3 replies to this topic

[ropad]

Hi there

Just a quick question. I work for a comparison shopping site that operates in in various countries. The main domain is located in the US and I have sub-domains for the UK and Australia (we did not go in for a country TLD strategy)

After the Mayday/Caffeine updates, the main domain lost some traffic (mostly on long-tail terms) - approx 10- 12% decrease in traffic. 5 months later (end-Sept), traffic has recovered pretty nicely. The same holds true for the UK sub-domain.

However, the AU sub-domain (which has fewer number of pages and we sell fewer products) lost nearly 70% of its traffic and 5 months later is still down about 50%.

My question is why would one sub-domain suffer more than another. Would it simply be because the US and UK sites have a higher domain authority and valuable links compared to the Australian sub-domain. All three sites share the same CMS and yes we do have the same duplicate content issues despite canonicals being implement, why would one sub-domain be so highly affected. Also, crawl errors were on average the same across the three domains and were all fixed at the same time.

Just wondering what I need to do to recover some of the traffic in Australia

Any input would be helpful

Thanks

Rob

[Sarah]

Hi Rob,

Has your Aussie domain lost and then recovered position too? You may be concentrating on high volume traffic and ignoring all of the lots of little pieces that bring a large volume when combined.

You could have a few hundred long tail, low traffic search terms that you lost position for. We found that we lost position in May too and concentrated on getting our high traffic terms back up, then realised that we were still losing traffic for those terms which slipped under the radar. We're working on getting our longer tail back, and a number of our more obscure search terms are driving traffic again.

Hope that helps!
Sarah

[Jill]

Impossible to say without looking at all the factors, but I'd guess it's probably because it's the same exact site as your other one so Google has chosen the other one to show rather than the Australian one. But like I said, it's just a guess.

[Michael Martinez]

What did you do to set geotargeting?