International and Multilingual SEO Tips – Part 1

 

Global SEO

We recently received a number of enquiries regarding the optimisation of international and multilingual SEO. So, here’s a quick guide to some of the key issues and common solutions.

Duplicate content across multiple domains

As companies expand overseas it’s common to own multiple domains all serving the same language. e.g.:

  •  www.company.com
  • www.company.net
  • www.company.co.uk
  • www.company.au
  • www.company.nz
  • www.company.za

Creating unique content for every page is generally considered SEO best practice since, theoretically, if each site’s content is sufficiently different then they can all rank alongside each other in Google, crowding out the competition.

In reality, creating completely different versions of the same site is often impractical due to productions overheads or technical limitations and so alternative solutions, such as site geotargeting or canonical tags are deployed.

Domain geolocation

Country specific domains

Some top level domains (TLDs) such as .co.uk are associated directly with a specific region by search engines, in this case the UK. Region-specific domains rank better in their target region than elsewhere, which is fine for national sites but makes them less suitable as the primary domain for global brands.

 Global domains

On the other hand some TLDs such as .net .com and .org are not region-specific and so are ideal for global sites.

Further, they can be geotargeted in Google Webmaster Tools, which turns a global TLD into a country specific domain.

Which to use

If you only have one website that targets a single region then either a country specific domain or a global domain with geotargeting is recommended, since employing a global TLD without geotargeting will result in unusable overseas traffic and inferior target region rankings.

Conversely, if you have a single site and want to attract international visitors then only a global TLD without any geotargeting will do.

Single language, multiple sites

If you have multiple sites serving similar content to various regions, as outlined above, then duplicate content can become an issue.

For example, if not geotargeting is set then the following defaults apply:

  • www.company.com (Global)
  • www.company.net (Global)
  • www.company.co.uk (UK)
  • www.company.au (Australia)
  • www.company.nz (New Zealand)
  • www.company.za (South Africa)

In this case some regions such as the United States will see two identical copies of the site (with no obvious preference in Google) with the .com and .net versions vying for attention.

Worse, countries such as the UK will see three versions, the .com, .net and .co.uk respectively.

The solution

As a general rule, only one version of a site should ever be targeting to a single region.

Further, no region should be able to see more than two versions of the same content and in such cases one version should be locally targeted (e.g. a local .co.uk site) and the other Global (.e.g. a .com with no manual geotargeting).

To resolve the duplication we can localise either the .net or .com version in Webmaster Tools to a territory such as the USA. That way, Google will see them geotargeted as follows:

  • www.company.com (Global)
  • www.company.net (USA)
  • www.company.co.uk (UK)
  • www.company.au (Australia)
  • www.company.nz (New Zealand)
  • www.company.za (South Africa)

Each region, such as the UK, will only see their geotargeted site and the global version (.com), which is okay.

Geotargeting a single domain to serve multiple regions

By setting geotargeting at the subdomain or folder level, you can elegantly enable a single domain to server both global and geotargeted content at the same time, without excessive duplication to any one region, as follows:

  •  www.company.com (Global)
  •  us.company.com (USA)
  • uk.company.com (UK)
  • au.company.com (Australia)
  • nz.company.com (New Zealand)
  • za.company.com (South Africa)

or

  • company.com (Global)
  •  company.com/us/ (USA)
  • company.com/uk/ (UK)
  • company.com/au/ (Australia)
  • company.com/nz/ (New Zealand)
  • company.com/sa/ (South Africa)

To do this a separate Webmaster Tools profile must be created for each of the above urls, which isn’t quite as tedious as it sounds, since they can sit in a single account simplifying their verification.

In part two, we’ll address how to optimise multilingual content across single and multiple domains.

Image sourced from Donkeyhotey, Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/5679642883/

International and Multilingual SEO Tips – Part 1 was last modified: July 20th, 2014 by Anthony
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