What is the best SEO site structure for multi country targeting?

[ConradC]

Hi There,

We are an online retailer with four (and soon to be five) distinct geographic target markets (we have physical operations in both the UK and New Zealand). We currently target these markets like this:

1. United Kingdom (www.natureshop.co.uk)
2. New Zealand (www.natureshop.co.nz)
3. Australia (www.natureshop.com/au) - using a google web master tools geo targeted folder
4. United States (www.natureshop.com) - using google web master tools geo targeted domain
5. Germany (www.natureshop.de) - in german and yet to be launched as full site

We have various issues we want to address. The key one is this: our www.natureshop.co.uk website was adversely affected by the panda update on April 12. We had some external seo firms work on this site for us and unfortunately the links they gained for us were very low quality, from sometimes spammy sites and also "keyword" packed with very littlle anchor text variation. Our other websites (the .co.nz and .com) moved up after the updates so I can only assume our external seo consultants were responsible for this.

I have since managed to get them to remove around 70% of these links and we have bought all seo efforts back in house again. I have also worked to improve the quality of our content on this site and I have 404'ed the six worst affected pages (the ones that had far too many single phrase anchor text links coming into them). We have however not budged much in our rankings (we have made some small gains but not a lot).

Our other weakness's are not the fastest page load times and some "thin" content. We are on the cusp (around 4 weeks away) of deploying a brand new platform using asp.net MVP with N2 and this looks like it will address our page load speed issues. We also have been working hard on our content building and I believe we will address that as well with this release.

Sorry for the long build up, however I felt some background was needed to get to my questions.

My questions are:

1. Do you think we are best to proceed with trying to get our www.natureshop.co.uk website out of the panda trap or should we consider deploying a new version of the site on www.natureshop.com/uk/ (geo targeted to the UK)?
2. If we are to do this should we do the same for New Zealand and Germany and redirect the existing domains to the new geo targeted folders?
3. If we do this should we redirect the natureshop.co.uk pages to the new www.natureshop.com/uk/ pages or will this simply pass on the panda "penalty".
4. Will this model build stronger authority on the .com domain that benefit all of the geo targeted sub folders or does it not work this way?
5. Finally can we deploy the same pages and content on the different geo targeted sub folders (with some subtle regional variations of spelling and language) or will this result in a duplicate content penalty?

Thank you very much in advance to all of you and I apologise for the length and complexity of the question.

Kind Regards
Conrad Cranfield
Founder: Nature Shop Ltd

[RyanKent]

Hi Conrad.

I have researched this topic quite a bit recently. The consensus for the best approach is:

• Use www.natureshop.com as your main site

• Use geo-targeted folders for your country-based sites such as www.natureshop.com/au

• Treat the folder pages as home pages for each country. Each of those pages should receive local links from their respective countries.

• Re-direct traffic from the old sites to the same pages on the new sites. Do not take the easy way out and simply 301 all pages to the home page for their country.

• Build your site for each COUNTRY, not language. For example, the US pages should use American spellings such as "center", and American measurements such as Dollars.

• Use the meta language tag to indicate the language used on each page. EN = US, GB = England, etc.

• Use country flags in a prominent location to allow users to find their country's pages. The flags are much more identifiable then letters.

can we deploy the same pages and content on the different geo targeted sub folders (with some subtle regional variations of spelling and language) or will this result in a duplicate content penalty?

You should not have any issues with duplicate content by following the above process. Google will understand your pages are specific to languages and countries based on your meta tags, folder structure, and Google WMT settings.

For the UK site, I would work to resolve all Panda issues and confirm the penalty is gone prior to moving that site. I would be interested to hear from others on this topic as I lack experience in this area. If the UK site was merged into the main site, would the Panda penalty only apply from Google.co.uk? Or could Google.com apply the penalty as well?

PS. I really love your business model. Free shipping, 1 year return policy, etc. shows a tremendous amount of confidence in your products. I would recommend adding some trust symbols. The BBB symbol, TrustE and Verisign or McAfee are the ones I prefer.

[ConradC]

Hi Ryan - sorry I never answered your post - it was much appreciated. BTW - we came out of the google panda update on our .co.uk website. Turns out that we were using geo-ip software to set the shopping currency (and product mix) and as all google crawlers are US based all the pages on our .co.uk were displaying USD$ instead of GBP£. We put some code in to identify when a web spider was the visitor and set the currency to GBP£. As a result we popped right out of the poor rankings for almost all pages.

[StephanieChang]

Hi Conrad,

Interesting results- however, I think there may be more to that than the currency change. You mentioned previously that the company worked with other external SEO agencies that had garnered only low-quality links to the site with exact match anchor text or little anchor text variation. You also mentioned that you were successfully able to remove around 70% of those links from the link profile.

This could have played a crucial role in your recovery from Panda.

[ConradC]

Hi Stefanie, That is very true - we managed to get rid of lots of the bad links, we rewrote the content to be of a better quality. However it was when we stopped the currency displaying in USD instead of GBP that literally 2 - 3 days later we jumped right back to where our rankings had been pre panda.

On a side note - I sent you guys at distilled an enquiry regarding our international seo strategy and structure through your website yesterday and I am wanting to employ your services - do you know if someone has received the enquiry as I am kind of hoping to make a bit of an urgent decision

[StephanieChang]

Hi Conrad,

Thank you for contacting Distilled. We really appreciate you reaching out to us. I just confirmed that we did receive your inquiry and one of our sales executives will be contacting you shortly. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

[ConradC]

Many thanks Stefanie - much appreciated

[RyanKent]

Hi Conrad,

Glad to hear your rankings have returned.

I agree with Stephanie. It is unlikely the currency change played a significant role in your ranking recovery. There are numerous other factors which likely resolved the issue. The timing just happened to fit with the currency change.

[ConradC]

Thanks Kent for your help before - yeah probably just coincidence - we had managed to remove some bad neighbourhood links and rewritten our content before we realised the currency display issue and changed that