How to tell Google which countries should go to which site of 3

[JeremySDMF]

Hi,

OK, here is the situation, I have 3 sites as listed below. The number of sites, tld's, and languages are not going to change.

abc.com (U.S. site, in English only, serves as the contact for 75 Countries in total)
abc.de (German site, in UK English and German, serves as contact for 98 countries in total)
xyz.com (UK site, in UK English only, serves the UK and 60 other countries)

All 3 sites have the same basic site pages, translated from US English to UK English to German. There are some differences for regions, but the site pages are about +90% the same. I created canonical tags to reference the US site as the original on all three sites. They all have there own blogs, which is unique to each site.

My question is how do I direct the appropriate international traffic to the correct site? In Google Search Console, I can only target one country for the .coms, (US and UK) and the .de is already associated with Germany.

Do I need to create href lang tags on each site for each country it serves? And if I do that, which language do I choose for those tags? For instance, Brazil (Portuguese) and Columbia (Spanish) are both covered by the US site, which is only in English. Would I make a href lang for Brazil using Portuguese or English.

Or is there a better way to do this. Is there a way I can use Google Search Console to assign countries? Right now a lot of UK visitors are going finding/using the American site, which I am trying to fix.

Thanks.

[aristotle]

It might be hard to get one site to be successful in a lot of different countries simultaneously

[JeremySDMF]

It is less about trying to make it successful in every country as it is about trying to direct the traffic properly. All 3 of these sites existed previously, they were all redone. In fact, the American site was 3 separate sites that was merged into 1.

I would like to know if there was a way to let Google know which site should handle which countries' traffic. Should I use hrefs, should I not use canonical tags?

This is a medical company with a product that no one else really has, so they will be found. They just have operations in only 3 countries, but can serve anyone around the world.

Thanks for any help.

[rainborick]

First off, keep in mind that language and geo-location are separate/distinct factors. In this case, I believe your main concern should be geo-location.

aristotle is correct in saying that it is difficult to get a site to perform well in multiple countries. geo-location is a strong ranking factor and will almost always result in a site attracting traffic only from the primary target country. This is particularly true for sites using a Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) like your .de domain. Generic TLDs, like your .com domains, can do better outside their primary target country - especially if you use the targeting options in the Google and Bing webmaster tools - but they will also tend to do far better in their primary target.

Go read Google's advice for Mult-Regional Sites [webmasters.googleblog.com] and you'll find some good advice.

[JeremySDMF]

Hi Rainborick,

Unfortunately the decision of ccTLD's and the regions each site controls was not determined by me, as each site is responsible for 60+ countries

The purpose of what I would like to accomplish with coding and webmaster tools is to let Google know which country (location) should go to which site. I realize having 2 .coms and 1 .de, are not the best options. Also, that the .de is responsible for most of Europe and part of Asia.

I do not see in webmaster tools any options to choose multiple countries as a focus, but only 1. And that is only if using a .com.

So I would think my only other option would be to make href tags based on location, which would mean making 60, 75 and 98 href tags for the 3 sites. But would that even make a difference?

Should I just ignore targeting all together, no href or canonical tags, and let Google figure it out? I don't want to exclude any region, which I feel is happening now, based on traffic/submissions.

I know this is a little out of the norm issue, so I appreciate all your help.

Thanks.

[rainborick]

No, your internal mark-up won't do anything in this regard. At best, you would indicate to Google which language is used for your pages. Mark-up will have no influence on geo-location. It will just help match users with pages using their preferred language(s).

To be clear, the .de domain is extremely unlikely to ever appear in the SERPs outside of Germany. Nothing you do will change that.

For the .com domains, their primary geo-location in both Google and Bing will default to the country where the server that hosts them is located, based on its IP address. You can override this by using the settings in the Google Search Console. Google also considers the geo-location origins of the links that point to a site as a secondary signal, so in some situations pages from those domains may appear in the SERPs for users in those other countries as well. That is, for a generic TLD whose primary target is Country A, it may (occasionally) rank in Country B if a substantial quantity/quality of links pointing to the site originate on sites located in Country B as well. Overall, you should never expect a site to appear in the SERPs outside of their primary target country.

However, on generic TLDs you can also set a separate primary target country on individual subdomains and subdirectories using the Google Search Console, which would give you a shot at multiple countries under a single parent domain. It would require populating those additional subdomains or subdirectories. You don't need to worry about duplicate content here. You won't be penalized for using the same content in these subdomains or subdirectories if they have their own targets set.

My point is that you need to take deliberate steps to target multiple countries. You can't rely on mark-up, page content, regional matching or other search engine algorithms to match a single domain with users in multiple countries.

[aristotle]

If you have the resources, it might make sense for the long term to create a few new sites to target some more individual countries, especially those that have the most potential for sending future customers. You could host each site in its targeted country and use the corresponding country code domain for it. All of this would take some work but might pay off in the long run.