Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Which Google does a .ie website get shown in?
-
Hi all, I am working on a .ie website and I was under the understanding that if you have a regional domain, like .ie you will limited to being shown in a search engine like google.ie
When I go to International Targeting in Google SEarch Console it says the site is associated with: Ireland
Am I limiting my ability to rank well in worldwide Google searches with this domain and if so, how can I counter this?
Many thanks.
-
I see a lot of confusion in all the answers :-).
The .ie domain is never treated as a generic domain name by Google. It's the country code domain for Ireland. Stop.
A country code domain name is geo-targeted by default on its corresponding regional version of Google, but Google doesn't "block" its visibility also in others Google (i.e.: Google.com or Google.co.uk), however, a ccTLD will have more difficulties in ranking higher in another Google than its own.
In other words:
- domain.ie is targeting by default Google.ie;
- but, it can be shown in Google.co.uk too;
- however, for ranking in Google.co.uk - because of its geo-targeted nature - it must have stronger signals like mentions and backlinks to justify its visibility than a domain.co.uk or domain.com.
-
to go back to your initial question and assuming .ie is treated as ccTLD, what GSC seems to validate; in Google´s eyes your site is more relevant for users in Ireland and will therefore not be able to rank equally well as a gTLD globally.
What you can do is change to a gTLD (which i think is the most efficient if you have one website targeting globally). or ccTLD´s for the countries you want to target (ok if you have a lot of recourses)
-
I'm keen to know, too. Thanks.
-
Hi Alick300,
isn´t .ie a ccTLD though for Ireland or does google treat this one as a gccTLD as seen here https://www.screencast.com/t/5YgjXIriy ?
-
Thank you - so am I right in saying the quote above says it doesn't matter whether the site is .ie or .com - it will not be detrimental to its ability to be shown in any version of Google search?
-
Hi,
I'm quoting John mueller(Googler).
"Q: How are the new region or city TLDs (like .london or .bayern) handled?
A: Even if they look region-specific, we will treat them as gTLDs. This is consistent with our handling of regional TLDs like .eu and .asia. There may be exceptions at some point down the line, as we see how they're used in practice. See our help center for more information on multi-regional and multilingual sites, and set geotargeting in Search Console where relevant."
Hope this helps!!
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 does not index UK version of our site, and serves US version instead. Do I need to remove hreflanguage for US?
Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
International SEO | | lcourse
We have another US domain with identical content but USD prices which is indexed fine. When I search in google for site:mydomain I see that most of my pages seem to appear, but then in the rich snippets google shows USD prices instead of the GBP prices which we publish on this page (USD price is not published on the page and I tested with an US proxy and US price is nowhere in the source code). Then I clicked on the result in google to see cached version of page and google shows me as cached version of the UK product page the US product page. I use the following hreflang code: rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.domain.com/product" />
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.domain.co.uk/product" /> canonical of UK page is correctly referring to UK page. Any ideas? Do I need to remove the hreflang for en-US to get the UK domain properly indexed in google?0 -
Google.ie returning more and more UK based results, why?
I have discovered the most infuriating issue with Google Search for Irish users and it seems to be getting increasingly worse in the last 2 years or so. This is not only frustrating as a business owner (in fact it could bring a business to its knees) but it is rage inducing as a consumer.
International SEO | | Secrets
Google knows the location where I am searching from and I'm using google.ie yet I still get just a small number of Irish websites usually followed by eBay and Amazon results then a never ending list of websites that are based in the United Kingdom. Now, I know the one thing that we all have in common is the use of the English language, however what we don't have in common is shipping costs. In order to slightly increase the number of Irish based companies I need to add in the phrase 'Ireland' to my search (on google.ie in Ireland) and this makes only a small difference. In fact, oftentimes Google seems to throw in the odd American or Australian site just to really wind me up.
