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.
US domain pages showing up in Google UK SERP
-
Hi,
Our website which was predominantly for UK market was setup with a .com extension and only two years ago other domains were added - US (.us) , IE (.ie), EU (.eu) & AU (.com.au)
Last year in July, we noticed that few .us domain urls were showing up in UK SERPs and we realized the sitemap for .us site was incorrectly referring to UK (.com) so we corrected that and the .us domain urls stopped appearing in the SERP. Not sure if this actually fixed the issue or was such coincidental.
However in last couple of weeks more than 3 .us domain urls are showing for each brand search made on Google UK and sometimes it replaces the .com results all together. I have double checked the PA for US pages, they are far below the UK ones.
Has anyone noticed similar behaviour &/or could anyone please help me troubleshoot this issue?
Thanks in advance,
R
-
As your own agency told, I too consider that when the hreflang will be implemented, this kind of issues should terminate.
Regarding the sitemap error, it was surely something that could be confusing Google about what site to target.
However, I see that you have also an .eu domain name...
I imagine that that domain is meant for targeting the European market and I suspect that it is in English.
If it is so, remember:
- In countries like Spain, France, Germany, italy... we don't search in Internet using English, but Spanish, French, German, Italian... Therefore, that .eu domain is not going to offer you those results you maybe are looking for;
- The .eu domain termination is a generic one, and cannot be geotargeted via Google Search Console. This means that - by default - it targets all the world, hence, you probably can see visits from English speaking users in countries like South Africa, UK, IE, Australia, New Zealand or India, where English is the main language or one of the official ones;
- When it comes to domains like .eu and hreflang, it is always hard to decide how to implement it. In your specific case, as you are targeting UK, US, AU and IE with specific domain names, the ideal would be to implement this hreflang annotation for the .eu (the example is only for the home page):
<rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.eu" hreflang="x-default"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.eu" hreflang="en"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.com" hreflang="en-GB"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.us" hreflang="en-US"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.com.au" hreflang="en-AU"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate">
With those annotations, you are telling Google to show the .com to users in Great Britain, the .us to users in United States, the .au to Australian ones and the .eu to all the other users using English in any other country.
That will mean that your .eu site surely will target also users in others European countries, both using english when searching (hreflang="en") and other languages (hreflang="x-default").
2 notes about the hreflang="x-default":
-
People living in the UK and searching in Spanish will see the .eu domain name, because it is the default domain name for searches in every language but English in GB, IE, AU and US;
-
Again, even if you pretend the .eu domain to target only European countries, that is impossible, because the .eu termination doesn't have any geotargeting power (and regions like Europe or Asia cannot be geotargeted via GSC). So it will be normal to see visit also from countries in others continents.
-
You're very welcome. Either way I'd be interested to see how this one progresses.
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your quick response and detailing out this well.
I have backdated and noticed that this occurs almost every six months. The US domain urls pop up in the UK SERPs for about 2 weeks and disappear after that. We are yet to implement the href lang tags on site and our SEO agency confirm that this should fix the issue.
Will keep this thread updated on the outcome.
Cheers,
RG
-
Whether or not this is an issue kind of depends on what your product or service is. If you provide a local-only service like a restaurant then your US site ranking in the UK would be unusual.
On the other hand, if you sell a physical product this may not be so unusual. For example, here in Australia we're quite limited when it comes to finding men's online clothing stores, most of it comes from the US or the UK so it's not uncommon to see something like the US Jackthreads show up in the SERPs here.
Since you do have separate domains for each location, this might be an indication that search engines aren't really understanding the different jurisdictions for each site; maybe they're not geo-targeted enough for the algorithm to comprehend the fact that each of the 3 sites server a unique area.
Some of the elements that can help define this, in no particular order:
- Server location
- HTML language ( e.g. lang="en-US")
- Regional language differences (e.g. US spelling vs UK)
- Location markup - on your location pages at the very least
- Location mentions throughout your content
While not specifically on-topic, Rand's Whiteboard Friday about scaling geo-targeting offers plenty of great advice that can be applied here as well.
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
-
My site is showing indexed in search console but not appearing in Serps
hi, i have recently made sites.google site and submitted to search console but when I copy paste in google , its not appearing
Algorithm Updates | | alan-shultis0 -
Do the sub domain backlinks count for main domain and increase authority?
