What is the best practice for optimizing international websites? We operate a .co.uk and .com and obviously content is similar.

[mdrussell]

We have two (and soon to be more) international websites, all in English. The sites in question are WebHostingBuzz.com and WebHostingBuzz.co.uk. Obviously content is similar as we're providing a similar service but from different locations and different prices.

What is best practice here? Should we completely re-write the .co.uk content (this is the newer site) so it isn't penalized for scraping?

Any hints/tips would be appreciated.

[DaveSottimano]

Hi Matt,

International SEO is always a fun question, especially when dealing with English speaking countries. Here's what I would do to help Google determine that this is a separate site and hopefully avoid any duplicate content issues - this will be specific to your UK site but the practice is universal:

1. List the UK phone number and address + any other specific UK contact info on every page (header + footer). The great thing is that you're already using the phone number and your registered business number in England. If it's ok with how you conduct business, I would also include the address in the footer as well

2. Change the HTML lang code to GB. Currently in the .co.uk source code you have: xml:lang="en" - what you need to be doing is specifying UK English like so: html lang="en-GB"

http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/web/tips/langtag.html#why

3. Double check webmaster tools for the UK site is targeting the UK

4. Ideally, you would want to change some of the text content to reflect differentiation between the English sites. I would simply paraphrase or rewrite the content from the American version and place it on the UK site.

5. If you see the .com version in the UK, don't panic. You'll need to build some links to the UK site ideally from .UK domains(co.uk, org.uk) and it should naturally sort itself out.

6. Something I've been wanting to try is the html link language tag. In this case it would work from the .com version link pointing to the .co.uk. W3 says it's not supported by browsers but doesn't mention crawlers - IMO it's worth a try if all else fails.

[http://www.webhostingbuzz.co.uk](<a href=)" hreflang="en-GB">Web Hosting Buzz

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_hreflang.asp

If you follow these instructions you should be fine, I mean apple.com and apple.com/uk are almost completely identical and they seem fine now. I haven't had any issues myself yet, and I've taken my own advice.

On a side note, I think I might become a customer - plans look pretty sweet

Good luck!

Dave

[RyanKent]

I really enjoyed your response David. I am learning aspects of international SEO and your reply really hit home for me. I never thought of changing the language code from EN to GB.

[DaveSottimano]

Thanks Ryan! Cheers for the compliment

[mdrussell]

Thanks David - much appreciated. We'll definitely be trying these.