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Asked: 2026-05-25T20:50:59+00:00

I have a service that is offered in multiple countries on the same domain.

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I have a service that is offered in multiple countries on the same domain. It is structured using virtual folders for each country, for example:

http://www.example.com/uk
http://www.example.com/usa
http://www.example.com/france

Previously we used separate domains for this purpose:

http://www.example.co.uk
http://www.example.us
http://www.example.fr

but were advised to collect all rank together on one domain and so made the change (301 redirects) losing some rank. Now it seems it is very difficult to target the search results for the relevant countries (e.g. get results into http://www.google.fr). Is there a way to tell Google’s Webmaster Tools which region each of these ‘sites’ exists within? It seems there is only an option for sub-domains and tlds!?

We could move again to sub-domains where this is possible, for example:

uk.example.com
usa.example.com
france.example.com

but another 301 redirect would be a pain in the arse and lose more rank!

Is there a solution using headers (e.g. Content-language), metas (<meta name=”language” content=”fr”>) or tags (<html lang=”fr”>) I could try?

Geotagging individual pages is also possible:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging#HTML_pages

And the spec seems to allow for geo.region to accept a country code if the region code is unknown, but would this do anything and can it be used without specific coordinates?

To make matters worse our servers are in Ireland (Amazon Cloud) and it would seem that that doesn’t help our regional detection on none country specific domains.

Any help is appreciated,

Cheers,

Paul

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Google Webmaster Tools allows you to verify a folder (e.g., site.com/fr/) and set specific geo-targeting for that folder. This is a ‘strong hint’ to Google on how they should classify/rank/include results, and will generally be sufficient to get things moving in the right direction.

    Obviously this is only the case for Google, so it’s important to look at on-page signals, too. Specific language markup in the HTML tag, as you’ve outlined, is a positive signal (and especially so in the case of Bing, who’re known to weight lang attributes heavily).

    From a non-technical perspective, gaining links from matched TLDs or language-specific content may help reinforce signals.

    Make sure that you get all the rest of your setup and on-page elements spot on, as multi-geo and/or multi-lingual SEO can come with an awful lot of pitfalls!

    I’d recommend doing some reading over at http://www.seomoz.org; they have a fantastic Q&A section, as well as an extensive backlog of articles including a number on this topic.

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