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I have both .ca and .com domains of my website. The website is meant for international audience, but it is important to be associated with Canada though. (the website is about Canadian immigration)
So the question is should I use .ca domain and 301 redirect .com visitors to .ca or vice versa and why?
In other words would it be harder to rank higher internationally with .ca domain?
I suppose it doesn't really matter which one you promote and do link building with.
So the question is should I use .ca domain and 301 redirect .com
visitors to .ca or vice versa and why?
It's the same thing, depends on audience targeting. If you are targeting the outside from Canada, then .com is prefered. It's common logic. If you are targeting my country (Croatia) it would be prefered / good to put .hr domain up.
In other words would it be harder to rank higher internationally with
.ca domain?
Well, this is a tricky part. It depends on amount of SEO effort that you are going to put on page this page. But yes, it's true. It would be harder to rank higher with .ca domain.
I suppose it doesn't really matter which one you promote and do link
building with.
It's true, it doesn't really matter which one you promote and do link building with, however... if your site is going for international audience, then .com is prefered. But, it's ok to use 301 redirect to your .com domain.
In seo , many factor is responsible for rank a website like Quality content,high and relevant back links,social signals. It doesn't really matter which one you promote but quality of submission is matter.
I think i would keep both toplevel-domains and use the hreflang tag in the header to show google which domain belongs to which location. That should fix the duplicate content issue and you should rank a little bit better (maybe, who knows). it's described here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Usually the country domains get preferred within the country, so you would get a boost within Canada if you go with .CA. However in your case your audience is mostly from abroad, so perhaps if you do 3xx redirect from CA to COM would do you better service.
P.S.
Keep in mind that sometimes people who view the search results may prefer or trust domains associated with the country. But this has to be tested with your audience.
As you mentioned in your question the the website is meant for an international audience. SEO ranking aside the international audience will be much more used to the .com domain than the .ca TLD.
COM vs CA
As of today the TLD does not matter much as long as you are not using free TLDs that are often associated with scams (suck as .tk for example). In fact Google has explicitly mentioned that the TLD is often ignored and making a website about a museum using the .museum domain (yes it exists http://about.museum/) will not help you at all.
Search engines are actively trying to incorporate localization - the Russian search engine Yandex for example offers different results depending on the neighbourhood of the user. With this in mind it is important to decide whether local Canadians or the international audience is your primary target in order to future-proof your website.
Link Building & Promotion of a 301 Redirect
Another important question which you asked is whether it matters which website you promote (co or com). Technically there is almost no difference when it comes to the power of the accumulated links (which boost your search ranking), however you must have in mind that this could change any day.
Currently many black-hat SEOs link to short domain redirects and point these links to the websites that they want to rank. Google will inevitably find a way to penalize them, so I advice promoting the main website not the redirect.
Permanent (301) vs Temporary Redirect (302)
Additionally make sure to use a 301 redirect not a 302 or javascript redirect as they are completely different in the eyes of search engines.
I would make the .ca and .com point to the same site, but promote the .com domain as it's for a wide range of users. So the canonical address will be the .com but canadians will probably get the .ca one as google is prefering local content.
If your services are limited to Canada and you have multiple local stores in various cities, then .ca domain will help you to rank better in Canada search results.
If your customers spread across the globe then using .com is advisable. You are serving international customers and have just .ca domain doesn't make sense to the users as well search engines.
So if you are specific to one country, use country specific domains like .CA other wise use .COM for a global presence.
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I have searched but not really found anything clear on the matter from what I have read so far, what impact does having your domain name across multiple tlds (e.g. mycompany.com and mycompany.fr and mycompany.es) have on your rankings?? I'm being told having them point to the same content is likely to get the site shot down by google.
Google doesn't have a parked domain detector according to Matt Cutts, so if the domain names simply all point to one location it won't hurt you.
