Afternoon

I have just inherited 5 websites with one being a .co.uk and the others 4 European sites, however the European sites are not ranking as it appears there maybe a canonical issue

The main url is .co.uk, however the 4 European sites work as shown below

/default.asp?currency=EUR&changesrc=Italy

The home page has content written in the local language, but then as you drive deeper into the site it shows the same pages as .co.uk

Would the easiest way be to buy domains for the specific countries and develop content that way?

Sorry for the long winded question, however my brain has died this afternoon and I cant think

Thanks

hi,

technically they should probably display in google even though they're differentiated only by the query string (that stuff after the question mark). So there may be some other issues. Is the content completely different across the versions? Are the versions linked from anywhere on the site? (eg. the footer, a country flag selector, etc) ... (and are those links plain html, rather than javascript).

Other Potential Reasons...

You mention it could be a canonical issue - it might be worth checking that you're not including a canonical tag in the homepage at the moment. If you are, make sure you're not telling search engines to ignore your european sites by marking 'default.asp' (without the query string) as the canonical version.

Other places to look at may be google webmaster tools. For 2 reasons: Firstly, it's worth checking these pages are being crawled. If not, make sure you're passing them in your sitemaps file. Secondly, you can tell webmaster tools to ignore certain URL parameters. Unlikely, but it may be that at some point someone has told it to ignore your 'changesrc' parameter.

Another thing you might want to look at - is the title tag different for each country?

Moving onto Multiple Domains...

In terms of moving forward, yes I'd always go for local domains if possible. I did this once splitting 3 sites into 13 european sites. We used domains where available (eg. yoursite.de) and subdomains where we couldn't secure the relevant country domains (eg de.yoursite.com).

There aren't many CMS systems that support multilingual/multinational sites very well as standard, and there are always complexities with that. In our case we had literally thousands of local language pages, and wanted to expand this further. As a result we built some custom extras onto the CMS (get in touch if you'd like more info). If you only have a few handfuls of page on each, and tat content isn't ranking right now anyway, it may be simpler to just start from scratch on the new local domains.

Hope that's useful - would love to know the eventual solution.

dan

--

http://www.linkedin.com/in/djbarker