• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. International SEO
        4. Targeting Different Countries... One Site or Separate?

        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.

        Targeting Different Countries... One Site or Separate?

        International SEO
        5
        8
        8525
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • BlinkWeb
          BlinkWeb last edited by

          I have a client who has 3 ecommerce sites. They are somewhat differentiated but for the most part sell the same stuff. Luckily 2 of them are quite authoritative, old and rank reasonably well.

          Most of the visitors and sales come from the US. He wants to start targeting Europe, Mexico and Canada.

          What are your suggestions for doing this? Are we better targeting on the main domains? Not really sure how to do that?

          Should we use a subdomain and a new store front for each geo?

          Should we use a .co.uk .co.mx and .co.ca each with a unique storefront?

          It looks like we are moving to a Magento platform so setting up multiple storefronts on a single database is not a big issue.

          Anyone have any experience with this?

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Getz.pro
            Getz.pro last edited by

            Most assuredly use different CC-TLDs! I would also point to each from each as you have seen on many global sites. This will allow you to use different keywords also as Europe and the US have different spellings for the same words. So make sure your shopping cart software allows this if you are using the same across all domains.

            This will help in link building also as it would be harder to get a spanish website linking to an english website even with sub domains.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • BlinkWeb
              BlinkWeb @MarkLoud last edited by

              I like that a lot! Can you rewrite product descriptions without maintaining separate databases? Would that involve a custom field or something?

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • MarkLoud
                MarkLoud last edited by

                Roger, The way we have approached this in the past was to go with separate TLD's using Magento. The main thing we did was to focus on a complete content rewrite for all pages including product descriptions to remove any possibility of duplicate content issues holding back the new sites and then set about localising with directories, webmaster tools and some low level link building. This seemed to do the trick in getting our .co.uk and .ie domains to rank above the older .com original site.

                BlinkWeb 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • Red_Mud_Rookie
                  Red_Mud_Rookie @BlinkWeb last edited by

                  Hosting on a US server is not as much of a problem as it used to be because the search engines have worked this one out.

                  Where it appears you may have a problem is that the site is already established in the US which will make it more difficult to establish a UK site unless you go for the uk tld.

                  If you want to make sure UK visitors to the .com are sent to the right site, then a lightbox generated using JavaScript for non-US IP users would do the trick e.g. www.travelzoo.com

                  Once the user has selected UK then a cookie is dropped and they will always be sent to the UK site.

                  Make sure your country select page includes a no index, follow tag so that it doesn't get indexed, but does pass any link juice it happens to acquire.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • nonlinearcreations
                    nonlinearcreations last edited by

                    It depends a bit on the client. While it's true that a new .ca domain will do better in Canada than a new .com domain, a brand new .ca may not do as well as your established .com which already has some authority. What we've often done was to setup a structure of www.clientsite.com/ca for the regional site. You can register www.clientsite.ca and 301 redirect it to to the subfolder.

                    If you do that, you can handle it in WT by creating multiple entries for the site, not declaring a region for the main domain but creating separate regions for each subfolder.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • BlinkWeb
                      BlinkWeb @Red_Mud_Rookie last edited by

                      I kinda figured that was the case.

                      I know it is going to be more complicated then setting the market in WMT. Any specific advise around geo targeting for e-commerce?

                      Is hosting on a US server a problem if we were going to launch a site in the UK?

                      Red_Mud_Rookie 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • Red_Mud_Rookie
                        Red_Mud_Rookie last edited by

                        If you are going for other markets with the same language e.g. UK (English) then I would go with a separate local TLD because a .com with a /uk will struggle to establish itself in a new market like the UK.

                        Believe me when I say that it is not as simple as indicating in webmaster tools which markets you wish to target, especially if you already have an established site in the US on a .com

                        Go separate. Go local tld.

                        BlinkWeb 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • 1 / 1
                        • First post
                          Last post

                        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.

                        • See all categories

                        Related Questions

                        • Jbeetle

                          Targeting Countries in the Middle East

                          Hi guys, I have a client based in the Middle East using a generic top level domain (.com), and they want to target multiple countries in the GCC (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar etc). I’m thinking that using the hreflang tag would be the best solution here, however the pages will mostly have the exact same content. There will only be slight changes on some pages in terms of using localised title tags [client service] followed by [targeted country], h1's and meta descriptions. Is this the correct approach? And if so should this be implemented side wide or can it be implemented on selected pages only? The site will be in English only.

                          International SEO | | Jbeetle
                          0
                        • alexcbrands

                          International SEO Question: Using hreflang tags across two different TLDs.

                          Hi! My UK based company just recently made the decision to let the US market operate their ecommerce business independently. Initially, both markets were operating off the same domain using sub-directories (i.e: www.brandname.com/en-us/ , www.brandname.com/en-gb/ ) Now that the US team have broken away from the domain - they are now using www.brandnameUSA.com while the UK continues to use www.brandname.com/en-gb/. The content is similar across both domains - however, the new US website has been able to consolidate several product variations onto single product pages where the UK website is using individual product pages for each variation. We have placed a geo-filter on the main domain which is 301 redirecting North American traffic looking for www.brandname.com to www.brandnameUSA.com However, since the domain change has taken place, product pages from the original domain are now indexing alongside the new US websites product pages in US search results. The UK website wants to be the default destination for all international traffic. My question is - how do we correctly setup hrlang tags across two separate TLDs and how do we handle a situation where multiple product pages on the "default" domain have been consolidated into one product page on the new USA domain? This is how we are currently handling it: "en-us" href="https://www.BRANDNAMEUSA.com/All-Variations" /> href="https://www.BRANDNAMEUSA.com/All-Variations" />

                          International SEO | | alexcbrands
                          0
                        • lcourse

                          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.
                          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?

