Country specific results

[kxu]

Our country specific pages reside as a subfolder under the main domain. So for example in US it's /us/, in Canada it's /ca/. What we've noticed is that Google Canada is showing US pages in some of the search results. Does anyone have experience with how to direct Google to display country specific page results?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

What you can do is setup specific profiles for each subdomain in Webmaster Tools and take advantage of geo-targeting in WMT.

You can do the same in Bing Webmaster Tools.

If the content is the same on these two versions, you can also take advantage of hreflang.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[kxu]

Thanks for the response. I checked with our analytics person and it's set up correctly in Webmasters. However, we are still getting US results in Canada for certain terms even though that content exist on the Canadian pages. Guess their algorithm is not perfect.

[katemorris]

How long has the Canada section been up? Is it identical to the US section? What is your main domain? .com?

[kxu]

Yes the main domain is .com. These pages are not new. Been around for at least a decade now. The content is different. What's surprising is that it's only few of our top keywords, so only a small percentage.

[katemorris]

My thought is that for some reason, with the Canadian and US proximity, the algo could see the US page as stronger. Do you see in Analytics for the few times this happens, the organic traffic to that page, is it border Canadian towns? It's definitely not perfect with bordering countries, but if you are geo-targeted correctly and the content is different, then overall you should not have major issues.

If you'd like, tell me a few terms and your domain and I'll check it out.