How would you manage several websites, same name, different TLDs?

[mysecretid]

Hopefully I can explain this properly!

We have a website that is a .com.au and is our business name. It makes us a bit of money (probably A$30K in the last 12 months) from selling digital download products that are only able to be used in Australia. We have just added some other products and affiliates/partners and want to get more sales by leveraging blogging and what appears to be low competition keywords. Plus I have credibility in the field having quals plus experience in (Aussie) well-known companies, ie I'm googlable, which helps with setting us up for success in blogging I think.

All good so far, right?

We also own the .com and the .co.uk versions of our business name and would like to sell the products/training that are not Australian focused and can be used worldwide. To get traffic though, we need blogs. Again lots of article opportunities with low competition keywords.

My question is, how do we do this without competing with ourselves? I really don't want to have to decide which blogs should go to which site. The Australian site is the most important so if it can't be done we won't bother, but I feel like we are missing out on a potential additional income stream without too much extra work.

Is there a way to rank on the .com.au site and then magically send all non Aussie traffic to the .com site with the same blog and with the appropriate products/links?

I don't even know the right terms to google to be able to research myself, so any opinions, ideas or pointing in the right direction would be super helpful.

Thanks.

 

[Ryuzaki]

You're going to want to go down the "hreflang" rabbit hole. Ahrefs has a great guide here. This is the kind of thing you'd want to do if you want to post content for multiple languages (including British English and American English, for example, which may have different pricing and currencies). You can set up default pages and all that.

Alternatively you can run a .com version of the site and a .co.uk version in addition to your .com.au and use "canonicals" (the search term you'll need to find more info. This route would let you run multiple sites all with the same content but you can make sure a specific domain's page gets the credit. Like...

1. .com.au/shrimp-on-the-barbie/
2. .com/shrimp-on-the-barbie/
3. .co.uk/shrimp-on-the-barbie/

Obviously this article should rank on the .com.au site, so you'd set itself as the self-referential canonical on the .com.au site. Then on the .com and .co.uk you'd set the .com.au article as the canonical reference. So if the .com or .co.uk get links, the credit goes to the .com.au article.

You could publish an article like /hamburger-on-the-grill/ to all of them and give the .com credit, and /top-of-the-morning-jolly-old-bean/ to all of them and make the others give the .co.uk credit for the links and rankings. This would keep your geo-targeting in tact, which you could set explicitly in Webmaster Tools for each domain, too.

Those are two angles of attack to consider: "hreflang" and "canonical". Those terms should get you started in your search, and the above should give you a bird's eye view of what's going on with them.

 

[mysecretid]

Wow! Thank you so much. That Ahrefs link is exactly what I was looking for, my husband does coding type stuff and he's pretty confident he'll be able to implement this. I'm really excited now because I feel like my idea might actually work.

I hope your response post also helps others who may be in a similar situation to me, as I feel like it offers up even more opportunities for bloggers/entrepreneurs.

I also plan on tracking/journaling our process and successes and failures in the Laboratory.

 

[bernard]

You might also want to have a "read this in other languages" link in there somewhere.

I can't say for certain this is the case, but so far I think I am seeing positive results for this in Google, like ranking than should be expected.

Google might be able to see a different page as a language variant without the hreflang tag.