A few months ago, in the post Using Country Specific Domains For SEO we introduced you to the idea of redirecting half of our Irish and UK pages from RevaHealth’s .com domain to our local .ie and .co.uk domains. In this follow up post we describe how the experiment turned out to be successful, but with a very disappointing result.
The main goal of all search engines is to return results from the sites that are the most useful and relevant to a user query. Sites with country-coded top-level domains, such as .ie, are associated with a geographic region, in this case Ireland. By default, and all other things being equal, sites with a .ie domain are interpreted as more relevant for users in Ireland. For generic top-level domains such as .com Google allows site owners to manually assign a preferred country in their Webmaster Tools.
As our .com domain’s content covers many countries we can’t use this particular feature to optimize the site for a particular region. Instead, we were hoping that by redirecting our Irish and UK pages to their local domains that those pages would benefit from a boost in search results positioning on Google.ie and Google.co.uk as being targeted at their local audiences.
The initial results were terrible. The redirected pages dropped in the SERPs by about 3 positions. As our Irish pages previously ranked better than our UK ones they suffered even more. (Ireland was our first local area of interest and those pages were in the index much earlier.)
After a few weeks our results moved slightly in the right direction but were still behind the control group. We decided to let the experiment run for longer, almost four months in total, to be sure that the conclusion drawn was correct. In the end we turned off the redirections, just last week in fact. The experiment was successful in terms of achieving measurable and unambiguous results, but unfortunately they were very disappointing.
Our redirected .com pages disappeared from the index and over time their corresponding .ie and .co.uk pages were indexed instead. However, they never reached the search results positions we had had before with our .com pages. We speculated that our .com domain had more trust and authority than our country specific domains and that’s why pages from RevaHealth.com ranked better even in Google’s country specific search engines.
Now, just one week after undoing the redirects, most of the .com pages have regained their positions from before the experiment, which we think goes some way to validating our speculation. Our generic .com domain, which is crawled much more frequently than our local domains are, does seem to be a more trusted site, not only by Google.com but also by Google.ie and Google.co.uk.
Have you run any similar experiments that you can share with us?
One thing that will have affected this experiment is that earlier this year Google changed how it treats .com domains in local Google searches. There is some information about this on Matt Cutts site here:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-about-generic-tlds-in-say-uk-results/
Did you take into account that Google penalise a page if there’s a redirect? Although how much of a penalty that is, I don’t know.
One thing also to take into account is people’s perceptions of local domains, which dictates their actions. I believe that if the first few results on a search are a mixture of .com and .ie, where a .com url is first and .ie is second; an Irish person’s natural instinct will be to click on the .ie first. Now this would be an interesting experiment. Maybe one has been done already?
Hi Mick
Very good point about user’s behaviour. We didn’t take this into consideration and certainly it would make for a good study.
Regarding the redirects, we use them extensively and have seen no evidence of a Google penalty.
Have you considered redirecting the traffic based on country ip to the country specific tlds, build up country specific backlinks and authority and then redirect?
Hi Leo
No we haven’t. We are now of the opinion that country specific TLDs aren’t the way to go for us and we are going to abandon the approach. We think that building more authority into the .com domain is the best strategy for us.
This is partly because the advantage of country specific TLDs are unproven (in our case) and even if they were the strategy would be a long term one as we have historically found that it takes a very long time to build up authority in a domain and the priority that Google seems to apply are in flux.
Have you seen this work elsewhere?
That’s not correct AFAIK.
Caelen I think there’s a number of very serious issues with your test that make it virtually impossible to draw any conclusions from what happened:
1. Pages rank very often based on their backlinks. Even if only a small number of the original pages had backlinks, there’s no way to know if Google had recrawled all the external pages and re-applied their links;
2. As Leo touched on, domain authority is likely a big factor, and the ccTLDs likely had little domain authority;
3. Large sites and wholesale redirects dont work so well. Basically if you dont manage your redirects then there’s a strong chance that Google never actually saw deeper redirects. Say you have a site with 4 tiers, and you redirect tiers 2-4 to a new domain at the same time. It’s likely that Google will crawl tier 2 more frequently than tiers 3 and 4. They will see the redirects on tier 2 and move over to the new URL. But the problem is that many pages at tiers 3 and 4 no longer have internal links from the original domain and become orphans. Google may never recrawl those deeper tiers to discover their redirects as a result.
4. Large sites often depend on internal architecture to achieve high rankings. It sounds like you may not have built this test in a way that replicates a real move over (but forgive me if I’m wrong). Did the country sites have full navigation/homepages etc? If not then the internal architecture of the country sites may also have contributed to poor results.
There are other workarounds you could look at Caelen – you could consider running near-dupes on multiple domains. I know it might sound whacky, but sometimes this can work if you can mash things up enough.
Last thing – I’m not disputing your conclusion that ccTLDs aren’t the optimal solution for you, but I think you should take care relying on the results of this test to determine that. I don’t think the test is valid TBH.
Next time we meet we should sit down and discuss geotargeting – it’s an area I really enjoy tinkering in.
Rgds
Richard
Hi Richard
1. We used 301’s – I was of the opinion that they pass on all link juice without the source pages having to be re-spidering.
2. This is our conclusion as well, that it comes down to domain authority
3. We proof positive that Google saw and recorded the redirects.
4. You are right that the test wasn’t complete but was the best we could do. It did have a home page etc, however the site structure was not complete. I am not sure if this invalidates anything as the redirected pages were getting the same link love from the .com domain as they were getting before the redirect.
Would love to chat about this sometime
1. 301s will likely pass a large amount of juice from old to new location, but Google has top recrawl all linking URLs to pass value across all the redirects.
2. I’d say this was likely a strong factor, but just one of many. Redirecting pages to what sound like orphan pages on the ccTLDs was probably the main issue.
3. Well if you have server logs that show Googlebot hitting all old URLs that’s a start, but how can you tell that Googlebot hit any and all external URLs linking to those pages?
4. Don’t get me wrong – this is a fascinating case study, but the problem is that there are so many dynamic variables in the mix that is is virtually impossible to test what you tried to test. If there wasn’t a full site on the ccTLDs then I’d have to say in my opinion you’re comparing apples with oranges.
I’d say that if you created a new .ie website with a full architecture, migrated the relevant pages over (301s etc), and then created strong interlinking between the .com and .ie that you’d likely rank well. The thing you cant transfer over is the domain authority which likely comes from links pointed at the root of your .com. Well, you can transfer some of this (via interlinking), but you’ll never be 100% sure how much.
I applaud you for taking the risk with this, and I think there’s still some tests you could/should consider that have a lower risk level. I’m thinking a parallel UK site might be a good test – I’d say any gains would far outstrip any duplication risk.
Of course all IMHO
Excellent case study Caelen. Also run a .com site and have wondered about your type of experiment in the past. I guess I’ll stick to building authority on existing TLD as you say.
Leo Fogarty suggested that we use multiple site maps to geo-target part of the site the its specific audience. We thought it was an excellent idea and have already implemented it and will report back with results.
[...] weeks ago we posted the results of our ccTLD SEO experiment, where we described our attempts to improve the rankings of some of our UK and Ireland targeted [...]