Regional and Global Site

[Clickmetrics]

We have numerous versions of what is basically the same site, that targets different countries, such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa.

These websites use Tlds to designate the region, for example, co.uk, co.za I believe this is sufficient (with a little help from Google Webmastertools) to convince the search engines what site is for what region.

My question is how do we tell the search engines to send traffic from other regions besides the above to our global site, which would have a .com TLD.

For example, we don't have a Brazilian site, how do we drive traffic from Brazil to our global .com site?

Many thanks,

Jason

[JaneCopland]

Hi Jason,

If you use the unique ccTLDs and the href lang / rel="alternative" tag, this duplication will be fine. The tag was brought out in late 2011 and tells Google: "just because this content is the same on an Australian site, a British site and an American site, this is okay - it has been done on purpose." You can also use it to point to direct translations, e.g. "this Spanish content is the same as this English content over here, but one is meant for the UK and one for Argentina." Lastly, you can also use this tag as mark up to say "This is French content meant for Canada, and this English content over here is also meant for Canada".

More information about the tag is available here and here.

Cheers,

Jane

[kwoolf]

That last comment kind of worried me. Each site has a separate domain, but is the content all the same? You'd basically be competing with each other and even your global site, not to mention suffering from possible duplicate content issues. Not sure what kind of approach you've taken but can't think of too many reasons one would want to host the same site on multiple domains.

But to answer your question, yes. More tips here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

Good luck Jason. I'm not going to sleep well because of what I read here tonight, but if you're fulfilling your business goals with this approach I'll just have to trust that you know what you're doing.

[Clickmetrics]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for your quick and helpful reply.

So if I understand you correctly, without specifically targeting a region using web master tools and using a region agnostic tld such as .com tells Google that this is our Global Site. As long as we leave our global site un-targeted and the regional sites targeted would be the most effective way to ensure non-regional traffic is driven to our global site.

As our sites are not multilingual, maybe the Brazilian example was not the best - however I was referring to English based queries.

With regards to your last point, no each site is a separate domain.

Thanks again for you help and advise.

Many thanks,

Jason

[kwoolf]

Hey Jason,

You're basically telling Google to do just that when you indicate the geographic target for .com site as unlisted and your other ccTLDs target as a specific region. If you don't have language specific content for Brazil in Portuguese or Spanish, then ranking for commonly searched terms in this locale will be challenging.

If you care to post a link to your site, we can all give you better advice. One question I have after thinking about your question for a minute is do you have these ccTLDs all pointing to the same site? Is your content translated into different languages? Unless there is a strong rationale for these ccTLDs, i.e. sales tracking, conversions, etc., I'm going to say you're probably hurting your ranking by having so many URLs all pointing to the same page. This spreads link juice out between all the pages instead of concentrating it to a single URL.