However, if you have duplicate content that's another story. In your example it sounds like you might have multiple sites that all have the same content, but are different domain names.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam team, claims that duplicate content will not hurt your ranking. You can watch that video here
He gives the disclaimer that it can hurt if it's "spammy" without going into very specific detail what that actually means. In my experience (I've had about 5-6 clients that did this) Google would typically look at one of their domains and ignore the duplicates, but not hurt their main site. The only exception to this is if one of the sites that isn't your main one starts getting more backlinks or traffic and then Google sees it as more relevant and then ignores your main site's content... Google's going to favor the duplicate that appears the most relevant.
I'm pretty cautious about duplicate content though because it has the possibility of hurting your site if Google thinks it's "spamy" and they change their algorithm so frequently now that its hard to keep up.
My recommendation is set up the other domain names as parked domains instead of duplicating the site. As you build up any backlinks focus on linking to just one domain name too.
Yes, if these serve the same content, it will sooner or later trigger a content issue or some kind of manually penalty. If Google finds out you own all those domain names (or they belong to a small network of owners), then they will take action for sure. The penalty will sink you in SERPs.
It is not natural to have many domain names sharing the same content. It does not happen by accident and there is no good reason one would need to achieve this.
I would never recommend using different ccTLDs for the same content in the same languages.
However, if the websites are localized, you can use hreflang and "connect" each version of a page with appropriate language. Check this link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
I am going to create a network with one domain, e.g. example.com then going to manage my websites in folders. Look below for example:
www.example.com/market
www.example.com/freebies
www.example.com/personalblog
www.example.com/shop
Consider that all four websites have different design and codes.From seo perspective, is it recommended or I should use subdomains or buy four domains for each website?
Do not use subdirectories to serve different, non-related websites. Sub domains can be considered if the websites have 'some' relation. Separate domains are preferable if the websites have nothing in common.
Well, that a good question.
In SEO, it's great to work with Silo's technique. the "market" silo's should deals with one subjet, the "freebies" silo's should deals with another, etc...
Nevertheless, Google needs to qualified the subject of the global site. The qualification of homepage is important for a great SEO strategy.
According to Abondance (famous seo french agency), working on subfolder isn't a bad solution, even if working on subdomain seems to be better (even more if different parts of your site is in different languages).
To conclude, i think that your solution isn't so bad, but some are thinking that subdomains are better, even more if subjects of every parts are really really differents in their content, as said by thaJeztah
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I heard something about Google has some priority for .us or .name domain names for assigning page rank to them.
For example, with the same situation for both a .at and .us domain name, the .us domain name will have higher page rank that .at.
I want to know is that correct or not?
No. Matt Cutts, head of the Google Web Spam team, explained a lot about TLDs in this video:
http://domainate.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/matt-cutts-discusses-new-top-level-domains-and-google/
There is no bias against TLDs, or as the article quotes:
Google will not have predisposed bias against new TLDs
Matt makes it clear multiple times that Google strives to return good
relevant results regardless of the TLD of the domain. He even made a
point to indicate that Google has no bias against the recently
released .XXX.
Although the writer does add:
What I think: Matt has said before they do not take TLD into account,
but many studies have shown that to not be true. The truth is, they
may not directly bias against TLDs, but factors like domain and site
age are factored into their algorithm. New TLDs have disadvantages in
both compared to established sites/domains in other extensions.
Some people later thought that Google would artifically favor new TLDs to make up for that, but here's more on that:
http://domainate.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/matt-cutts-confirms-new-tlds-will-not-get-seo-preference/
Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages,
regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank
new TLDs appropriately, but I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind
of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening
in the long-term either.
I don't think so. Logically, Google has to consider tld as the same. Otherwise, all webmasters would buy .us tld unlike others even if they work on sites out of the United States. Moreover, I don't think Google gives more PageRank to .us tld than others. A website is a website despite of its tld.
In my opinion, no priority by logic.
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I am taking SEO of our website to another level. I read a lot about it and study all aspects of how to properly handle multiple domains and languages. For now we use three domain names www.myurl.eu, www.myurl.de and www.myotherurl.com.
All sites were pointed to the same content and I soon learned out that having multiple domains is not a good practice (good reading regarding this: http://www.seo.com/blog/multiple-domains-seo/). OK I solved this as suggested by SEO and Google experts, to pick one primary domain and do a 301 permanent redirect from other domains! OK solved!
