How to Target Other Countries Using TLDs?

[sbrault74]

I would like to know if it is possible (and beneficial) to target other countries using country-based TLDs?

When visiting a company website for instance, you often get redirected to your country's site. For instance, when you visit cafepress.com from Canada, you get redirected to cafepress.ca.

Since both websites (cafepress.com and cafepress.ca) have the same content, how they get away with it with no duplicate content issues?

[SoleGraphics]

Some domains are generic, .com .net .org and others are geo targeted.  So by geo targeting by TLD is only half the battle. Google states "we'll rely on several signals, including IP address, location information on the page, links to the page, and any relevant information from Google Places". Having an exact replica doesn't make sense but tweaking it to suit the country does.

So in the example provided above I think that they have all those "signals" Google is talking about there so it's two different sites targeting different SERPs. You'll notice that their home page titles are different just for starters, I'm sure they don't have exactly the same sites placed on two different domains.

Read more about this here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

[sbrault74]

Part of my website is a blog and I don't see the use of using a country-based TLD except if I'm going to host it in another country to increase performance.

That said, there's also a directory of companies accompanied by user reviews and various data. I would like to target other countries with this directory by listing only companies from these countries.

How would you suggest to handle this?

[sbrault74]

Every cafepress domains have the exact same content for the most part.

[sbrault74]

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

[DennisSeymour]

Hi Stephane

I would take a look at hreflang and learn that.

To help you speed it up a little:

http://www.stateofdigital.com/hreflang-canonical-test/

Look for other posts by Aleyda as well.

[SajeetNair]

For different geos suggest the following -

• Use CCTLD
• Host the websites on geo specific servers (US website on a US server)
• Implement href language tags on the geo specific pages to avoid duplicate content issues
• Implement href language tags in the XML sitemap as well
• As a safety measure, implement self canonical tags

• Sajeet

[JaneCopland]

Hi Stephane,

For just one or two pages, targeting different countries, on-page content might prove to be sufficient. That is, a page about companies in X field in the UK, listing UK companies with their addresses and telephone numbers, will give Google a range of signals to indicate that that content is most relevant to people from the UK.

That said, the page itself should not contain href lang information to indicate that it is for a Canadian market. If href lang information is included, it should specify the UK.

If the content is sitting on a .ca domain, it will be harder to show that the UK review page is for the UK - it would be better to place this sort of information on a generic TLD website.

The question of duplicate content between .com, .ca, .co.uk etc. sites is answered by geo-targeting, both using the ccTLDs and href lang tags. Google "ignores" duplicate content when the websites' tags tell it that although the content is the same, this version is for Canadians, this version is or Americans and this one over here is for Brits.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Jane