                          International SEO | | lcourse
                          0
                        • DocdataCommerce

                          How to best set up international XML site map?

                          Hi everyone, I've been searching about a problem, but haven't been able to find an answer. We would like to generate a XML site map for an international web shop. This shop has one domain for Dutch visitors (.nl) and another domain for visitors of other countries (Germany, France, Belgium etc.) (.com). The website on the 2 domains looks the same, has the same template and same pages, but as it is targeted to other countries, the pages are in different languages and the urls are also in different languages (see example below for a category bags). Example Netherlands:
                          Dutch domain: www.client.nl 
                          Example Dutch bags category page: www.client.nl/tassen Example France:
                          International domain: www.client.com 
                          Example French bags category page: www.client.com/sacs When a visitor is on the Dutch domain (.nl) which shows the Dutch content, he can switch country to for example France in the country switch and then gets redirected to the other, international .com domain. Also the other way round. Now we want to generate a XML sitemap for these 2 domains. As it is the same site, but on 2 domains, development wants to make 1 sitemap, where we take the Dutch version with Dutch domain as basis and in the alternates we specify the other language versions on the other domain (see example below). <loc>http://www.client.nl/tassen</loc>
                          <xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
                          hreflang="fr"
                          href="http://www.client.com/sacs"
                          /></xhtml:link<br> Is this the best way to do this? Or would we need to make 2 site maps, as it are 2 domains?

                          International SEO | | DocdataCommerce
                          0
                        • Alex.Weintraub

                          Auto-Redirecting Homepage on Multilingual Site

                          The website has an auto-redirecting homepage on a multilingual site. Here is some background: User visits the site for first time > sent to javascript age verification page with country of origin selector. If selects "France" then served French page (.com/fr-fr/). If selects any other country, then served English page (.com/en-int/). A cookie is set, and next time the user visits the site, they are automatically served the appropriate language URL. 1st Question: .com/ essentially does not exist. It is being redirected to .com/en-int/ as this is the default page. Should this be a 301 redirect since I want this to serve as the new homepage? 2nd Question:. In the multilingual sitemap, should I still set .com/ as the hreflang="x-default" even though the user is automatically redirected to a language directory? According to Google, as just released here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/creating-right-homepage-for-your.html "automatically serve the appropriate HTML content to your users depending on their location and language settings. You will either do that by using server-side 302 redirects or by dynamically serving the right HTML content. Remember to use x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation on the homepage / generic page even if the latter is a redirect page that is not accessible directly for users." So, this is where I am not clear.  If use a 302 redirect of .com/ to either .com/en-int/ or .com/fr-fr/, won't I then lose the inbound link value and DA/PA of .com/ if I just use a 302? Note: there is no .com/ at this moment. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks,Alex

                          International SEO | | Alex.Weintraub
                          0
                        • SOS_Children

                          Subdomains or subfolders for language specific sites?

                          We're launching an .org.hk site with English and Traditional Chinese variants. As the local population speaks both languages we would prefer not to have separate domains and are deciding between subdomains and subfolders. We're aware of the reasons behind generally preferring folders, but many people, including a-moz.groupbuyseo.org, suggest preferring subfolders to subdomains with the notable exception of language-specific sites. Does this mean subdomains should be preferred for language specific sites, or just that they are okay? I can't find any rationale to this other than administrative simplification (e.g. easier to set up different analytics / hosting), which in our case is not an issue. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

                          International SEO | | SOS_Children
                          0
                        • HMK-NL

                          How to fix the duplicate content problem on different domains (.nl /.be) of your brand's websites in multiple countries?

                          Dear all, what is the best way to fix the duplicate content problem on different domains (.nl /.be) of your brand's websites in multiple countries? What must I add to my code of websites my .nl domain to avoid duplicate content and to keep the .nl website out of google.be, but still well-indexed in google.nl? What must I add to my code of websites my .be domain to avoid duplicate content and to keep the .nl website out of google.be, but still well-indexed in google.nl? Thanks in advance!

                          International SEO | | HMK-NL
                          3
                        • Corel

                          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 | | Corel
                          0

                        Get started with Moz Pro!

                        Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                        Start my free trial
                        Products
                        • Moz Pro
                        • Moz Local
                        • Moz API
                        • Moz Data
                        • STAT
                        • Product Updates
                        Moz Solutions
                        • SMB Solutions
                        • Agency Solutions
                        • Enterprise Solutions
                        • Digital Marketers
                        Free SEO Tools
                        • Domain Authority Checker
                        • Link Explorer
                        • Keyword Explorer
                        • Competitive Research
                        • Brand Authority Checker
                        • Local Citation Checker
                        • MozBar Extension
                        • MozCast
                        Resources
                        • Blog
                        • SEO Learning Center
                        • Help Hub
                        • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                        • How-to Guides
                        • Moz Academy
                        • API Docs
                        About Moz
                        • About
                        • Team
                        • Careers
                        • Contact
                        Why Moz
                        • Case Studies
                        • Testimonials
                        Get Involved
                        • Become an Affiliate
                        • MozCon
                        • Webinars
                        • Practical Marketer Series
                        • MozPod
                        Connect with us

                        Contact the Help team

                        Join our newsletter

                        Access all your tools in one place. Whether you're tracking progress or analyzing data, everything you need is at your fingertips.

                        Moz logo
                        © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                        • Accessibility
                        • Terms of Use
                        • Privacy

                        Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.