and the blog may not always necessarily be about the products on my ecommerce website and may be products on say eBay, Amazon, etc. (In otherwords, it's going to be it's own website with an unbiased opinion, but the ecommerce site will be linking to it on certain products that are reviewed on there). Any help is appreciated 🙂
Technical SEO | | tomhall900 -
302 multiple domains...
Hello, I have a few domain names with orthographic variations that I'd like to redirect to my main site. The problem is my registrar (OVH) does only 302 redirects, so what are my options ? Can I keep a dozen 302's ? Do I have to change all their DNS (it's a load on my server...) ? Thanks for any ideas Johann.
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
How to 301 multiple domain names to a single domain
Hey, I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck. So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G. It looks like this: www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com. My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record. What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless? Thanks, Anthony
Technical SEO | | Grenadi0