Country Specific Search and Domain/URL Structure

Enterprise Solutions to Geodesignate in SERPs When ccTLD Is not Available

By Yoshie Yager (@yoshie_s_y)

Many enterprise companies have websites that contain sections for multiple countries under one domain, instead of hosting ccTLDs (country code top level domain.) For example, www.example.com might have their UK pages (or enterprise companies might call “site”) within the .com domain (i.e. www.example.com/uk/) instead of having www.example.co.uk.

Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs)

The benefit of having a ccTLD is the automatic demographic indication within country-specific search engine portals. If the company has www.example.co.uk, then, the site should show up in the UK’s search engine results (such as www.google.co.uk). Having the .uk domain automatically allows search engines to identify your targeted search country.

Single Domain with Multiple Country Pages

However, instead of having the ccTLD (in this example, the .uk domain,) the enterprise company might have one consolidated site which incorporates many different country pages (“sites”). We’ve seen repeatedly that many enterprise companies utilize this single-domain method in order to save costs in content management and hosting purposes. But in these cases, how do search engines know to preferably display www.example.com/uk/ pages (the UK-specific “site”) if a consumer in the UK performs a search query?

The short answer is that by default they cannot (unless the site is hosted within the targeted country), which is why ccTLDs are important. However, if acquiring ccTLD is not an option, there is one alternative.

GeoDesignation & Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools allow you to indicate which country directories under a single Top Level Domain are targeting. Unfortunately this feature is not available in other search engines’ webmaster tools yet. However, given Google’s global market share (out of all the three major search engines Google, Yahoo, and Bing, Google dominates, except for Japan in which Yahoo has the biggest share out of the 3 search engines), this can be a good alternative.

Using Google Webmaster Tools

First, create an account with Google. By the way, as a part of the process, Google will also ask you to verify that you are a site administrator by either posting an assigned empty HTML file or implementing an assigned meta tag, but you only have to do this once if you verify at the top level domain level. So if you verify at the www.example.com level, then www.example.com/uk/ is covered.

You can then post a directory for each country you want to geotarget. Enter www.example.com/uk/ for the UK geo.

Then select a country to target with that directory.

Then select a country to target with that directory.

You now have pages (“site”) that Google recognizes just like they were each a separate ccTLD, and the pages within these folders can be given preferences for searches performed within the targeted geos.

If you still have problems with your domain structures, share with us.

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Tags: Country Specific SEO, geodesignation, Global SEO, Webmaster Tools

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Enterprise Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.