Geotargetting advice - UK & USA

Morning all

We currently rank very well for our keyword terms within google uk for our .co.uk site.

Our company is looking to expand into the USA and as such, we have purchased the .us version of our domain (the .com is owned by someone else) got some hosting in the states to point it to and threw up a site, put in a few links from our UK site as well as a couple of others, and it's now PR3 although not getting much traffic, which I don't expect it to for now.

Anyway, there is talk now of forwarding everyone who visits the UK site to the USA site if they come from the USA and where as I think it makes sense that they see US related content, I'm a little worried about what this will do for our UK site as I imagine that the googlebot is us based and so will be forwarded immeadietely and drop the UK site from google UK.

Has anybody tried anything like this and could offer advice?

thanks

Hi,

I would not recommend geotargetting. I live in Mexico and there is nothing more irritating than trying to visit a site and get re-directed to the Spanish version for Mexico.... and then even sometimes trying to no avail to navigate to the English US version. I would recommend having a link on the UK site that links to the US site and vice versa. Maybe some talented coder could have a pop up box that only pops up for US visitors and asks if they would like to be re-directed to the US site.

As far as googlebot, be sure you have a lot of external links to both sites and you should be fine. Many companies have two domains for two countries and do fine in the SERPS.

Nicole

Hi Nicole

Thanks for your response, we already have the 2 way links between the two, but people tend to ignore them. I think maybe your idea of the geotargeted pop up would be good rather than force users to visit the US site. Our UK site is a lot more developed with a lot more content/case studies/press releases etc...at the moment, our US site is not much more than a shop window with some duplicate content

Hi Nicole,

Since Google will not let you geotarget a .co.uk you use the .us site and geotarget that.

If you started out with the .com or the .us I would have recommended doing a subdomain and hosting it in the target country on its own server, inserting the code for WMC, then geotargeting it.

One more thing, I would avoid using the duplicate content on the new site. It will draw a penalty. If you were to post content on both sites at the same time and the new one got crawled first your original would get penalised.

Yes I know...I keep trying to tell the powers that be that they will not see any traffic from the search engines to the new site until it is completely rewritten and new location specific content is added no matter how good the back links...

There are various issues you are talking about here and your geo-targeting solution doesn't capture...

The Issues

1. US consumers don't normally buy from uk domains - they don't normally patron so you don't have US traffic to really "geo-target".

2. UK domains don't show well to US consumers for lack of US-based links

3. A separate domain dot.us solves #1 but not #2 but links from a UK-based domain don't help much in US

4. geo-targeting software isn't really needed since you are not making dot.uk domain to service US consumers.

So set the website on dot.us, and promote it via US based links and eventually it will have ranks.

Not really an issue... any link from uk to us or reverse use Javascript and/or rel="nofollow"... no problem what-so-ever now with dup content.

i have a related question if I may:

i got a name.com site and an name.pl site - obv i am targeting clients mainly in poland but google seems to only show the name.com site when i do a search for it in google.pl.
so now I am a bit at loss - should i just position the .com site and hope it ranks locally too (currently it seems i am sandboxed as its a new site) or should i take the .com site off (or maybe a redirect) and just leave the .pl site?

BTW i did change in google geo settings my preference to poland