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Should all traffic from international tld be country specific?

onlinesource

3:01 am on Feb 10, 2015 (gmt 0)

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I have a question that has been bugging me for awhile.

So Amazon has multiple international tlds including a .au site, a .ca site, etc. The thing is, each of these stores are pretty much identical. They are both hosted on the same servers and pretty much just share content like categories, products, etc. In fact, you can take one product link and switch out the .com in the current product url with .ca and it's the exact same product, same product title, same product image, same everything minus maybe currency (USD vs CAD).

What I don't understand is, I am finding Amazon ca search results at Google.com. Why is this? Isn't Google suppose to filter specific international traffic for each specific international domain?

Now, I can go to Google Canada and type in Amazon and get Amazon.ca. Except when I type in my domain .ca, I get my .com site. This is what first got me worried. :/

I am trying to setup the same sort of thing as Amazon because I am sitting on various multiple international tlds.

What I've noticed is that some - but not all - of the traffic coming to specific international tlds is from each particular country. For instance, the co.uk domain targets the United Kingdom and records show that the UK is 54% of its traffic. That's good, but I also wonder why that is not higher and why the United States is 13%. Another figure that startled me, was that my .ca site which targets Canada and although records show Canada is 44% of the traffic to my .ca site, again the USA is 13% of it's traffic.

I don't get it. Again, if I go to Google UK site and search for my store, I get both my .com and .co.uk domains. Why? Why isn't Google filtering out .com results in it's UK search engine.

I don't know if I should be worried or not? Like I said, Amazon Canada shows up in Google.com results, so it's obviously getting USA traffic and USA customers even if the .ca site was setup for that country specifically.

onlinesource

3:14 pm on Feb 10, 2015 (gmt 0)

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Again, I'm pretty much baffled. So basically my SEO guy came to me this morning and was like my other international tlds are becoming the top referring source for my .com site. He says Google is going to see all of these sites as one and get me for duplicate content. He suggests that I have unique product descriptions and product images for each store. I only hate this idea because with 63 products multiplied by 4 stores, that will take a ton of time!

I just don't understand how other sites like Cafe Press and Amazon get away with this because their content is not unique.

I'm wondering if I should just delete my international domains and redirect all traffic to the .com site.

goodroi

5:07 pm on Feb 10, 2015 (gmt 0)

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IMHO General advice when is comes to Amazon is to remember that they are in a unique situation. Amazon has a crazy level of backlinks and other quality signals so they can do things that could be really bad for other websites to imitate. Be careful whenever you think about copying Amazon.

Some of Amazon's things are brilliant and should be copied and other Amazon things are best left where you enviously find them :)

netmeg

6:05 pm on Feb 10, 2015 (gmt 0)

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From an SEO standpoint, is there a real advantage to being on a TLD other than .com? This is a serious question, because honestly I haven't done anything outside the US except for two sites in Canada, and we only separated those out because there are shipping and product issues that make them slightly different than the US versions of those sites.

I guess I've never understood why you'd want multiple TLDs for the same site as a matter of course. Language? Maybe, but SEO? In 2015? I don't see it.

RedBar

6:59 pm on Feb 10, 2015 (gmt 0)

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Google has had its knickers in a twist over this for several years now and it seems to be getting worse, in my widget sector it is very noticeable.

Yes, I see amazon.com in my UK results and sometimes ahead of their .co.uk but it usually does this when there is not a UK result for my search.

I have many international domains, a couple of years ago I had to duplicate my .com onto my .co.uk since Google removed it from their UK results altogether meanwhile it kept all its rankings in .com

I had to change another.com into a .co.uk for precisely the same reason and for that particular search 90% of the results are .co.uk even though there are plenty of UK.com sites worthy of ranking.

I have had one specific Indian .com since 1998 and when geo-targetting came in Google placed it firmly in Indian-only results, it very rarely gets anything from outside India these days.

I could go on but the reality is that some of their results are simply diabolical, I can show you UK searches that deliver 90% US companies as their result.

99% of my business is non-UK and so far in 2015 0% of my global enquiries have come through my .com, the majority is through .asia, then .in/eu/co.uk

If anyone/Google wonders why I/others build so many sites it is precisely because their algos do not work as intended, trying to rely on one site for international business is a Google impossibility.

aakk9999

2:35 am on Feb 11, 2015 (gmt 0)

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This situation can be incredibly frustrating.

Again, if I go to Google UK site and search for my store...

Are you searching for your domain name? Or your brand name? In that case it is more likely Google will show you your domain from a few TLDs

Do you have this problem when you search for a particular product? Here I do not mean quoted text from your page. I mean search for a product you rank for. Search it on Google.com, coming from USA. Search it from Google.co.uk, see if you can use UK proxy or get someone in UK to search for it.

See which domain is ranking. Perhaps Google is filtering it out correctly. Or it may not and the reason could be your backlinks (having many co.uk backlinks pointing to co.uk site, for example).

This anomaly can also indicate the relative strengths of your domains, e.g. .com domain may be so much stronger that overtakes co.uk domain in UK SERPs and/or causes it to be filtered out.

I have noticed the same happening with TripAdvisor on co.uk in the past, where for some searches the first two results would be from TripAdvisor, one from .com and one from .co.uk TLD, but showing exactly the same page. This seems to have disappeared recently and only co.uk is being shown.

Using rel alternate hreflang may help, where you specify en-gb on a page targetting UK, and en-us on an equivalent page targetting USA etc. More details here:

Use hreflang for language and regional URLs
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en [support.google.com]