Ranking the same English language content on different (sub) domains

[FranticFish]

I am advising on a business where there is a .com and a .co.uk in English that publish 90% similar content. In GSC the .co.uk is geotargeted to the UK but the .com is geo-targeted initially. The two sites are cannibalising each other, to the detriment especially of the .co.uk

I'm aware that we could use subdomains or domains to have the following set up:
.com as international
.co.uk for Britain
us. or .us for America
au. or .com.au for Australia
... and so on

My questions are:
1) how effective is the GSC geo-targeting feature (together with href lang) at doing this?
and
2) how do you stop dupe content issues for an international domain in English when you have regional domains in English?
Or, how can I stop the .com showing in regional Googles instead of or as well as the regional equivalent?

There are strong business considerations for them having multiple (sub)domains in English.

The only thing that will be different from region to region is the menu and the content that gets pulled onto the home page. Pretty much all the categories, and all the content in those categories, is shared.

I'd welcome any experiences, plus any advice on pitfalls, pros / cons of doing it this way as opposed on one mega site.

[aristotle]

One possibility that MIGHT help is to scatter the name of each country , and the names of major cities within that country, throughout the site designed for that country. Also, you should add some unique content to each site that isn't on the other sites, the more the better. All of this would be in addition to the other possibilities you mentioned.

[Andy Langton]

Hreflang basically says "if you were going to display this page, choose the most appropriate alternate language". For instance, if your .co.uk was in the rankings in Google.es and you had a Spanish version available, the Spanish version would be displayed.

So, in your case, if you have the wrong site ranking in geographic results, hreflang will fix this. It won't however, obtain you any rankings that you don't have already.

how do you stop dupe content issues for an international domain in English when you have regional domains in English?

Remember that the issue with duplicate content is that Google chooses which duplicate to display, possibly to your detriment. If you're publishing the same content multiple times, you cannot prevent this with geotargeting options.You can use hreflang to fix the display, but it won't fix a problem if Google chooses a less useful duplicate to rank, and your rankings are worse as a result.

In terms of best practices, country-level domains are the way to go. You eliminate all possible doubt by doing this.

[FranticFish]

Thanks for replies both of you.

In terms of best practices, country-level domains are the way to go.

The problem with this is that for English language, the .com international version will still compete with them. You could have a German language site on a .de and an .at and be confident that Google would keep those two apart - but not necessarily if you then published a German language .com - that site might well start showing up in the German and Austrian Google indexes.

They do have a .co.uk that is being outranked by the .com in Google UK currently. Because there's no way of assigning a family in GSC, there's no way to tell Google that we DON'T want the .com to be seen in countries where we have a country specific domain. And because the .com is far older and far more popular, Google obviously prefers it.

So I think I'm going to recommend that they
- try regional subdomains (so us.example.com, uk.example.com and so on) but be prepared for that to not work the way they want it to, and
- be prepared to have a regional home page only (so example.com/uk/) with all other content published only once and not geo-targeted in any way.

[Andy Langton]

The problem with this is that for English language, the .com international version will still compete with them.

As long as the .com has a specified language, hreflang sorts this out. Typically, this would be the US, but you can also use it as "fallback" for non-specified English speakers, e.g.

<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.co.uk/" hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com.au/" hreflang="en-au" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/" hreflang="en" />

[FranticFish]

Andy, have you used this yourself and seen it work? I don't have any first hand experience, but what I've read indicates to me that hreflang is like canonical and a guideline more than a rule.

In this case the .com is very strong and other country domains in English will be weaker or even brand new.

[Andy Langton]

Andy, have you used this yourself and seen it work?

Yes. I've been doing international set-ups for a long while. For years it was a real pain to get multi-country to work, and involved a lot of technical fixes to be in place, but hreflang, from my experience, works as expected. You're not going to get 100% results and the canonical comparison is a good one. It's also never going to replace building distinct, country-specific sites in terms of performance, but, of course, you have to weigh that against the implementation time (next to nothing for hreflang). I'm very sceptical of "proprietary" solutions, "Webmaster Tools" options and the like, but hreflang is pretty effective if implemented correctly.

[FranticFish]

OK thanks!