.co.uk & .com ...How to best rank for both?

[AjiNIMC]

Assumption:
#1: Having a .co.uk websites helps in ranking in UK
#2: Having a .co.uk website helps in better sales in UK as people see personalized.
#3: .com will be for all countries except UK
#4: Adding content on both .com and .co.uk will be difficult, there will be common section
#5: Google allows tags rel=alternative langhref for languages but not for regions in the best way


Now how do one have a website for .co.uk and .com and get the best for ranking.

Thanks,
Aji Issac

[tedster]

Google's intention is to sort this situation exactly as you described: the .co.uk should rank in the UK and the .com should rank elsewhere.

At various times they have some problems getting this right, but as a rule it does work as planned. I've never seen "duplicate content" problem with this set-up.

[edited by: tedster at 6:55 pm (utc) on Feb 13, 2012]

[sunnyujjawal]

Google search results changes a lot in local search engines. Choose keywords wisely from keyword tool for global and local volume search

[Yellow_Sun]

We have two domain names the same, one .com and the other .co.uk, and tedster is right on Google having troubles getting rankings right at most times.

About 35% of the content is written on the same subject matter but not duplicated.... guess I just don't trust Google on ranking us well if the content is the same, but tedster knows best so maybe it's ok to do.

Things that should help rankings:
- .co.uk content specific to the UK, and .com specific to the US.
- .co.uk site on a server in the UK, .com US server.
- .co.uk links from UK sites, .com links from US sites.

Hope that helps a little, good luck!

[HuskyPup]

Personally I find Google making a complete hash of things in Google.co.uk for my company dot com and company dot co.uk sites and they have both been around since 1994.

The .com hardly ranks for anything in the UK these days and the .co.uk may as well not be there now for all the traffic it gets, and the majority of that is from the USA, therefore I'm seriously considering just launching the entire .com site on the .co.uk url and see what happens.

At the moment the .co.uk is a completely different site to the .com, let's see how the mega meddler copes with a complete duplicate!

I never used to have this problem, both sites ranked extremely well in the UK Serps but all it is now is a pointless mess and full of spammy MFA keyword domains.

Bing does a better job but by no means good though, those MFAs are everywhere again.

[AjiNIMC]

Thanks everyone.

Still searching for any possible solution. No tag I could find for it.

Will Canonical tag work with some variation of it? Any Google guys who can help with an answer? Thanks!

[tedster]

Aji, the canonical link is not the right tool here. If you tag the .co.uk pages as .com being the canonical URL, then the .co.uk pages will eventually not show up in the search results - and the reverse would also be the case.

The ideal help for this situation would be many backlinks to the .co.uk domain coming from sites that are located in the UK.

[AjiNIMC]

My whole concern is:

My business is same, my knowledge base and blog, discussion etc is same ... How will google come to know that its the same business and pass on credit from one website to others.

Canonical with alternative tags can be suggested by Google to fix it up. I read almost all official docs by Google blog but nowhere it mentions about multi region as of now.

Can we get some Google officials to answer it as this is going to be a major factor as most of the companies are working in different regions + Google is going more and more regional as well.

Thanks,
Aji Issac

[tedster]

If you want Google's official input, the place to go is their own forums - we're not a venue to communicate with Google.

I've worked with many international businesses who own both a .com and many country code TLDs. I've never seen any way that Google uses something like the "value" of the business to influence rankings of the individual domains.

[AjiNIMC]

Here are few things I could did it further, I don't know if they improved the page later or not.

[support.google.com...] (See the example part)

http://www.example.com/ English-language homepage. Contains information about fees for shipping internationally from the USA.
http://en-gb.example.com/ English-language; displays prices in pounds sterling.
http://en-us.example.com/ English-language; displays prices in US dollars.
http://de.example.com/ German-language version of the content

Now also see step #1 and Step #2 here.

Only one thing I could not get is, can the URL in the alternative be on a different website? I read but could get an answer to it.

Thanks.
Aji Issac

[edited by: tedster at 3:34 am (utc) on Feb 15, 2012]
[edit reason] I turned off the automatic linking [/edit]

[tedster]

I don't remember seeing that particular Help page before - thanks for the link. And now I feel quite confused about the rel-canonical recommendation on that page.

can the URL in the alternative be on a different website

It isn't explicitly stated, is it? I'd guess that if a different subdomain is OK then a different domain altogether should be, too - but after reading that rel-canonical comment I'm not too confident of my guesswork right now.

And rereading this Help section, I see it is about "any website that offers content in more than one language." Maybe they feel they already have the ccTLD situation under control.