BUT! Then I attended on an technical SEO brief in UK, where a SEO guy was speaking something about local search and how UK Google search will prefer .co.uk domains. And it turns out he was correct. Also the link I have posted above there is also a paragraph regarding this:
Country Specific Domains
This is less of a tactic, and more of a “must do,” and is therefore my
exception to multiple domains. It’s an exception because all of the
problems above do not apply when you get into other countries. In
fact, in order to have the best results in international SEO, you’ll
need to have a country specific TLD (or top level domain). For
example, if you’re doing business in England, you will have a hard
time ranking without a .co.uk domain. You can still rank without a
country level TLD, but it’s an uphill battle. And by uphill, I mean
Rocky Mountains-type uphill.
Q1:
So OK, to rank high for my business in UK I will need a www.myurl.co.uk. I have bought one. Now question that arises from this. Is a www.myurl.co.uk again a 301 redirect to my primary domain or not? How should I handle this?
Q2:
Then there is a multilingual aspect of all this. My site is build in a way so Language sites are altered with an /lang/ code in url. Example:
www.myurl.eu/en/products -> english products site
www.myurl.eu/de/products -> same site in german
www.myotherurl.com/en/products -> 301 redirect to
www.myurl.eu/en/products
So now what to do with my country specific domains www.myurl.co.uk and www.myurl.de? Should these be 301 redirects to main domains like www.myurl.co.uk -> www.myurl.eu/en/ and www.myurl.de -> www.myurl.eu/de/? Is this the right way to go with?
Q3: should I really go this way having separate country level domains in countries where I do business? I haven't seen let's say Apple having an apple.co.uk and so on? How important is this really?
Q1. In my opinion you should use 301 end redirect it to
www.myurl.eu/en.
Q2. Yes, you should point country specific domain into that
country language version of your site. eg. www.myurl.co.uk should
be redirected to www.myurl.eu/en
Q3. Country domain is only one of dozens of things which makes
certain page to be connected with that or another
country/region. I think you shouldn't take so much care about
that. There are much more important things connected with pages
internationalization than country domain, eg. links from
country-local pages, diversity of that links, content value, etc.
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OK. This problem is doing my head in. And I don't know if there even IS a definitive answer.
We have a website, lets call it mycompany.com. It's a UK-based site, with UK based content. Google knows about it, and we have done a load of SEO on it. All is well.
Except, we are about to relaunch my company, the GLOBAL brand, so we now need mycompany.com/uk, mycompany.com/us, and mycompany.com/au, for the various countries local content. We are using GEOIP, so if someone from the US loads mycompany.com, they get redirected to mycompany.com/us etc.
If someone isn't in one of those three countries (US, Australia, or UK) they get the UK site.
This is all well and good, but we dont want to lose the rather large amount of Google juice we have on mycompany.com! And worse, the Google bot appears to be 100% based in the US, so the US site (which is pretty much out LEAST important one of the three) will appear to be the main one.
We have thought about detecting the bot, and serving UK content, but it appears Google may smack us for that.
Has anyone else come across this situation, and have a solution?
As long as Google can find mycompany.com/uk and mycompany.com/au, it'll index all three versions of the site. Your domain's Google juice should apply to all three URLs just fine if they're on the same domain.
Have you thought about including links for different sites on the homepage? Google could follow those and index their content as well - in turn indexing the UK content.
If you instead using uk.mycompany.com, us. mycompany.com etc, then you can
register them with google webmaster tools and specifically tell google which country they are from.
This might still work with folders rather than subdomains, but I haven't tried it.
One way to get round that, thinking about it, would be to 301 redirect uk.mycompany.com to mycompany.com/uk, then you'd be telling Google, as well as keeping your existing structure.
#ross: yes, we have links between the sites. It' just the home page, and which one comes up when someone searches for "my company" in google.
Thanks!
google alerts just brought me to this thread.
The domain name that was previously used in your question is my blog and the domain name is not for sale.
Are you just using this as an example domain - for the purpose of this discussion only? The convention is to use example.com as it is reserved for this exact purpose.
Some clarification would be appreciated.