trading internationally on a .co.uk domain

superdooper500 · May 24, 2013

Is it doable? I have a new business I'm in the beginning stages of building up, and I have the .co.uk domain as I thought I'd mainly be trading in the UK. However an opportunity has come up to service international clients too. The .com domain is taken by someone sitting on it, and the guy won't sell it to me.

So my question is, can I realistically expect people to purchase from America, Australia etc from a .co.uk domain?

Would something like a .net domain be my next best bet for an international website?

Confusingly enough, can I get the .net, rank it in the USA or Australia, and point it towards my .co.uk site, or do I need 2 seperate sites? I don't want duplicate content obviously, but would 2 sites be better than one?

I'm really taken on the name, its absolutely perfect, so I don't want to change name, more find a solution until the guy eventually sells me the .com (which I'm sure I can convince him to one day...)

I could of course get the .com with a hyphen or similar, but that ruins my brand consistency a little.

Hope this isn't too confusing! Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

jamesap · May 24, 2013

Depends on what sort of business. If it's something that triggers a 7-pack search (i.e. local search) then yeah, you can rank a .co.uk in the US/Australia.

If it's something that includes a reference to UK, yeah usually.

If it's something that has no significance to the UK and you don't own a .com or equivalent international domain, no. Best case in this is to own the ccTLD for that country .de, .fr, .es, etc. - but it's going to be a lot more work. It's a separate fight in each country.

There's markup (rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us") for each English speaking country.

If you DO own an international domain like the .net, you can create /uk/ /au/ and /us/ directories and add them individually to WMT and set the geotargeting for each. But I'm not sure that's as effective as owning a separate site.

superdooper500 · May 24, 2013

Thanks for your reply James. This is definitely useful information. If I had seperate directories, would that require replicating the website multiple times? How would I avoid duplicating content to achieve this?

Very fascinating subject, I appreciate your input.

jamesap · May 24, 2013

I can't post an answer cos it has a URL in it

superdooper500 · May 24, 2013

Fantastic, thanks for your PM on this, I'll post up the content so others reading the thread can make use of the info.

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-uk" href="http://www.example.com/uk/" />
<link rel="canonical" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-au" href="http://www.example.com/au/" />

And so working in a system such as this will help me avoid duplicate content penalties? As each site, although essentially the same, is aimed at a different country?

superdooper500 · May 26, 2013

I found this article from google, posted in 2010. Do people think its still relevant on the whole?

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

It certainly feeds in nicely with what Jamesap was saying.

andycan · May 26, 2013

The article is still relevant to a point, but I think that having a local presence or the appearance of one, will improve your rankings in each particular country. I know that both Google and Bing are currently working on validating the actual presence of businesses in each country. So I think it's better to focus on this as domains will become less relevant. On one of my own business websites, a similar business/similar name with an Australian domain name ranks higher than me on certain keywords in the UK.

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