Help targeting the USA in Search
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I believe I've properly targeted, and told Google that our website absoluteautomation.com is aimed at US residents, while the .ca domain targets Canadian. However our .com domain routinely appears above our .ca when searching in Canada (actually on a physical computer in Canada) on google.ca. I'm hoping I can fix this both to improve Canadian search results, and I'm assuming that whatever is making .com appear so well in Canada is hurting it on the US side.
Any ideas?
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I'm doing a search from Toronto and the .ca site comes up above the .com site for the branded terms. When did you create the .ca version? If it was done recently, it might take a bit of time for Google to rank the .ca pages for the related terms.
Cheers,
SEO5..
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Hi there,
The best way to solve Google's search result misalignment issues is by using hreflang annotations in order to specify the language and country target for each one of your different sites pages and refer to Google to the relevant version in each case. Please check:
- Google's specification to use hreflang annotations.
- Examples of misalignment situations (as yours) and the explanation on how to use the hreflang annotations with a tool.
- More examples on how many different sites use hreflang annotations
I'm pretty positive that if you use the annotations correctly the situation will improve

Thanks,
Aleyda