Going International on Google
This blog post serves as a guide – and shares a whole bunch of information and configuration advice with regards to taking your business international on Google.
Sub Folders VS Sub Domains
Firstly – do you have an internationally target-able domain name? Google only recognizes certain domain extensions as ‘international' so for example davidnaylor.co.uk, or bronco.co.uk is very unlikely to perform well on the international stage, you can see what domain names Google recognizes here.
Once you've figured that out, you also then have to consider whether to use your current or a new single domain VS having a domain for each country. We've created a table below explaining the advantages and disadvantages to each:
Advantages | Disadvantages | |
Single International | Less link building – with a sensible internal link structure (e.g. flags) pointing to all the country homepages, you can pass equity around more effectively.SEO Campaigns have wider impactLess site maintenance required. | If your link building isn't squeaky clean, it could only take a single penalty to take your entire brand down.Hosting, without larger expense is somewhat centralized to a single location. CDN's can be used to help with this. We'd usually advise central Europe or US for a domain targeting many countries. |
Multiple, country specific domains. | Less risk, the opposite of what's described as above.Can host in the target country. Meaning a faster site to local users.Hreflang , or Search Console geo targeting becomes optional. | You need to run PR/Link Building campaigns on many domain names instead of a single one.More domains to handle and greater hosting expensesMore security considerations, with running many sites. |
URL Structures
When using a single domain for multiple locations, it's important to develop a sensible URL structure, we recommend language-country sub directories straight off the domain name. These folders would usually follow the same formatting as the value in a hreflang tag. For example:
- com/en-gb/ (English, Great Britain)
- com/pl-en/ (Polish, Great Britain)
- com/fr-fr/ (French, France)
- com/fr-ca/ (French speaking Canadians)
There is many possibilities. This is especially useful in Europe, with the likes of Belgium where citizens speak 1 of 3 possible languages. Keeping pages for each locale inside subdirectories like this, allows for them to be targeted via either hreflang or sub folders.
It's always preferable to use sub directories over sub domains, because search engines treat a sub domain in much the same way as a new domain name.
Internal Links
Assuming you have decided to move forward with a single domain, make sure you've got a country selector in the header of the site, we've seen many of these before setup as JS drop downs that redirect onclick. This is fine from a usability point of view but it would be better to have a set of links, whether in a drop down or a line of flags. This ensures equity is passed into all of the countries from the homepage, and other pages.
Redirecting Users
Occasionally a user might arrive at the wrong place, or they may have intentionally hit the UK locale from France. We often get asked if these users should be IP sniffed, location queried and automatically passed on. This has the potential to look like cloaking, although Google has become massively better and distinguishing between the two.
It is our opinion that a simple JS pop up is enough? "Hi, are you in the right place?" then if the user is where they want to be – no harm done, and if they aren't, we can quickly pass them on without risk. So look at the Users IP, if it's not quite right, just ask them – no redirects needed. This should be done with AJAX and JavaScript, to look up the IP. But the actual overlay box should be permanently present in the source of the page, again to ensure it doesn't look like we're cloaking anything.
When passing a user on – pass them to the product in the correct language/locale, do not pass them back to the homepage.
Targeting Options
A number of different approaches available to geo-target a singles sites content.
Hreflang
The new and we think eventually the only way to geo-target a website is using new HTML Tags. The benefit of this over using Search Console is you can target both language and country easily. You can also map similar pages to one another, ensuring everything ranks properly in its targeted location. E.g. you don't have a UK product page ranking in the US, or vice versa.
Implementation is very simple, assume we have pages targeting the UK and France, we would add these tags to both pages:
- <link rel=”alternate” href=”http://www.example.com/en-gb/blue-widget.html” hreflang=”en-gb” />
- <link rel=”alternate” href=”http://www.example.com/fr-fr/blue-widget.html” hreflang=”fr-fr” />
Important: Make sure your canonical tags match the same URL as the hreflang tag!
Full details of implementing hreflang can be read here.
Sub Folders
This is the original targeting method, that's been around for years and years. Very simple, anyone can do it. You can add each subfolder as a new site in Webmaster Tools, simply login to Search Console, on the top right you have a "Add a Property", click it and type in something like:

Once this has been added (if the domain is already authorised, no further verification is needed), you can click through to the sub directory. Inside Search Console, in the left hand navigation select "Search Traffic" and then "International Targeting". Once the page has loaded, select the "Country" tab and select which country you want to target users in.
