Google displaying root domain instead of country locale
-
Hi,
For many months now, Google refuses to display the relevant locale in many markets, and instead shows the root domain as number 1 result. The country locale isn't even in the SERP in some countries(!).
This only applies for branded searches. It appears Google is treating the root domain as an international landing page or something, while this isn't the case - visitors get redirected automatically based on their Geo-IP to the relevant country locale if they enter the root domain, there is no "flag selector" that people or bots can choose.
Site: example.com
If someone searches for "example" from Google Canada, they should be met with example.com/en-ca/ as the first result for branded searches.
Instead, example.com is ranking, and example.com/en-ca/ is nowhere to be found.
This problem is in all our English markets; Canada, India and UK. For non-english countries, branded searches return the relevant locale, but the root domain is often the 2nd result as well. This isn't as bad as the case with the English markets, but still.
Any help whatsoever would be greatly appreciated, or if you can recommend great reading assets. I have researched this thoroughly and tried different technical solutions, but nothing has worked so far.
Thanks!
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
-
Google is indexing our old domain
We changed our primary domain from vivitecsolutions.com to vivitec.net. Google is indexing our new domain, but still has our old domain indexed too. The problem is that the old site is timing out because of the https: Thought on how to make the old indexing go away or properly forward the https?
Technical SEO | | AdsposureDev0 -
Geo Targeting a Country Domain
Hey Mozzers A customer of mine hosts an international web shop on a country domain (customer.ch) which is automatically targeted to 'Switzerland' by the Google Search Console. So far so good, the shops for Switzerland are all in a subfolders /ch/. However, there are 2 more shops in two more subfolders: /de/ (for Germany) and /row/ (for the rest of the world). Google thinks both /row/ and /de/ are Swiss shops which results in searchers on Google.ch currently getting /row/ with the wrong currency and language pair. Question: I can't set the targeting for customer.ch/de/ in the search console to Germany, it's set by the domain country to Switzerand. Also, the customer doesn't own customer.de. How can I still let Google know that customer.ch/de/ is the shop to be displayed only to searchers from Germany, but not to searchers from Switzerland? Thx!
Technical SEO | | ChrisCronimund0 -
Google Crawling Issues! How Can I Get Google to Crawl My Website Regularly?
Hi Everyone! My website is not being crawled regularly by Google - there are weeks when it's regular but for the past month or so it does not get crawled for seven to eight days. There are some specific pages, that I want to get ranked but they of late are not being crawled AT ALL unless I use the 'Fetch As Google' tool! That's not normal, right? I have checked and re-checked the on-page metrics for these pages (and the website as a whole, backlinking is a regular and ongoing process as well! Sitemap is in place too! Resubmitted it once too! This issue is detrimental to website traffic and rankings! Would really appreciate insights from you guys! Thanks a lot!
Technical SEO | | farhanm1 -
Google displaying different meta descriptions for the same URL but different keyword
Hi All, A quick question that may even have a quick answer: Why would Google display a different meta description for the same URL for a different keyword? For example I enter 2 of our similar keywords into Google: KEYWORD A | META DESCRIPTION A DISPLAYED | URL A KEYWORD B | META DESCRIPTION B DISPLAYED | URL A Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Domain Forwarding / Multiple Domain Names / or Rebuild Blogs on them
I am considering forwarding 3 very aged and valuable domain names to my main site. There were once over 100 blog posts on each blog and each one has a page authority of 45 and domain authority of 37. My question is should i put up three blogs on the domains and link them to my site or should i just forward the domains to my main site? Which will provide me with more value. I have the capability to have some one blog on them every day. However, i do not have access to any of the old blog posts. I guess i could scrape it of archive.org. Any advice would be appreciated. Scott
Technical SEO | | WindshieldGuy-2762210 -
How to display the full structure of website on Google serps
I have been searching around but unable to gather information as to how we can control or list top pages of a website on Google's first page , i.e. if we type seomoz in google , we can see the main listing with 6 subdomain listings , which link to Blog , Seo tool , Beginner Seo guide , Learn Seo , Pricing & Plans and login My question is can we control these listings i.e. what to display and what not , and if yes how can we make this type of visibility on first page , by using html or xml sitemaps or theirs something mostly websites are missing. Cause this type of data is coming up for very less websites and mostly websites are with single urls. c43Ki.jpg
Technical SEO | | ngupta10 -
Is 301 redirecting all old URLS after a new site redesign to the root domain bad for SEO?
After a new site redesign ...would it hinder our rankings if we 301 redirected all old URLS that are returning 404 error codes to the root domain (home page) ? Would this be a good temporary solution until we are able to redirect the pages to the appropriate corresponding page? Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Should rel canonical tags include the root domain
It does sound like a silly question but bear with me a little... I recently installed on my Joomla website a module that automatically creates rel canonical tags for pages that contain lists that can be sorted by different criteria: (price, alphabetic order, etc...) I know that a proper canonical tag should look like this: However, the module I'm using creates the following structure Will this work? I mean, will it be "understood" by the bots? To see what the module actually does, you can visit the following link http://www.quipeutlefaire.fr/fr/index.php?sort=price&sort_direction=desc&limit=10&limitstart=0&option=com_auctions&category=240 In the source code you will see that the canonical tag is Which is the original "unsorted" page. Thanks in advance for your help
Technical SEO | | QPLF0