Is International Geotargeting with Duplicate Content Effective?

[AliveWired]

A company located in Canada is currently targeting Canada through the geotargeting setting in Google Webmaster Tools.  Google.ca rankings are good, but Google.com rankings are not. The company would like to gain more traction for US people using google.com.

The idea on the table is to set up a subfolder www.domain.com/us/ and use WMT to designate this version for the US.

Here's the kicker:  the content is exactly the same.

Will Google consider the US version duplicate content?  Is this an effective way to target US and Canada at the same time? Is it better to forget a duplicate US site altogether and use the "unlisted" setting in WMT?

[irvingw]

Yes it's still duplicate content. Also, you almost never see a .ca domain ranking in the US. If the US market is big enough they should consider buying a .com and making unique content got the .com site.

[David-E-Carey]

Agreed it will be flagged as duplicate content and personally speaking I would not set geo-targeting to Canada I'd just leave it off targeting completely. Done it like this for years and my ranks for my target keyword phrases are near the same irrespective of Canada or the US and my site is actually a UK domain.

I always find this tricky about the type of domain as well so as Irving is saying a .com would be helpful, with unique content and I guess 'maybe' the domain should be understood by Google to actually reside within the US i.e. hosted there. You might want to look into the importance of a domains registered geo-location these days - but that might just be old paranoia on my part.

However, ultimately content should be king with a good link quality strategy, can the owner of the domain for instance attain & build good US based root domain links?

David

[AndreVanKets]

This is fairly new to me so I'd like to know the answer to your question as well..

From the brief research I've done, I've read somewhat conflicting info. I've read that you could implement the rel=alternate tag on the geo-targeted page/subfolder that contains the dupe content. This will tell Google which page is the preferred version but for people searching in the targeted location it would return the geo-targeted page. (If its in a different language, you'd include the hreflang tag as well)

On the other hand, I also read that you cant geo target different countries if you have a country specific domain. So for example, website.ca is dedicated to serving canada results, and therefore cant geo target US. You can only geo-target when you have international domains (.com, .net, ,org etc.) I'm not sure how true this is, and cant find a source that explains this in detail.

If someone has experience in implementing geo-targeting with success (languages/locations/country specific domains etc) i'd also appreciate some clarification.

Greg

[RuiZhiDong]

Did your rankings improve for Canada/US after you turned off targeting?

[David-E-Carey]

I would be more inclined to say that other factors are at play to how my ranks appeared in other countries other than the one I reside and work in. My site does not really have a country level target so geo-targeting would not be a strategic/necessary tool for me. My approach here would be to leave it to the search engines to determine if the value/quality of your content to searchers in other countries and not feel that just by using geo-targeting in GWT that it is actually going to improve your presence in a specific target country.

Here I have 2 stories that are optimised for specific keyword phrases. One story is from Ontario, Canada and the other Atlanta, US. I don't think about them in the sense that the first should be geared towards Canadians and the other Americans, more important are the thematics of the stories that should be deemed more importantly than a searchers geographic location.

http://www.instantatlas.com/public-health-ontario.xhtml
http://www.instantatlas.com/CDC_Story.xhtml

I asked Rand a similar question years ago about geo-targeting and from memory I think he said this feature is not active on the Moz site (at the time) as they want the site to be available to all, irrespective of what country the reside in.

David

[AliveWired]

Sorry, seems I forgot to say that the current domain is a .com...

[RuiZhiDong]

Thanks, David.

I do have some sites that has country level targeting (.com.au and .co.uk) which are ranking in Google.com as well as Google UK & Google Australia.

I thought what you meant was that I wouldn't lose the UK and Australian rankings if I switched off geotargeting

[David-E-Carey]

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