Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Points noted. I am targeting users continent wise. 1)North America 2)Europe,Australia 3)Rest Hopefully,that will reduce the border overlap problem.(?) I do not mind 1 and 2 be mixed just 3 has to be separate due to my business model and vast Purchasing power parity difference. Will the error be less than 10-15% seeing the above conditions? Any best practices to minimize? I appreciate your time,Ryan.

Hi! Your question is not so simple at all. The reason? Simple: it is not a matter of factors, but a matter of how the web is used, how SEOs has done SEO in their countries and the "search market" competitiveness existing in any countries To give you an example: US Search Market is surely the most competitive of all... you can see it indirectly checking the cost per keywords in Adwords. For a site in the States it is not enough to do "simple SEO", are needed more links and unique domains linking to you, you have much more "noise" (aka spam sites) to fight against, also the Social signals needed are much more than somewhere else. On the contrary, in a Market like the Italian one, that is smaller, things can be easier. You can rely more on things like old classic article marketing (I see sites ranking great just with that), really good sites aren't so many, just a minority of sites do a good SEO... On the other hand, because of the cultural gap, an American SEO probably won't be so good doing Italian SEO. Not just because of the language, but also because he doesn't know the mentality and, therefore, how Italian search things in the Internet.

Ryan said it all... but my first suggestion would be to start asap a link building campaign in order to give to the new .ca and .co.uk a strong link profile, in order to have the .com ranking higher than them in the regional Googles.

I work with a few multi-national enterprise level sites. For a site to gain good visibility in non-US countries, it is critical that the content on those sites be in the target language. You don't need to necessarily own a country-coded Top Level Domain like a website.fr, either. Plenty of companies do great using .com/fr.  If that is the route you take, make sure you translate as much content as possible into the languages that represent the countries you are targeting. If you create country specific sub-directories and just use your English content you will lose some control over what Google will display in search results. The canonical tag can help, but it's best to create in-language content. Feel free to reach out to me if you need help!

Thanks for your answer vitalscom. I was planning to go with using a different TLD (and unique, language-specific content) for each language - as I believed this to be the preferred strategy. I wasn't aware of the change in GWT that you mentioned. I was under the impression that there's an advantage when trying to rank in countries with the TLD of that specific country.

Does anyone have any useful tips on how to have 2 different versions of the site targeting different locations but using very similar language (Probably would be considered duplicate) I would suggest the following approach: use mysite.com/us for the USA site and mysite.com/uk for the UK site. You can change the 2 letter designation as you deem appropriate. You could also choose to leave the uk site without a folder and use the /us folder for the United States. It's up to you to determine which method would communicate the options most clearly to your users. use flags at the top of the page to help users understand their option. An American flag for the US site, a British flag for the UK site, etc. use the language meta tags to differentiate your site's pages: EN-US, EN-GB be sure each version uses the correct monetary versions and measurements be sure each version uses the correct language. There is actually quite a bit of difference between the languages and readers from the US who have not previously read a UK site will often not understand the verbiage. A simple statement like "the prices are much dearer" is not understood by most Americans. use appropriate cultural references on each site. There are sayings and references commonly used in daily conversations which are different between each country, along with different laws. Be mindful of these differences. Use Google and Bing WMT to designate each section of your website as being specific for each country Use geo-targeting so users from each country automatically land on their country's page. Keep in mind occasionally you will have a UK user who wants to access the US site and vice-versa so I only advise geo-targeting for the initial visit and not forced throughout the entire visit. hosting in the UK is fine but consider a CDN or similar service which can serve images, videos and other content up faster to your visitors. By using the above methods, your content would not be considered duplicate. Search engines understand the same content is being customized for each locale and will present results accordingly.

I wouldn't consider this as an SEO decision, but a human decision. Is this the best method for your users? Is this the most efficient way for them to be able to perform this particular action? Any negativity is going to affect your users more than it will your SEO I believe in this case. As to Google bots seeing the pop-up, a general rule I use is if you can see it in the source code of your site, Google can, too.

Yeah I was going to the account, and trying to set the search location to India locations, but since it was .com it wasn't going to work. I was trying to find a way to make it ignore my IP as well. Either way I still didn't see the site on the indian version of Google, when not logged in (e.g. no history to change my results). If I am reading the google custom search notes correctly your URL would have google show me Indian sites, but our site is a .com in the US being clicked on by people in India, so I am not positive it would work for what I am looking at. I appreciate the help though

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered? Thanks!

What exact do you mean by "when I checked targeting in German there were almost 5 billion pages"? I know you are referring to "million" but how did you arrive at that number? Other things to check: submit an updated sitemap to Google. How many pages show in the site map? what type of navigation does your site offer? Is all of the navigation visible in HTML? some sites offer dozens of versions of the same page. A print-friendly version, sorted ascending by price, sort descending by price, sort by size and many other properties. Each sort is a different page on your site. You can have a site with 150k worth of canonical pages, but 5 million actual pages. Google will not list the duplicate pages.

Hey Brian, If the EDU advice in the SEOMOZ Professional Guide to Link building is correct, (it discusses the EDU myth and if it holds more value than that of a normal link/URL) then i'd imagine that a ccTLD would be a more beneficial link for localised results/sites than one from a non ccTLD, just like any other domain would be. You'd still get the EDU kudos but with the additional benefit of it being more targeted to a region. eg: a link from an edu.ph would be more beneficial for a Philippino site, than a straight .edu would.

I am actually stil waiting for the final lists to ensure a comparable search result "study". Regarding subdomains & worst approach: thats whats confusing me (maybe due to my newbie status with seomoz): The domain authority for the TLD is lower than the ones for the subdomains. I actually figured this to be a hint, that subdomains do inherit this from the root domain. But I hope to be able to tell you more in 2-3 weeks, when I have those lists ready and can compare the search workds/phrases over all countries.

Switch to a static URL. Search engines are becoming better at dealing with parameters, but sometimes they falter, as in your situation. And from an aesthetic and sharing perspective, the shorter static URLs are superior.

If you're trying to target other countries with a website that already exists in a different country you'll find it difficult. At the moment it's only really possible to optimise a website fully for one particular country. Here are some general best practices I'm aware of: Host the site in the country you're targeting, with a country-specific domain extension. Set geotargeting in Google Webmaster Tools. Obtain links from the country/ies you're targeting. Use the local language...will the site be in English, Arabic and/or some other languages? If it's a foreign language or even English, it's important to have someone fluent with the local language writing the content, preferably someone aware of cultural differences that may exist if the content is translated.

I agree with EGOL, a new hosting option may be best. But if cost is the issue then user-experience is the most important. Server locations may effect SEO, but conversion rate is more important for your business, therefore high bounce rates because of slow load speeds will have an adverse effect.

Ensure you're present in all the meaningful local directories and join the relevant Australian industry organisations. Make sure your customers can contact you through Australian numbers and include your address or PO BOX if possible.

Not in a reasonable way. Search engines provide results based on matching content to the user's query. If a user searches for a term in English then you would need to provide that term on your page in order to rank for it. You would also need to optimize your page for that term (title, header tags, url, etc). You presumably have already done that for the English version of the site. If a user makes a search query using an English term, they presumably understand English and are seeking a website written in English. If a result was provided in another language that would be a bad user experience, the page would definitely have a higher bounce rate, and that may cause the rankings to drop.