Country Specific Domain

[WayneRooney]

Guyz, we are new startups and have one very simple question regarding domain name.

Should we use example.com or example.com.au ?

Our Goal initially would be to target customer from Australia and gradually go global. So if we opt for .com.au we may have an edge in terms of local SEO in the beginning but lose out in the long run. What is the best way to tackle this?

Thanks

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

If you are definitely planning to go global or multi-national, go with the .com. You can rank well in Australia with just a .com - go into Webmaster Tools and geo-target the domain for Australia, changing this if and when you need to. If you want to target Australia, New Zealand and the US (for example) one day, you can have sections of the website targeting each, and you can target a specific subfolder to each nation. For example, site.com/nz/ can be added as a separate project in Webmaster Tools and set to New Zealand.

I hope this helps!

[WayneRooney]

Hi Jane

Can you show me a tutorial on how to do this in webmaster tools?

Thanks

[JaneCopland]

Hi Edmond,

Sure thing - it's actually very easy. I'll show you here. Log into Webmaster Tools and go to the account you want to geo-target. Click on the "settings" button where the arrow is in this screenshot:

<a>http://i.imgur.com/ziFanER.png</a>

Click "site settings": <a>http://i.imgur.com/j65txrk.png</a>

Choose "Australia" (or wherever) from the drop-down: http://i.imgur.com/6KNNOVb.png

You can only do this with non-country specific domains, so you can't geo-target a .com.au domain to the UK, etc.

You can then add site.com/nz/ as a new project in Webmaster Tools so it shows up in the initial list with all your domains. That subfolder, you target to New Zealand and so forth.

Cheers,

Jane

[WayneRooney]

Hi jane

Say we have an ecommerce store selling shoes. Should we create different stores for each country and geotarget it for best results? Since those items are similar, wouldn't it create duplicate content?

For example:

www.example.com/us/sling-bag-white

www.example.com/uk/sling-bag-white

Aren't those the same? How to tackle this duplicate content? Any Moz article that i should read to get an idea of the whole thing and best practices for this situation?

[sagive]

Hey +Edmond Hong,

Since both countries "speak english" i would not build different stores unless you have different pricing (even then there are better solution).

As to the domain, i would buy both of them to keep you authority intact and avoid copycats but i would
invest time marketing the .com one which is global.

Google or to be exact matt cutts did say that Google is geo associating site according to their domain so
its best to buy something that would serve you in the long run.

[JaneCopland]

He can certainly buy both domains and that would be a good option (301 one to the other), but he will likely need to serve different stores or dynamically change pricing etc. due to the different currencies and possible shipping / returns differences. It's also worth noting that if he's targeting North America, some of their spelling is different to Australia (US vs. British English).

He can use the href lang tag to show Google that even though both stores are in English, one is English for the US and one is English for Australia, one is Spanish for Spain and one is Spanish for Mexico, etc.

[JaneCopland]

Google has recently made this super easy: check out the rel="alternative" or "href lang" tag, as it is often called. You can provide the "same" content for UK, US, Aus and not run into duplicate content problems.

The same goes for Spanish in lots of countries, French, German for Germany and Austria, etc. Very handy.