It's completely absurd that Google rarely returns results for .ie websites or irish based websites when searching in Ireland. Many UK companies don't ship to Ireland (including many of the eBay and Amazon results). This is killing Irish businesses who have the products and cheaper or free shipping and many how are working damn hard on their SEO are still being passed up for companies that have nothing to do with our economy.... Why oh why is this happening.0 -
Country subfolders showing as sitelinks in Google, country targeting for home page no longer working
Hi There, Just wondering if you can help. Our site has 3 region versions (General .com, /ie/ for Ireland and /gb/ for UK), each submitted to Google Webmaster Tools as seperate sites with hreflang tags in the head section of all pages. Google was showing the correct results for a few weeks, but I resubmitted the home pages with slight text changes last week and something strange happened, though it may have been coincidental timing. When we search for the brand name in google.ie or google.co.uk, the .com now shows as the main site, where the sitelinks still show the correct country versions. However, the country subdirectories are now appearing as sitelinks, which is likely causing the problem. I have demoted these on GWT, but unsure as to whether that will work and it seems to take a while for sitelink demotion to work. Has anyone had anything similar happen? I thought perhaps it was a markup issue breaking the head section so that Google can no longer see the hreflangs pointing to each other as alternates. I checked the source code in w3 validator and it doesn't show any errors. Anyway, any help would be much appreciated - and thanks to anyone who gets back, it's a tricky type of issue to troubleshoot. Thanks, Ro
International SEO | | romh0 -
Does Google's algorithm work the same in every country?
I can't help but feel this is a silly question! but does Google algorithm work exactly the same throughout all countries? I run a few sites in the UK and a couple in Spain but can't help but feel that my Spanish sites are harder to rank for. The sites that rank the best are business directories in Spain... whereas here in the UK you'd be lucky to find one on page one..
International SEO | | david.smith.segarra0 -
What are the best practices for translation of city/state names for international SEO? (ie. New York in English vs. Nueva York in Spanish)
I'm working on international SEO / translation of a global travel site. While we have a global keyword research and translation strategy in process for each market they serve, I've run into a unique question. Overall, we are translating (and localizing) content for each market but aren't sure what to do with location names. Each country/state has cities and locations that have their own dedicated pages. I see three options for these location names (when titling a page and writing content): keep them in English, translate the names in the market languages, or use a combination of the two. The challenge with altering the location names to the market languages is that they are truly not known by those names. Though there are some instances where it may make sense…for instance **New York **in Spanish would be "Nueva York" with **‘**Nueva' being the Spanish translation of ‘new’. There are other instances, where no translation exists. If you’ve had a similar experience I'd love to hear your approach/recommendation.
International SEO | | JonClark150 -
Website Target in Europe
Hi, I am planning a site to target in Europe and I expect to translate my site into ten different languages namely English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Greek, Portuguese, Dutch and Swedish. I am doing some study of this case in targeting different countries for SEO, most of the advise are the following: a. Build 10 different websites and target different geographical location in Google Webmaster b. Get 10 different country specific domains for 10 different websites I would like to hear any suggestion if there is anything better than this ? I had all the materials and translation ready but building 10 different websites or getting 10 different domains are very time consuming and costly. I would be appreciated if any one had any advise for me to make the website more management friendly. Thank you. Tom
International SEO | | Stevejobs20110 -
Non US site pages indexed in US Google search
Hi, We are having a global site wide issue with non US site pages being indexed by Google and served up in US search results. Conversley, we have US en pages showing in the Japan Google search results. We currently us IP detect to direct users to the correct regional site but it isn't effective if the users are entering through an incorrect regional page. At the top of each or our pages we have a drop down menu to allow users to manually select their preferred region. Is it possible that Google Bot is crawling these links and indexing these other regional pages as US and not detecting it due to our URL structure? Below are examples of two of our URLs for reference - one from Canada, the other from the US /ca/en/prod4130078/2500058/catalog50008/ /us/en/prod4130078/2500058/catalog20038/ If that is, in fact, what is happening, would setting the links within the drop down to 'no follow' address the problem? Thank you. Angie
International SEO | | Corel0 -
Google Webmaster Tools - International SEO Geo-Targeting site with Worldwide rankings
I have a client who already has rankings in the US & internationally. The site is broken down like this: url.com (main site with USA & International Rankings) url.com/de url.com/de-english url.com/ng url.com/au url.com/ch url.com/ch-french url.com/etc Each folder has it's own sitmap & relative content for it's respective country. I am reading in google webmaster tools > site config > settings, the option under 'Learn More': "If you don't want your site associated with any location, select Unlisted." If I want to keep my client's international rankings the way it currently is on url.com, do NOT geo target to United States? So I select unlisted, right? Would I use geo targeting on the url.com/de, url.com/de-english, url.com/ng, url.com/au and so on?
International SEO | | Francisco_Meza0