Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Steven, I'd have to agree with EGOL here - it is something that Google should have figured out - however, to some extent I think they have. For example, if I search for optimisation software here in the UK I get results for pages which are targeted to 'optimization' as well as 'optimisation'. Whilst I'd guess that the UK spelling might not be helping you in this instance, I wonder if there might also be issues in terms of your site's authority or strength which are also causing you issues. You've not said which site you're working on, but how does it stack up in terms of domain authority and page authority versus your SERP competition? It might be worth looking into that in the first instance. The other alternative would be as EGOL highlighted - target 'optimization' instead. It occurs to me that this might be worth testing - take your page as it is right now but switch out UK for US English and see if your rankings improve. As you say you could create a US targeted subfolder on your site (I'd recommend implementing hreflang to avoid duplicate content issues) and try to tackle the issue that way - however if you're site isn't authoritative enough it likely still won't rank. Hope this helps, Hannah

Hi Downpour, It all depends on your budget and resources available to manage the sites efficiently. Local domains is still the commonly recommended for best results however on the SERPs but it really depends on the business. Heres a recent article I read that might help. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049274/International-SEO-Core-Considerations Regards Rob

Hi Paul, As you already know there are a couple of ways to approach this. Opinions will vary, but with the details you have given I would be tempted to do as you originally thought, keep building links from US based sites. There must be some US based blogs, review sites etc that cover your software field (?), those would be the first place I would look at for getting some more relevant US links. Keep in mind that not all .com sites are US oriented so even though you say you have more US links than UK, if this is only based on the domain then it might be a bit more complicated than that. You have not mentioned what your keywords are, but software type keywords might have some pretty different keyword difficulty scores between the US and the UK, which might account for your #1 ranking in the UK and nowhere to be seen in the US. That being said, since you are ranking in both for other keywords that is an indication that ranking in both is at least possible with the setup you currently have. If you have not done so already, it might be worth putting a news page or a blog post on your site about the expansion into the US market. If you run a blog then I am sure there are some other content ideas you could come up with that detail US specific data for your particular software field which would give you some nice content to use when approaching people for links. Hope that helps!

Maybe you could try blocking all google.co.uk Ip's for that page.

No. I mean... your root can be targeting your main geographic market (USA) and the subfolders your international markets. if you have geotargeted the subfolders, if you have implemented the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X" correctly, if you do a targeted, localized and valuable link building, then there no reasons to worry.

When your ranking 1, 2 or 3 for your main keywords, depending on how competitive your keywords are. when you don't think your efforts will get you much further. Example don't waste your time trying to beat wikipedia

Thank you, Christopher. I actually meant optimizing websites, not optimizing blog posts.

Hi Oleg, Thank you very much for the response. One more thing, do i have to put this code on each and every page which has been replicated or just on the homepage?

Hey Gianluca, Thanks so much for your answer!! Hopefully i will make through this technical process in one piece:) For sure I will have some more questions on the way. PS your webinar about content curation was great Thanks. Raviv

Good question. Let's say that if the .ca domain was free, and your intention was to target exclusively the Canadian market, then that domain would be better, because of its strong (and automatic) geo-targeting. Said that, having a generic name domain - especially a .com - is not bad at all. At the end you can always set up the geo-targeting of the site in the setting panel of GWT, work on a great localization of the content in order to answer for real to the buying culture and specific "version" of the Canadian English, and earning links especially from Canadian sites. Doing that, the .com domain name won't have any problem in ranking in Google.ca. More over, on the long term, when hopefully the eCommerce will have success, you may also think about expanding your business to the USA market (or other countries). In that case, the .com domain name will be an advantage, because you will be able to set up country targeting subfolder (i.e.: /en-us/) and geo-target the subfolder in GWT, something you are not allow to do with subfolders of a country level domain name.

