Will I get Penelized for having a .co.uk site AND a .com site?
-
Hi Mozers,
I have a very important pitch coming up which needs to tackle a questions about international SEO. My client currently has a .com website, but we are debating internally about creating a .co.uk website too so that we can localise content for the UK versus American English on our .com site.
Currently, our clients proposition is global, so we made the decision to create a .com website but using American English spelling as a large chunk of English speakers in the world use American English over British English. However, we want to grow the business within the UK, and therefore want to use British English language. Hence creating a .co.uk website.
Now, my question is this.... the new .co.uk website will be identical content as the .com website, except for a few spelling changes and the way we phrase certain sentences. How would we be able to run both a .co.uk site and .com site without being penelized from Google for plagarism? Would it involve href lang tags? Server hosting location? Any ideas from you guys out there?
-
Hi,
You should use hreflang across the 2 different domains: https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation#q16
And I would change the content as much as posible to make it relevant to the targeted country.
Regards
-
Your best bet is following Google's guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
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
-
Anything I can throw money at to get a quick boost?
I run SEO for a multi-location business. Most of our locations are great and others are still ramping. SEO is a long process but we have higher expectations for these stores. While all the normal stuff get going to boost our rankings, is there anything quick I can just throw some money to get a jump start?
Local SEO | | danieldaher0 -
My 12 year old site suddenly has all of its landing pages deindexed?
Half of my landing pages have suddenly been de-indexed without warning. These have been ranking for over two years! Climbing from the bottom of page two to the top three of page one with fundamental content marketing and healthy real links. I'm desperately trying to figure out what has gone wrong. They even deindexed my Medford Oregon landing page, then reinstated in and I asked to be re-indexed on search console and deindexed it again. I've checked screaming frog, and I see no robot issues. There were some wp-media attachments with kind of similar URLs (city name-locksmith) ranking on page four that I found (i thought I set Yoast to redirect all attachment, strange) and I deleted those because I thought that might be the problem. But they have deindexed even more today! We are a 12 year old company and our livelihood was built on search, which is why we have maintained good ethics (which most locksmiths don't care about) and have done our best to play by Google's rules. I checked with wp-engine and everything seems to be perfect for our hosting. Any suggestions would be so greatly appreciated.
Local SEO | | Meier0 -
One company, two audiences. Ok to make two sites?
I have researched and researched on this question, and I'm still not satisfied. Most of the answers on the Moz forum and otherwise are all from 2013, as well. So, I thought I'd bring it up again. I have two distinct audiences for a real estate business I'm working with (very different needs and interests): Farm Buyers Residential Buyers My client is wanting to expand their presence in the farm market. Their main competitor is ranking for, more or less, an exact domain name match. They want to spin up a site focused only on farm buyers. Here are the pros/cons in my mind of creating a separate site: Pros: Reaching/targeting a specific audience (better user experience), having domain name with keywords (I won't keyword stuff...promise), a site completely devoted to content regarding farms, a blog completely devoted to farms (we have a content strategy in place) Cons: NAP issues (same address), splitting up domain authority, a bit of brand confusion (though the same logo/brand will be on both sites) In my mind, the pros outweigh the cons. Any ideas on how to address the cons? I could just not include address and phone, but that seems ridiculous...catering to the bots and not the user. Thanks, everyone!
Local SEO | | Gabe_BlueGuru
Gabe2 -
.co.uk and .co coexistance?
Hello, Our business has been setup and has been targeting the uk. Therefore, we've always had a .co.uk domain. Now that we want to go international, we are looking into expanding in the U.S. and have bought a .co domain to do so. My question is: would we get .co.uk penalised if some of the .co pages will have similar content to the .co.uk pages? I know .co is a Generic Top Level Domain (gTLDs), but my understanding so far is that: as long as we set a country target & US language on the .co domain and follow basic cautionary steps and best practises from this article and others, we should be completely fine. Is this also what you guys think? Thanks in advance!
Local SEO | | MarketingGH0 -
To Keep My Company's CO.UK Page Or Redirect It...
Hi Moz'ers - I have a question... Just to set the stage, we're a small recruiting firm, with an even smaller marketing department. I'm essentially a one man wrecking crew and don't have a ton of extra time. That being said, I know that page rank (and local office rank) are critical to our inbound lead generation, so I'm willing to invest some of my time into doing it right. The issue I'm having is ranking high as a local business in Austin, New York, San Francisco, and London, UK (to name a few). So far I've solved this through building dedicated subpages on our .com site and link building key word anchor text towards those pages. The only page that's not really gaining traction is our London page. So I decided to clone (most of) the site, tweak the text (to try and avoid dup text), and try and get that page to rank. I'm also having it hosted on a local server, have it using a local domain address suffix (co.uk), using local hreflang (on our .com site), created dedicated web 2.0 sites, and done my best to do some link building. The problem I'm facing is crapy local ranking, and limited bandwidth to maintain two sites. Should I: A) Scrap the co.uk site and focus on the .com (and subpages)
Local SEO | | bettsrecruiting
B) Keep the co.uk domain, and just redirect the URL to our .com page
C) Keep the co.uk domain, send all links from the home page to the relevant page on our .com page, and set up 301 redirects for all other relevant pages.
D) Hire someone to clean up, rewrite, and upkeep the co.uk site because it has the most SEO value in the long run and is the only way I'm going to be able to rank locally in London. What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance! Tim Our European Site - http://bettsrecruiting.co.uk/
Our US Site - http://bettsrecruiting.com/0 -
Which domain extension would benefit my SEO the most? Old vs New .com or .shoes
Having a keyword in a top domain extension like .com could benefit your SEO. Well I think it was like that.
Local SEO | | KnowHowww
So if you would sell cars and you had cars.com it could benefit. But is there something to say about the new extensions like .shoes.
Do they have the same impact or are they just not old enough? A domain like cars.com is probably registered since the beginning of the Internet so it carries more weight. I'm curious to hear your opinion on the matter. Thank you in advance,
kind regards, Eelco0 -
2 websites or one .ca and .com
Hi I have a client with a lighting business in Canada but ship to all US- they have ecommerce web site .ca and .com the .ca has always brought more traffic. (they have a store in Canada) they are now redoing the site and trying to decide should they have just one site and the other redirected to it or should they have two and which one the main one- they would like to sell to the us but are obviously stronger in Canada- don't want to lose on both sides.. Appreciate any help!
Local SEO | | maryk920 -
SEO planning: Franchise/multiple local sites
I am in the planning stages of franchising a cleaning business and was wondering if anyone had some ideas on SEO strategy. If money were no object and I had a team of hundreds of copywriters at my disposal, would the ultimate solution be to have the following sort of URL structure www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city within which there are numerous www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city/local-town pages? If this is the best strategy then is it worthwhile to begin work towards ranking for cities and local towns within them prior to actually operating there? I understand that lack of physical presence will penalize me in terms of local search but would a lack of physical address and phone number render any foundation work pointless (for example, prior to having any franchises in say London, would it be worth while building quality content and links on a www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london page, and then www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london/notting-hill, alongside a blog and so on?) Interested to understand the best way to go about this given the enormity of the campaign! Thanks
Local SEO | | EdwardoUK0