International Website Targeting

[David-Kley]

Hello fellow Mozzers, had a quick question.

So we have a new eCommerce client that is interested in launching a website in multiple countries. According to their vision, they want a US site, UK site, Japan site, etc and so on.

I have a few concerns about doing it this way.

First, there is the issue with the sites being the same. They only difference will be that they have a different domain, such as domain.co.jp for the Japan-based site, domain.co.uk for UK, etc.

Even if we target different countries in webmaster, won't the sites still compete with one another and potentially get tagged as duplicates?

I'm thinking there has to be a better way to have a site targeted at the world, without having to clone and duplicate and relaunch. Anyone have experience with this?

[gfiorelli1]

Hi David.

You are right... creating three identical sites on three different geo-targeted domain names can be a problem.

However, if you implement the hreflang tags in order to tell Google what URL to show depending of the geography of the targeted user (see more here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en) will avoid the risk of duplicated content and to see the stronger domain outranking the one meant, for instance, for Japan in Japan.

Said that, this "full duplication" strategy can be only very temporary, because it does not have much sense targeting users living in different countries with the exact matching content:

1. American English is different than British English;
2. In Japan people simply don't search in English, and maybe neither use Google as main search engine (it is Yahoo).
3. The culture, hence how people use internet and search on the web, is different in the three countries (slightly different in the case of USA and UK, enormously in the case of Japan).

So... yes, the strategy proposed is not the most effective one, despite of the advantages of the hreflang mark up implementation.

[David-Kley]

Thank you for your response. It appears the best way to go about this is to make the main site amazing and optimize it around what they sell, correct? This is what I had in mind, but just wanted to check with the community to be sure.