UK Sub-Domain question

[mfrgolfgti]

Hi Silverdoor, thanks for getting back to me. To clarify what I mean about "new domain": the client used to have their UK website at www.itelligence-uk.com. But their corporate HQ decided to design and build a brand new, multi-national, multi-language site, which is now at www.itelligencegroup.com. Off that main domain they have created a site for the UK operation and this is at www.itelligencegroup.com/uk/.

The UK management team of the client want us to carry out SEO for the UK site only. However I'm wondering about how to set this up in Moz because I don't want results for the corporate site, I just want results for the /uk/ site. Is this possible within Moz or do I have to tell the client to set up their site & domains differently?

I would add that we have not set up or built any of these new websites for the client.

Does this make sense?

[ecommercebc]

Hi there,

If you'd like to track a specific subfolder as your campaign in Moz (e.g. www.itelligencegroup.com/uk/) you can definitely do this in Moz, just enter your subfolder URL when setting up the campaign. Moz will then set it as 'Tracking this subfolder.' in campaign settings.

I've just tested this and it works fine. Might be trickier to set up GA integration, but you could hook up just a GA account for your /uk/?

[SilverDoor]

Makes perfect sense now.

Firstly, I agree with hemblem5 above on how to track this.

Most importantly however, the very first SEO recommendation I would suggest to your client, is that they change the way the GEO-location redirect is currently set-up.

Having a GEO-location redirect in place can cause indexation issues with Google. Googlebots need to be thought of like a human as they crawl and index pages in a very similar fashion.

Just imagine this scenario:

• Your site domain.com has several different country profiles set-up for it /UK/ /US/ etc.
• To easily direct the user to the most relevant page, a GEO-location redirect is put in place, which is great for the user journey.
• However, when a Googlebot comes along, it is registered to its own GEO-location which lets say for this example is the US.
• Consequently, it is redirected to the /US/ version of the site, which has very few links, if any to the /UK/ subfolder
• This results in the /UK/ version rarely (if ever) being indexed. Which is not good for SEO.

You'll be glad to know however, that there is an easy work around for this.

Instead of using a GEO-location redirect, let the user see the global domain (www.domain.com) then, using a pop-up or welcome page, offer to direct the user to the most relevant page to their country.

Doing the above will ensure that you have no indexation problems and will help to rank the global domain higher overall.

Let me know if you have any questions on the above or need any further references etc.

Hope this helps

Thanks

SilverDoor

[mfrgolfgti]

Hi Hemblem5, I will set it up like that in Moz as you suggest.

thanks for your help!

[mfrgolfgti]

Hi Silverdoor

thanks for your very comprehensive answer. I understand the points you make about the GEO-location but have a question: in your previous message you said "a redirect is already set in place to go from www.itelligencegroup.com to itelligencegroup.com/uk/". I'm not sure that's correct although maybe I'm misunderstanding. If I type: www.itelligencegroup.com into my browser, I am automatically taken to: http://us.itelligencegroup.com/. From there I have to select "itelligence worldwide" which is at the very top of the screen. I then get a list of locations and I can pick the UK which then takes me to www.itelligencegroup.com/uk/. Is that a redirect?

[SilverDoor]

Hi,

That's very strange indeed.

When I go direct to the URL www.itelligencegroup.com, I am automatically redirected straight to itelligencegroup.com/uk/.

Where are you based US or UK?

The http://us.itelligencegroup.com/ version concerns me a little as this is a sub-domain of www.itelligencegroup.com. Your client needs to have some consistency on how they are targeting different locations.

If they want to target by subfolder i.e. /UK/ then maintain that across the board. Don't go switching between sub-domains and sub-folders this is just going to confuse search engines.

However, the method you mentioned above is the correct way of doing it. Giving the user an "intelligence worldwide" option. Although, if this is being offered, I would implement this on www.itelligencegroup.com and and then direct the user from there.

Does this make sense?

Thanks

SilverDoor

[ecommercebc]

Just to confirm, I'm seeing the same behaviour as SilverDoor when I go to itelligencegroup.com.

[mfrgolfgti]

Well that is interesting, and thanks to you both (SilverDoor & Hemblem5) for confirming this. I am based in the UK but strangely am redirected to the US site when I go to itelligencegroup.com. Are you both based in the UK too?  I'm wondering if this is a caching issue because my colleague gets directed straight to the UK site when he goes to the itelligencegroup.com domain. So this may be a red herring if caching is to blame, I will check this out.

SilverDoor, do you know if there is a way to test whether the Googlebot is mainly indexing the US site and not indexing many pages on the /UK/ subfolder?

[ecommercebc]

Hi there, yep - I'm in the UK and get redirected. Be good to hear how you get on with this, as it might be caching.

To kick start your point to SilverDoor, using site:itelligencegroup.com/uk/ I can see Google has indexed some of your UK pages. There's a lot of really nice advice on Moz on how to handle international SEO and SilverDoor's recommendations are awesome as well, so I'm sure they'll have something to jump in on.

[SilverDoor]

hemblem5 has started this off perfectly.

Firstly, yes I do live in the UK. A caching issue could potentially be the problem, it'd be interesting to see if that's what fixed the issue.

Just to expand on hemblem5's point, the best way to see exactly how many pages Google has indexed, is by using the search operator **site: **(kudos to hemblem5 for mentioning)

Using this search operator on both the US and UK site, we can see the following results:

site:itelligencegroup.com/uk/ Google is currently indexing 1,160 pages

vs.

site:us.itelligencegroup.com Google is currently indexing 879 pages

We can also see that when using:

site:itelligencegroup.com Google is currently indexing 3,130 pages

From a quick look at the above, I can also see that the domain has 3 sub-domains:

• us.itelligencegroup.com
• blog.itelligencegroup.com 975 pages indexed
• myaccount.itelligencegroup.com 7 pages indexed

I think going forward, the best thing to do would be to see how many pages you actually have across the site. If there all being indexed then there's no huge issue regarding making changes. If they're not then I recommend following my advice in the previous post.

A good tool to use to find all your pages is Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool. However I would recommend running the tool outside of peak visiting hours as it can sometimes cause the host server to slow down in response time due to the large number of requests.

If you have any questions just ask.

Let me know how you get on.

Thanks

SilverDoor