Hi Spencer, The rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag inclusion along with the Geotargeting option in Google Webmaster Tools (if the websites are not ccTLDs but generic domains) are solutions for these situations: When you have two websites targeting different countries with the same language and they're competing with each other in SERPs, cannibalizing their opportunities and that might end up also with content duplication issues at some point. About your concern: "Currently for some of our keywords US is #1, UK is #4. If we implement rel alternate, will it just remove our US page". Your US website would be removed for the UK search result pages indeed and although in the short term this might seem as counterproductive, the reality is that this result from a relevancy perspective doesn't belong there since you already have your UK website targeting those users especially. This also means that you can also be losing opportunity by having UK users going to the US version that is not as relevant for them, so their experience can be poorer and the conversions might not be the same. Additionally, as I mentioned before you might end-up suffering from content cannibalization / duplication issues with both websites showing the same or very similar content without giving signals to Google that they're not really duplicates but two versions targeting different audiences. Because the previous in the long-run the best is that you make the most out of your international Web versions (country versions in this case) and give the necessary signals to Google so these start ranking in these countries search results instead. In case your US version is a .com domain and it's also attracting rankings, organic traffic and conversions from abroad, excluding the UK (for which you have your own UK website version) then you can leave that website without a specific geolocalization in Google Webmaster Tools and just specifying the language in the hreflang attribute (not the country) but if you have a specific website version for the UK then you should definitely specify that this website (whether it's a .uk ccTLD, subdirectory, subdomain or another generic domain) is geotargeting to this country. I hope this helps!

Hi Daniel, I agree with Emanuele, you can invest your time and resources in much more valuable, long-term link building strategies, that will be much more beneficial for your clients without risks that links from directories that are not necessarily that relevant or an authority towards your industry. Instead of thinking where to create links with high PageRank you should instead identify along with your clients how you can create and promote valuable and attractive assets (from content, guides, tools, giveaways, contests, etc.) with them in order to not only improve their Website popularity (with natural links, shares, references, +1's, citations, etc.) but that are also aligned with their business goals and allow you to improve your branding, loyalty, conversions, etc. If you have a bit of time you should watch the #RCS presentation of Wil Reynolds at Mozcon last year where he covered this topic. You can see what I talk about and get inspired by taking a look at this summary with the slides of the latest LinkLove presentations. By switching your focus on building links like this you can really create a competitive advantage over your local competitors that from what you shared might still be building links in a more "artificial" way. I hope this helps!

Appreciate the feedback, Mike.  I'll take a closer look at SAP.

Even if you are substantially right, sometimes that is impossible (imagine an eCommerce with 100K+ products. The differences will be minimal (currency for instance, being pesos in MX and Euro in ES). That's why it exists the rel="alternate" hreflang (see my answer below for more).

It looks like to me the criteria are that you need to be a big brand to get your own search box within the search results. It could be that these sites are hand picked. Search Engine Land covered this topic a couple of years ago. Read the article here.

An easy solution would be a wordpress multi site with woocommerce plugin network activated. It's a free software with lots of resources and a very engaged comunity to help.

There are a lot of ranking factors that influence the ranking for a certain keyword, right ? Given that thought, there has to be something beyond the Page Title / Meta data. Think about some of these things: Extermal In-bound links Internal Links Size of the site / Number of pages within your website Nature of content Images, Image filenames, Alt Tags etc Any social media related to that keyword ? It's absolutely possible for a website to rank for hundreds and thousands of keywords but that does not mean if they are targeting another keyword, they optimize it, create a page and rank for it ? Think about it, if Amazon.com wanted to rank for Car Insurance (Extreme examples, super competitive keyword and an equally strong domain). The site may have lots and lots of pages somehow related to Car Insurance (Books, DVDs etc) with Page Titles, On-page content and so on, but they still probably would not rank higher then the competition even though the competition may not have anywhere close to the link profile as Amazon.com Does that make sense ? In my opinion, it's a combination of content and internal/external links. Maybe I am wrong and it's something else. Did you actually get any penalty ? Are/were any of your other keywords affected ? Keep in mind, your site is 6 months old. So it does not really have the age aspect as well as domain authority.