[AjiNIMC]

Yeah, even I guess so. Different domain is supported in canonical URLs for sure but in href, they haven't mentioned it anywhere explicitly (not in examples not in words, everywhere they are mentioning URLs). Also they haven't mentioned any condition that it has to be from the same domain.

en-US, en-UK is a really cool way to put the content. I think I shall do the experiment with the assumption that it will work with multi domain.

Thanks,
Aji Issac

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

No on-page tags are needed, you can sign up for and log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and assign a geographic location to each domain. Obviously you would assign a U.K. geo-location to the .com.uk site and I would simply leave the .com without a geo-location set (perhaps at most set up some code on the .com to redirect to .com.uk if it detects a UK visitor?)

I can't guarantee Google will adhere to this, they don't trust webmaster provided information very often, but it's designed for this.

[Whitey]

There needs to be some more careful thought here with regards to the Panda quality score.

Although it's cool to put content across multi TLD's and rank on each of Google's regional listings, what is not clear is whether this form of duplication can effect your Panda score and get your penalised.

Logically, aggregated content is considered low quality - so how does Panda deal with it in this form? Surely no differently. So proceed with caution.

I've not seen any references that can answer this [ there may be some ]. Has anyone got any answers on this?

[tedster]

Obviously you would assign a U.K. geo-location to the .com.uk site

When you have a country code domain such as .co.uk, you cannot assign it to another country - only the UK. The options in WMT are grayed out and inactive

Although it's cool to put content across multi TLD's and rank on each of Google's regional listings, what is not clear is whether this form of duplication can effect your Panda score and get your penalised.

I've worked with several companies who use country-specific TLDs and none of them have seen any Panda problems.

[atlrus]

Why do you need 2 websites for the same content?!? Just use the .com

For the keywords I monitor in Google.co.uk 10 out of the top 10 websites are on .com domains. Some are UK companies, some are international, but none of them use .co.uk and they are doing just fine. Also, none of them use geo-targeting either, i.e. those same websites show on Google.com without the "United Kingdom" added to the description.

[AjiNIMC]

If you search for SEO companies UK, you may get a different view, 8/10 are .co.uk, same is with loan uk. For many of the keywords people will be using uk along with it.

[atlrus]

If you search for SEO companies UK, you may get a different view, 8/10 are .co.uk, same is with loan uk. For many of the keywords people will be using uk along with it.

That's because you include "UK" in the search. Most people from UK won't do that, the same way I don't put "USA" at the end of my searches :)

I own a few UK-targeting websites and I can honestly say that visitors from UK never include "UK" with their searches (and I rank both for blue widgets and blue widgets UK). Now, I can see people searching for "loan Liverpool", but that's different.

If you do a search for just "SEO companies" you would get .com domains which rank just as good or better than .co.uk Also, if for some reason they decide to include the "UK" it would be at the front, as in "UK blue widgets", rather than "blue widgets UK", which also brings out just as many .com as .co.uk

[HuskyPup]

For the keywords I monitor in Google.co.uk 10 out of the top 10 websites are on .com domains. Some are UK companies, some are international, but none of them use .co.uk and they are doing just fine.

I have to completely disagree with this for my widgets.

These days it's a nightmare trying to rank my 18 year old example.com, it's mostly been blown out by .co.uk sites even though it still ranks extremely well in G.com

For some keywords ALL I see are Chinese and Indian .com, mostly directory, sites ranking in the top ten and I have to add UK to the search to find any meaningful G.co.uk SERPs.

Obviously it depends on one's widgets but for me G.co.uk is an awful mess and don't even get me started on US created keyword MFA domains.

[atlrus]

I have to completely disagree with this for my widgets.

These days it's a nightmare trying to rank my 18 year old example.com, it's mostly been blown out by .co.uk sites even though it still ranks extremely well in G.com

For some keywords ALL I see are Chinese and Indian .com, mostly directory, sites ranking in the top ten and I have to add UK to the search to find any meaningful G.co.uk SERPs.

Well, this actually proves my point.

As far as you having a hard time ranking .com and being beaten by .co.uk - this has nothing to do with your domain extension, you are simply outranked by websites which happen to have .co.uk as TLD.

[nippi]

Tedster, what you say makes no sense.

If its was true, i could write one lot of content, and publish a

US
CA
UK
AU
NA
SA

version, identical content, and it would all just work out, i could SEO them just fine.

My experience is this is not the case.

[Whitey]

I've come across a few large sites that changed their minds on multi TLD , prefering to canonicalize them into one URL/domain. The consensus is that it takes too much support to maintain and management.