Removing United Kingdom next to a generic TLD

[jgohil]

We have a generic top level domain (gTLD) called www.xyz.com which was set to target United Kingdom in Google Webmaster Tools.  We have now launched a US version of the site targeting US consumers – www.xyz.com/us and set the geographic target to United States on GWT.

When I search for xyz on www.google.com, the serps brings up the .com site with “United Kingdom” beside it.  This will most likely confuse our prospects as they would think we only have a UK operation.  How can I tell Google not to include “United Kindgom” next to www.xyz.com

Any thoughts?

Since this was happening, I removed the geographic location target for www.xyz.com to null on GWT. Would that help solve the issue?

Look forward to your reply. Many Thanks

Jay

[john4math]

Removing the geotargeting for www.xyz.com sounds like a good first step.  I'd watch like a hawk though to see if you see any loss of impressions or rank on google.co.uk searches.  When you say that "United Kingdom" appears next to it in the SERPs, where does that display?

How much duplicate content is there between the UK and US versions of your site?  If you have duplicate content, Google recently announced support for rel=alternate tags: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html.  This can be used to help have only one version of each page appear in a SERP. What you'd do it select a canonical version of the page across duplicate (or near duplicate) versions, and then set the alternate pages.  Google will show the canonical versions title and description in the SERPs, but will show the country specific display URL based on the users geolocation.  I'm still working on getting these up and running on my site.

Also, for Bing and other search engines, you might want to take a look at http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-website-s-country-and-language.aspx.  This gives instructions for how to tell bots which language and country each page is specific to.

[jgohil]

Hi John,

Many Thanks for the comments. Really appreciate it.  The content on both the sites is unique so we don't need to really worry about duplicate issues. But the links you pointed out are of great help.

So when I search for xyz on www.google.com, the results page shows the www.xyz.com and next to that it mentions United Kingdom.  I wanted to know how we can get rid of the United Kingdom.

Thanks for your help

Jay

[Gladeway_Media]

I have a client with the exact same problem.  They are using a .com and only do business in the US.  They've never done business internationally, yet "United Kingdom" shows up next to their domain in SERPS just like this:

Title Tags | More Title Tags

www.companyx.com  - <cite>United Kingdom</cite>

Meta Description..................................................................

What is causing this?

[gfiorelli1]

Hi Jay,

if it is possible, it would be of great help if you could tell us the domain name of the site, because without giving a look to its code is quite hard to find an answer.

The same is valid for you, Yellabird. In your case, then, I would really suggest you to open a new question thread in the Q&A, in order to not mix both cases, even though they apparently are very similar.

Thanks