Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If you go down the adwords route, checkout Google Grants (free advertising for non-profits).

I think that the proper way to do it is through budget primarily if you can afford to build a website that is going to be able to geo-target using the right TLD for whatever country I would utilize geo-DNS to accomplish this however I would create new content for each page the reason for this is because of the hreflang issue talked about here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igbrm1z_7Hk you may also utilize tools from http://www.neustarlocaleze.biz/directory/clarity.aspx sincerely, Thomas

Thanks to both for your responses. I don't think that search engines shouldn't see this like a manipulative action, but maybe they do and we'll be banned. Thomas, I couldn't use a GeoDNS because I think that GoogleBot always come from an US IP, so it will only index and rack our US domain. This is the reason for try to identify GoogleBot and don't make the redirect, I Google had a spider with an IP of each country we shouldn't have this problem, but think that this isn't suceed. We'll use ccTLD for each one, so Webmaster Tools assign the country automatically. Best regards, Robert

Ditto that. Sorry got tied up on some stuff & meant to reply. Miriam did a better job than I could have. AlwaysLeading

You might want to get some rel="alternate" hreflang="x" attribution on those different domains to be safe. Especially if you are (you should be) using localised spelling for each country. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en From above link, scenario where rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is recommended: "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."

Hi Rui, I see what you mean, we just redirect our .co.uk domain with the ISP to the .com one as it was being treated as a low quality domain. It was something like a .com DA of 68 as opposed to a co.uk DA of 16 (bizarre why that was happening). After that our content in SERPs was/is balanced across all the countries in question. Personally I like to partner with people in these countries, help them write content with our PR people and optimize the content for their countries. I know not everyone has the facility to do this but I find it drives traffic well from these countries on content that was originally written in the UK but tailored for say an Australian audience i.e. 'If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it probably is a duck!' in other words the more localised the content can be the better when trying to work in other countries. Cheers David

Sri you "should" rel nofollow advertising links. It is as simple as that. If the "advertiser" says they won't pay if it is nofollowed then they didn't want advertising, they wanted to buy a link - which is against Google's webmaster guidelines. I'm not judging one way or another or saying anything about whitehat vs grayhat vs blackhat vs anything else. All I'm saying is a link that has been paid for, and passes pagerank, is technically against Google's guidelines. If you and your clients each go into the agreement knowing this and understanding the risk then that is up to you.

Go with the subdomain that is just targeted to Portuguese, the language. Use an HREFLANG tag to tell Google which pages are translations of an equivalent English page. This will allow you to get traffic from a number of countries that speak Portuguese. I am of course assuming that your content doesn't change other than the translation. Don't geo-locate unless you mean to actually target a country. If you want to go after the Brazilian market with different content that is just for Brazilian citizens, then geo-locate. In that case you can use a ccTLD (those are only for geolocation), subdomain, or subfolder. That's up to you, but only when you are ready to actually geo-target your content.

Kelli (sorry, I had the wrong name somehow?) First let me clarify a few things. Is the content between the US, Canada, and UK the exact same but on different URLs? Is any of the content translated to cater to the different markets (spellings, word usage, etc.)? Does each country have the same product set, etc.? The HREFLANG is not necessary unless you are changing the language in some way. I am not sure that is what you should be using here. But your answers will help me understand so I can tell you what to do. Check out my tool here to help: http://www.katemorris.com/issg/

Hi Robert, Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I can't mention the clients name in this instance. There was definitely a mistake with redirects. I still don't think that explains the sudden rise in traffic (direct traffic in GA) fro the USA. For a few days after the initial redirection there was a 400% increase in traffic which nose dived the days after. The reason it nose dived I'm guessing was because visitors we're taken to a 404 page and this is obviously a bad user experience so the search results have dropped perhaps because of this. Its frustrating as I can't see the keywords, only the landing pages under direct traffic in GA so its hard for me to see exactly if this is true or not. It has been since been repaired and pages are redirected to their closest relative but many are folder redirects instead of page to page. This is because much of the content has not been migrated. I will continue will my investigation and let you know if I find out anymore information. Thanks for your time. Rob

I believe your current configuration is hurting your long term SEO. My preferences would rank as follows: company name + country specific TLD (company.de, company.uk, company.com subdomain on .com uk.company.com, de.company.com directory on .com company.com/uk/, company.com/de/ That's my .02

As of now, using latin characters for URLs is still the popular choice for international sites, as non-latin characters in URLS is still not yet widely supported and recognised. Since we do know that keywords in URL is a ranking factor (albeit not a huge one), it would be wise to stick to latin-characters for now from a SEO perspective. Moreover, it would be much easier to type and recognise a URL with latin characters rather than the one given above. The best strategy for now is to ensure your page titles contain the keywords (in thai) that you want, since the page titles is going to affect click-through rates much more than localised urls. Here's an article that might be useful in your case: http://searchengineland.com/should-you-transliterate-your-brand-for-international-seo-130966 Hope that helps!

I mean that www.site.com should be accessible as is (returning a 200 status) and not 301 redirect users to a page like www.site.com/en. So the home page would be www.site.com and the rest will be www.site.com/en/page1, www.site.com/en/page2 etc. This might cause problems to implement with some CMS' but try if it can be done that way.

Thanks. One more question: does this also mean that the main page www.example.com/index.php (whether the index.php is shown to the user or not) gets all the same domain authority as the domain itself (www.example.com) as it is the main page?

Hello there, First up let's deal with the international element. As John has mentioned Googlebot typically crawls from the US - as such if you're dynamically serving content based on IP (on the same URL) you're in danger of Google only being able to crawl and index your US content as it's unlikely Googlebot will ever see the content you've created for other countries. As such I'd recommend creating distinct URLs for each country and using rel=alternate hreflang as John Barth has suggested. Just to be clear - I wouldn't recommend serving UK vs US content dynamically on the same URL. However, from these distinct URLs it's totally fine to serve content appropriate to the device. Use the Vary-HTTP Header to indicate to Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile that a mobile user-agent gets served a different version (in order to avoid looking like you’re cloaking). See https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details. I hope this helps, Hannah

Thank you for your comment! Actually, the issue of duplicate content amongst the subirectories should be sorted out through implementing the rel="alternate" hreflang. But of course, the more diverse content the better!

Great advice, thanks very much for your help!

This may be late, but yes you would need to add each sub-directory to GWT to set their location. If you've already claimed the main site, it should automatically verify the sub-directories for you. More info (check out the video): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

This was taken from Google hotel finder. Thanks Xus8dnX.jpg