US domain pages showing up in Google UK SERP

[RaksG]

Hi,

Our website which was predominantly for UK market was setup with a .com extension and only two years ago other domains were added - US (.us) , IE (.ie), EU (.eu) & AU (.com.au)

Last year in July, we noticed that few .us domain urls were showing up in UK SERPs and we realized the sitemap for .us site was incorrectly referring to UK (.com) so we corrected that and the .us domain urls stopped appearing in the SERP. Not sure if this actually fixed the issue or was such coincidental.

However in last couple of weeks more than 3 .us domain urls are showing for each brand search made on Google UK and sometimes it replaces the .com results all together. I have double checked the PA for US pages, they are far below the UK ones.

Has anyone noticed similar behaviour &/or could anyone please help me troubleshoot this issue?

Thanks in advance,

R

[ChrisAshton]

Whether or not this is an issue kind of depends on what your product or service is. If you provide a local-only service like a restaurant then your US site ranking in the UK would be unusual.

On the other hand, if you sell a physical product this may not be so unusual. For example, here in Australia we're quite limited when it comes to finding men's online clothing stores, most of it comes from the US or the UK so it's not uncommon to see something like the US Jackthreads show up in the SERPs here.

Since you do have separate domains for each location, this might be an indication that search engines aren't really understanding the different jurisdictions for each site; maybe they're not geo-targeted enough for the algorithm to comprehend the fact that each of the 3 sites server a unique area.

Some of the elements that can help define this, in no particular order:

• Server location
• HTML language ( e.g. lang="en-US")
• Regional language differences (e.g. US spelling vs UK)
• Location markup - on your location pages at the very least
• Location mentions throughout your content

While not specifically on-topic, Rand's Whiteboard Friday about scaling geo-targeting offers plenty of great advice that can be applied here as well.

[RaksG]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your quick response and detailing out this well.

I have backdated and noticed that this occurs almost every six months. The US domain urls pop up in the UK SERPs for about 2 weeks and disappear after that. We are yet to implement the href lang tags on site and our SEO agency confirm that this should fix the issue.

Will keep this thread updated on the outcome.

Cheers,

RG

[ChrisAshton]

You're very welcome. Either way I'd be interested to see how this one progresses.

[gfiorelli1]

As your own agency told, I too consider that when the hreflang will be implemented, this kind of issues should terminate.

Regarding the sitemap error, it was surely something that could be confusing Google about what site to target.

However, I see that you have also an .eu domain name...

I imagine that that domain is meant for targeting the European market and I suspect that it is in English.

If it is so, remember:

1. In countries like Spain, France, Germany, italy... we don't search in Internet using English, but Spanish, French, German, Italian... Therefore, that .eu domain is not going to offer you those results you maybe are looking for;
2. The .eu domain termination is a generic one, and cannot be geotargeted via Google Search Console. This means that - by default - it targets all the world, hence, you probably can see visits from English speaking users in countries like South Africa, UK, IE, Australia, New Zealand or India, where English is the main language or one of the official ones;
3. When it comes to domains like .eu and hreflang, it is always hard to decide how to implement it. In your specific case, as you are targeting UK, US, AU and IE with specific domain names, the ideal would be to implement this hreflang annotation for the .eu (the example is only for the home page):

<rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.eu" hreflang="x-default"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.eu" hreflang="en"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.com" hreflang="en-GB"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.us" hreflang="en-US"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.com.au" hreflang="en-AU"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate">

With those annotations, you are telling Google to show the .com to users in Great Britain, the .us to users in United States, the .au to Australian ones and the .eu to all the other users using English in any other country.

That will mean that your .eu site surely will target also users in others European countries, both using english when searching (hreflang="en") and other languages (hreflang="x-default").

2 notes about the hreflang="x-default":

1. People living in the UK and searching in Spanish will see the .eu domain name, because it is the default domain name for searches in every language but English in GB, IE, AU and US;

2. Again, even if you pretend the .eu domain to target only European countries, that is impossible, because the .eu termination doesn't have any geotargeting power (and regions like Europe or Asia cannot be geotargeted via GSC). So it will be normal to see visit also from countries in others continents.