Repeat this process for each country you want to target.
Common Misconceptions
Below are a few assumptions that are often made when creating a site that targets multiple countries:
- When targeting different countries, such as US and GB, even though you will have a lot of similar pages – the content between these pages still has to be unique from one another. You shouldn't serve the same content for multiple locales.
Conclusion
My opinion remains generally, in most circumstances a single bigger site is better and more cost effective over having many sites. But this is largely dependent on campaign specifics. I.e. Blackhat VS Whitehat and so on.
9 Comments
Max - http://www.guymax.de/
Hi Anthony,
Thank you for the nice post! I was just wondering about two settings you described above:
1. Combining hreflang and canonical: I heard that google often time gets it wrong and if the content is not 100% the same (different currency or some other small differences) google still has problems. What do you think?
2. Settings in Google Search Console: Imagine you got a domain and for each language a subdomain/ folder – would you take any setting? Because if I got the english-language folder setting to US, it wont rank that well in UK, Australia…
Looking forward to hear your opinion! 🙂
Cheers
Max
Anthony Shapley - http://www.anthonyshapley.co.uk
Hi Max,
Thanks for getting in touch, I forgot we’d scheduled this to go out today!
1. Regarding the Canonical and hreflang tag, my understand is that they are fine to use together provided the hreflang and canonical for a specific page match each other. Something as simple as missing off a trailing forward slash can cause issues I’ve read, although having never made the mistake I can’t really comment further than what we’ve read about it online, I think JohnMu spoke about this somewhere. Just dug it out for you:
https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/17fbv5phpks
So its important that, your canonical is for the translation you are on (and not all pointing to a single translation/version) and that the Canonical/Hreflang URLS match each other throughout all the different versions. Does that make sense?
2. This is the more difficult question to answer, I’d just leave it as is, but it really depends on the circumstance. An e-commerce site I’d be more inclined to write new descriptions and create a IE/AU/GB, etc unique site – with unique descriptions. Its a costly thing to do though but in theory you should rank better in each area by having a dedicated site.
Ant
Max - http://www.guymax.de/
Hi Ant,
thank you very much for your quick and helpful reply! 🙂
Its just always the same, google is sending mixed signals to the SEOs – and not the other way 😉 https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation#q20 (I think I understood it wrong, guess you’re right, Thanks for link to Johns G+ post!)
The second question is really a difficult one (and I dont have a certain optionion yet):
a) Unique sites and better rankings and a lot of effort.
b) The same content for one language, less effort and no language specialization for one country
But maybe we’ll test option c) the almost the same main-content + hreflang and unique titles & descriptions maybe thats a good way in the middle…
Cheers
Max
Anthony Shapley - http://www.anthonyshapley.co.uk
Hi Max,
I’m not sure I’d want multiple URLS with the same content, like you’ve described as a third option, we’d personally advise against anything like that as its duplicating the page content.
Ant
Earl Grey - https://www.syndk8.com
In my experience there is a lot of advantages for using many different localized domains and they perform much better than one big site.
But although this is true I needed to consolidate all my local domains into one big site just so i could keep control and grow the site.
To be able to function as a business and keep it manageable I will have to take the hit on traffic.
Anthony Shapley - http://www.anthonyshapley.co.uk
@Early Grey – Sorry I never saw this before, there are plenty of advantages to both really. We’ve had a lot of success in the past, using one domain, across Casino Sites in particular it worked really well. Its great when you only limited budgets to invest in obtaining links.
Carps
Takes me back to the glory days when [client name redacted] wanted to launch their entire brand on a Monday in the US by changing their main domain to the .com at 5:30 on a Friday night.
Anthony Shapley - http://www.anthonyshapley.co.uk
@Carps – I miss those glory days, see here: https://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/16012010028.jpg
Richard Kearsey - http://www.wearenewmedia.co.uk/
Hey Anthony Great post and it is really worth to read it.I just wanted to ask you that if we have websites for multiple locations so, .com is preferable for the website or not.And,Yes,I am going to bookmark this blog and waiting for the next blog post.
Thank you