Getting ranked for the wrong subdomains

[thetrafficker]

Hi,

I have a problem with one of the sites I promote and I thought I'll bring it up here and see if anyone here has ever experienced this problem and found a solution:

My site is operating on different markets (countries and languages). Each one is separated by its own subdomain and each has unique content or is defined as canonical to another domain.
My problem is that I have, for example, the au subdomain ranked instead of the uk domain (which is the main www one).

Couldn't find any written material about this to thought to try here.

Would appreciate any thoughts you may have on this, even it they're only theories.

Thanks!

[NathanielB]

Have you set each sub-domain to be country specific? You should be able to set a new webmaster account for each of the sub-domains to do this as well as add the meta tag.

I would also check your canonical tags are set correctly because if they are set wrong they could cause a problem, for example, if you are telling google that uk.domain.com is a canonical of au.domain.com that might explain why google is ranking the au version instead of the uk one possible?

[thetrafficker]

Have you set each sub-domain to be country specific? You should be able to set a new webmaster account for each of the sub-domains to do this as well as add the meta tag.

I would also check your canonical tags are set correctly because if they are set wrong they could cause a problem, for example, if you are telling google that uk.domain.com is a canonical of au.domain.com that might explain why google is ranking the au version instead of the uk one possible?

Hi Nathaniel,

I've actually did all the basics and even more:
- Defined GWT country targeting for each of the subdomains
- Defined the canonical links perfectly
- Added a <hreflang> tag in the problematic domains
- Made sure to have unique content, including title and meta description

So I'm actually trying see beyond all of these basic actions.
I should mention that this problem has started at May 2012 (yes, around the big Penguin update, but not sure if it's related)