• 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. Non US site pages indexed in US Google search

        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.

        Non US site pages indexed in US Google search

        International SEO
        3
        4
        1221
        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.
        • Corel
          Corel last edited by

          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

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • AlanBleiweiss
            AlanBleiweiss @john4math last edited by

            John,

            Thanks for adding all of these great suggestions - I don't do international that often so the full list of methods isn't always in my conscious awareness!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • john4math
              john4math last edited by

              Here's all the things you can do to try geotarget your content for the search bots:

              • Register each subfolder as a separate site in Google Webmaster Tools (e.g. example.com/ca/, example.com/us/), and geotarget it (see here).
              • Set meta tags or http headers on each page to let Bing know the language and country (see here).
              • For duplicate or near-duplicate pages across different English speaking localities, you can try out the hreflang tags to clue Google in that they're the same page, but geotargeting users in different locations.  I haven't personally implemented this myself, so I can't speak to how well it works, but you can find more info about it hereand here.

              Setting nofollows just stops PageRank from flowing, but bots can still follow these links, so I wouldn't do that.

              AlanBleiweiss 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
              • AlanBleiweiss
                AlanBleiweiss last edited by

                Its absolutely possible that's what's happening.  You cannot rely on Google's system being barred from crawling anything on your site, no matter how well you code it.  Even if you blocked the URL with nofollow, it would not stop the bot.

                Another factor is if all your content is in English (as your URL structure suggests it is). Google does a terrible job of discerning separation of international content when all the content is in the same language, on the same root domain.

                Proper separation in a way Google can't confuse is vital.  Since I expect you do not intend to change the language across sites, your best action would be to migrate international content to a completely different domain.  At the very least you can then use GWT to inform Google that "this domain is for this country", however if you want to be even better off, you'd host that other content on a server in that country.

                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

                • KempRugeLawGroup

                  Duplicate Content Regarding Translated Pages

                  If we have one page in English, and another that is translated into Spanish, does google consider that duplicate content? I don't know if having something in a different language makes it different or if it will get flagged. Thanks, Ruben

                  International SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup
                  1
                • VERBInteractive

                  Has any one seen negative SEO effects from using Google Translate API

                  We have a site currently in development that is using the Google Translate API and I am having a massive issue getting screaming frog to crawl and all of our non-native English speaking employees have read through the translated copy in their native language and the general consensus is it reads at a 5th grade level at best. My questions to the community is, has anyone implemented this API on a site and has it a) helped with gaining traffic from other languages/countires and b) has it hurt there site from an SEO standpoint.

                  International SEO | | VERBInteractive
                  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
                • lcourse

                  How to interlink 16 different language versions of site?

                  I remember that Matt Cutts recommended against interlinking many language versions of a site.
                  Considering that google now also crawls javascript links, what is best way to implement interlinking? I still see otherwhise extremely well optimized large sites interlinking to more than 10 different language versions e.g. zalando.de, but also booking.com (even though here on same domain). Currently we have an expandable css dropdown in the footer interlinking 16 different language versions with different TLD. Would you be concerned? What would you suggest how to interlink domains (for user link would be useful)?

                  International SEO | | lcourse
                  0
                • lcourse

                  Country name displayed after domain name in google SERP

                  our online shop targets clients in the US and worldwide (same URL - no subdirectories - currency changes based on IP). when searching in google.ie or google.no for our site google displays in the SERPS "US" or "United States" after the URL for our site, but for most other US competitors it does not show the country in the SERPS. I deleted our google places listing 2 weeks ago, since I suspected it may be related, but no change so far. In google webmaster tools we have targeted the shop domain to United States, which may be another factor. Unfortunately we can not undo this setting since without it our google US ranking for the most relevant competitive keyword drops from position 8 to position 100+. Server location is in Germany which despite lots of US links and US contact info and USD currency appparently makes google think that the site is not targeting the US. Does anybody know what triggers the country name in the SERPS (google places or webmaster tools or other) and  can give advice if there is any way to get rid of it.

                  International SEO | | lcourse
                  0
                • jimmer

                  Country specific domains pointing to a .com site

                  Hello, I am new to seo so please be easy if this happens to be a "silly" question. My company has a .com site. We are expanding into global markets, focusing on specific countries right now. General question: Would I be penalized for duplicate content if I purchased country-specific domains and pointed them to the .com site? Thanks, Jim

                  International SEO | | jimmer
                  0
                • BlinkWeb

                  Targeting Different Countries... One Site or Separate?

                  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?

                  International SEO | | BlinkWeb
                  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
                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.