Hi all, I just wonder if the back links for different sub domains will be counted and considered to rank the main domain better or they are just limit to sub domain pages? There are many websites which has got multiple sub domains which receive backlinks? So the backlinks to main domain and sub domain weigh same at Google? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Does Google use dateModified or date Published in its SERPs?
I was curious as to the prioritization of dateCreated / datePublished and dateModified in our microdata and how it affects google search results. I have read some entries online that say Google prioritizes dateModified in SERPs, but others that claim they prioritize datePublished or dateCreated. Do you know (or could you point me to some resources) as to whether Google uses dateModified or date Published in its SERPs? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | Parse.ly0 -
Google sets brand/domain name at the end of SERP titles
Hi all, I am experiencing that Google puts our domain name at the end of the titles in SERPs. So if ia have a title: "See our super cool website", Google would show "See our super cool website - Betxpert.com" in the SERPs Well. This is okay. Apart from the fact that i myself often put the brand name in the title AND the fact that Google mispells the site name. The brand is BetXpert with a upper case X...so when i get a SERP with "See our super cool website - BetXpert - Betxpert.com" I am annoyed 🙂 Any one out the know how to tell Google the EXACT brand name, such that they do not set a value the site owner does not want to have? -Rasmus
Algorithm Updates | | rasmusbang0 -
Should my canonical tags point to the category page or the filter result page?
Hi Moz, I'm working on an ecommerce site with categories, filter options, and sort options – teacherexpress.scholastic.com. Should I have canonical tags from all filter and sort options point to the category page like gap.com and llbean.com? or have all sort options point to the filtered page URL like kohls.com? I was under the impression that to use a canonical tag, the pages have to have the same content, meaning that Gap and L.L. Bean would be using canonical tags incorrectly. Using a filter changes the content, whereas using a sort option just changes the order. What would be the best way to deal with duplicate content for this site? Thanks for reading!
Algorithm Updates | | DA20130 -
Google is forcing a 301 by truncating our URLs
Just recently we noticed that google has indexed truncated urls for many of our pages that get 301'd to the correct page. For example, we have:
Algorithm Updates | | mmac
http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html as the url linked everywhere and that's the only version of that page that we use. Google somehow figured out that it would still go to the right place via 301 if they removed the html filename from the end, so they indexed just: http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/ The 301 is not new. It used to 404, but (probably 5 years ago) we saw a few links come in with the html file missing on similar urls so we decided to 301 them instead thinking it would be helpful. We've preferred the longer version because it has the name in it and users that pay attention to the url can feel more confident they are going to the right place. We've always used the full (longer) url and google used to index them all that way, but just recently we noticed about 1/2 of our urls have been converted to the shorter version in the SERPs. These shortened urls take the user to the right page via 301, so it isn't a case of the user landing in the wrong place, but over 100,000 301s may not be so good. You can look at: site:www.eventective.com/usa/massachusetts/bedford/ and you'll noticed all of the urls to businesses at the top of the listings go to the truncated version, but toward the bottom they have the full url. Can you explain to me why google would index a page that is 301'd to the right page and has been for years? I have a lot of thoughts on why they would do this and even more ideas on how we could build our urls better, but I'd really like to hear from some people that aren't quite as close to it as I am. One small detail that shouldn't affect this, but I'll mention it anyway, is that we have a mobile site with the same url pattern. http://m.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html We did not have the proper 301 in place on the m. site until the end of last week. I'm pretty sure it will be asked, so I'll also mention we have the rel=alternate/canonical set up between the www and m sites. I'm also interested in any thoughts on how this may affect rankings since we seem to have been hit by something toward the end of last week. Don't hesitate to mention anything else you see that may have triggered whatever may have hit us. Thank you,
Michael0 -
Why has my homepage been replaced in Google by my Facebook page?
Hi. I was wondering if others have had this happen to them. Lately, I've noticed that on a couple of my sites the homepage no longer appears in the Google SERP. Instead, a Facebook page I've created appears in the position the homepage used to get. My subpages still get listed in Google--just not the homepage. Obviously, I'd prefer that both the homepage and Facebook page appear. Any thoughts on what's going on? Thanks for your help!
Algorithm Updates | | TuxedoCat0 -
Using Brand Name in Page titles
Is it a good practice to append our brand name at the end of every page title? We have a very strong brand name but it is also long. Right now what we are doing is saying: Product Name | Long brand name here Product Category | Long brand name here Is this the right way to do it or should we just be going with ONLY the product and category names in our page titles? Right now we often exceed the 70 character recommendation limit.
Algorithm Updates | | mlentner1