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I have written some code to do this if anyone has the same problems: Title: Number of Pixels: Description: Number of Pixels:

Hi Stu, as the root domain and sub-domain are targeting different geo-locations, moreoever Google treats the sub-domains a little more like a stand alone website, it is highly recommended to earn links for both of them individually, by all possible means from their respective geographies, I mean from the web properties operating or targeting audience in those geo-locations. For example, it would be odd for me to earn links for a Japanese website, targeting Japanese audience from web properties operating or targeting USA audience. Though this is not uncommon, it will not serve the purpose. Over and above this, fetching quality back links from any where is always recommended especially if those links are from authority web properties with high DA, PA and other SEO goodies like good Google PageRank etc.. I would conclude by addressing your question that fetching links to the root domain will not help much to make the sub-domain rank high in search results for many obvious reasons. Just like  we do deep link promotions for promoting pages other than the home page so that they can rank high for their respective target terms, we should be promoting the sub-domains also as if they were standalone websites so as to get maximum benefit from an off-page promotional campaign. Hope it helps my friend. Best, Devanur Rafi

Thanks Guys for all of the help. I think we will just implement cross domain GeoIP redirects to ensure users get the right location and currency. Cheers

HI Paul First to say congratulations on your site. My daughter used it recently before taking her UK driving test! I expect your site is quite a labour of love keeping it up to date? I have to say looking at your current site I don't think there's a lot wrong with what you have now. OK, it doesn't follow the country code / language code convention (which you have included in the new structure), but there is no particular URL structure required by Google I know and I guess it's the same with Bing and Yahoo. Have you had a look at Google's FAQs on internationalisation here: https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation ? So, for your URL structure proposed above there is nothing in particular I would pick up on. Just one things re SEO on your site and one on commericiality... Your best asset re building the site SEO wise will be your articles area. Grow that and add lots more useful articles for learner drivers. Commercially, I think it is a great idea to add Insurance searches on your site, but (1) I think they are hidden where they are in terms of encouraging a call to action and (2) at the moment the dropdown combobox doesn't seem to be working. Again, well done on your site. All the best to you. Peter

Alan if you are using rel="alternate" hreflang="x" correctly then there shouldn't be any problems with duplicate content for different locales using sub domains or folders. As per Google's guildelines: Some example scenarios where rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is recommended: You translate only the template of your page, such as the navigation and footer, and keep the main content in a single language. This is common on pages that feature user-generated content, like a forum post. Your pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but the content has small regional variations. For example, you might have English-language content targeted at readers in the US, GB, and Ireland

Hello, anybody there?

I'm using a .de domain, so google does the geo targeting by default. I have several region specific sites that have a high degree of content overlap, so I use <link rel="alternate" tags to prevent duplicate content issues. I also do ip based redirections so users are sent to the most relevant site. the urls in question are http://fiik.com (this only does the ip based redirection) http://fiikelectric skateboards.com - USA http://fiikelectric skateboards.com.au - Australia http://fiikelectric skateboards.co.uk - UK and english speakers in europe http://fiikelectric skateboards.de - Central Europe, German speakers, not built yet maybe the best approach would be to use a .com or .eu domain, so geotargetting isn't forced, the rely on the <link rel="alternate" tags to do language based targeting.

Correct.

I have done this before for a huge site in 7 languages and had many a debate over the years with Matt Cutts on it. The short answer is multiple TLD's Reason:Matt Said in a video and for the life of me I am unable to find it. That if they allow sites to rank in every country then people will just create content for them to get extra traffic, if they created a tool in WMT people would just tick every country saying their site was relevant. The only sure way was if they created a TLD and put some hard work into it. doing xyz.com/jp/ is an option and then targeting a "Geographic target" in "Site Settings" but it will not get the same power as a TLD specific to that Geographic location. TLD are a very strong indication of location.You will have to setup sub folders in WMT like separate sites and target each directory with the "Geographic target". Also, this is something I have been saying all day long, separate sites are good because you never know when Google is going to slam you with a penalty for a silly reason. You would lose all your locations in one go if they are on the same domain. But only have one site down if it happened. Also have a good read about "hreflang" this will help you make a few decisions as this is new since the time I worked on the Multi-regional site. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077

Cool question, the answer is already given and is NO. Google is rolling out the bigger algorithmic updates per region or per country. For example the first version(s) of the Panda update were only released for the regions speaking English. After that they deployed it to several european countries to see what the influence was there. In the end after a couple of months they deployed it worldwide. I couldn't find it that fast but I thought there was also a video from Matt Cutts explaining that some elements of the algorithm only work for specific countries.

Thanks Gary for coming back on this one. - nice suggestion. We ended up buying the domain in France. Many thanks, David

** isn't there a place for marketing through the name and building trust through creating an online brand promoted through social media etc, which in turn builds trust with search engines?** Sure, there is a place for building.  If you going to brand build then spend that effort on a brand that is absolutely clear and unmistakable. If you market your biz as "Unlock My" then lots of people are going to go to UnlockMy.com. The harder you work to build your brand the more the person who owns that domain will get your traffic. So, I think that unlock.my has two strikes against it.

Try applying this Advanced Segment, which will segment out your metrics showing only the traffic which originated from America: https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=XGA6--mISZqq4AT60sJBRQ Once the advanced segment is applied, you can look around on various reports and try to see if you can find anything which seems out of whack.

Hi Patrick, I am unaware of an exact equivalent to UBL or Localeze that is specific to Canada. Check out David Mihm's awesome Local Search Ecosystem infographic for Canada. It is densely packed with information: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/local-seo/local-search-ecosystem-canada/

While I agree with Lesley that it's best not to translate the proper nouns associated with place names - it's not always as simple as that. For instance, the Spanish island of Mallorca is mostly referred to as Majorca in the UK. So in these situations I would go for the version that is most widely understood (and searched for) in the target region.

Hi Lawrence, That's a tough question to ask, but in my experience, it's not a major thing. I would say it is a bigger issue for user experience. If you're geo-targeting your website within webmaster tools and also through href lang then you should be ok. My advice would be to go with the GeoIP option purely to give your users better quality of information.

This is very much a question we have been considering for one of our sites and I very much agree with Chammy, that it is very much a resource issue. If you have the resource to provide unique content for each separate domain, build links, do social activity for each one then local domains are perhaps the way to go. For us, trying to maintain multiple domains would have been too labor intensive and we found that consolidating all our activity into one global .com site has had a positive benefit in that there has been an upturn in overall search traffic, likely caused by consolidation of all the ranking factors to one domain.

Hi Des, You will probably want to look at implementing rel=alternative hreflang="xx" in this case and you usually do not want to be putting a rel=canonical pointing at the .com site from the .co.uk site. Google has removed the text referring to the canonical tag from the relevant help page on hreflang exactly due to the confusion you mention in your question. As I understand it you can still use a self referencing rel=canonical tag if you like, but the hreflang is the best way to declare to google that you have language/region specific content available on other urls. Having both hreflang and a canonical tag pointing to the .com site might get you UK searches showing the .co.uk site url (from the hreflang) but showing title and description text from the .com site (because of the canonical tag). Check out these 2 links for a bit more info: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en http://dejanseo.com.au/canonical-vs-hreflang/ Hope that helps.

In Australia I recommend ilisys.com.au - they are owned by Uberglobal. They have a dealer hosting package. We host our clients domains and websites under this package its quite well priced - we have about 100 domain and its costs $200 per month. They have all the usual features, CMS support, regular backups, automatic restore on request. Alternatively I can host you under our package. Good luck with the other countries

Yes I did, already replied last week. Sent my PM again to make sure you've got it.