International SEO Setuo

[nezona]

Hi Guys

i have a client who is looking to be found in multiple English speaking countries I.e .co.uk, .com and .com.au

At first I advised they would need unique content for each to avoid duplication but then the client showed me this site http://welleco.com/ this is setup via shopify on a multisite. All the sites have the same content and are all indexed.

My question is can this be done in WordPress? Via something like WPML. And would it need to have seperte hosting and a seperate site or can this be done by something like IP redirect.

Can someone advise if this is good practice or maybe suffer other ways?

Thanks in advance.

[katemorris]

Hi!

First, I never recommend doing something just because another site does and it looks like they are getting what they want without doing the work. You never know what is going on behind the scenes.

Second, for your client, if there is nothing that needs to change on a per country basis, why make different sites for different countries? Or does something change across the countries they want to target?

Third, never use IP based redirects for geo-targeting if that is the route you go. It creates a bad user experience for travelers and search engine bots.

I recommend (without knowing much about them) that they make one site in English, it should work just fine in all of the target countries. However, if there are other reasons for being country specific, do let me know.

[gfiorelli1]

First of all, the answer given by Kate is totally correct, so consider it.

However, I will try to answer your question from a different perspective and starting from considering that there's a serious reason why your client needs to have different websites for targeting different countries where the same language is spoken (i.e.: some products are not available in every geography, or the client is marketing the services/products with different messages or, simply, the business company has also a physical presence in the targeted countries).

So, considering that starting point, we can find ourselves in 2 situations.

The first is the ideal one: the websites - albeit substantially identical in their purposes - are localized (different content or simply a different "writing" of the content from site to site, attention to the country level nuances of the language (i.e.: respecting British English orthography in the UK website).

In this case - apart geotargeting the domain (if its a generic domain name) via GSC or relying on the automatic geo-targeting the country code domain names have and earning "local" backlinks - you should implement the hreflang annotation in order to indicate to Google what URL to show to searchers depending on their language and location.

The 2nd case is more tricky and, unfortunately, more common: the websites targeting different countries but having the same identical content from site to site.

In this case, you should still need to implement the hreflang but, contrary to all written and available documentation, you should canonicalize all the duplicated website to the "canonical" one while indicating in the href element of the hreflang the canonicalized alternative URLs.

As I said, this is not "documented" in any Google help pages because it's formally the wrong way to implement the hreflang. In fact, we all know that that alternative and self-referential hrefs must always be "canonical" URLs.

However, this is a strong and valid exception, and it has been validated as such by John Mueller in a tweet answering a question by Glenn Gabe about this same situation.

Said all this, when it comes to hreflang implementation in this kind of situation, I always suggest running a test on a limited set of URLs before implementing it broadly.

Finally, you're asking if you can do it this on WordPress. Sure you can.

[nezona]

Hi Guys,

Further to my question, thought I would give an update.

We now have hreflang, canonicals and redirects in.

We have basically emulated the setup of this site:-

www.welleco.com.au

www.welleco.co.uk

www.welleco.com

which is using the same content and all pages seem to be indexed in Google.

However we have this home page

https://www.rejuvenated.com.au - which is not indexed in Google and appears in GSC in excluded URL's in index coverage as "Google chose different canonical than user". Is this a duplication issue? Why have the other pages been indexed and why is the .com home page indexed?

Regards

Neil

[katemorris]

I see https://www.rejuvenated.com.au in Google's index.

[nezona]

Apologies it’s rejuvenated.co.nz

[gfiorelli1]

That notification seems confirming my supposition that Google is consolidating that homepage with some other of the existing ones... hence, I'd test the canonical hack I explained above.

[nezona]

Cheers Guys,

Great answers here! now I come to think of it the site was already ranking high worldwide for the co.uk site. The reason for the different domains is the difffeent distributors and currencys. Definitely won’t go down this route again. Will try the canonical hack and let you know, how it goes.

regards

Neil