Today's question comes from Manchester
in the United Kingdom.
Adeel asks, "Is there any way Google
identifies sister websites?
For example, relationships between
ebay.co.uk, and ebay.com.
Does linking between one to the other--
is that taken as paid or unnatural?
And I'm talking strictly about good, genuine ccTLDs
for businesses."
OK, so I'll try to give you the best answer I can.
But I'll also talk about non-good, non-genuine ccTLD
businesses.
So it is the case that we try to interpret
as best we can the relationships that there are on the web.
At the same time, it's very helpful
if you can tell us a little bit about what your sites are so
that we can return the correct content to users, regardless
of which country they are coming from.
So let's look at the spectrum.
On one hand you've got ebay.co.uk and ebay.com,
and we need to know that those are somehow related.
And then on the other hand, we've
got all the way down to somebody who has 100 different websites
all about medical malpractice or something like that.
So let's concentrate on the ccTLD case
for the initial question here.
It is the case that we try to figure out
that those sites are related.
But we are doing the best we can,
and if we get a little bit more help then we can say,
oh, this is a German user.
They should get ebay.de, or yoursite.de.
If it's a French user, they should get the .fr version,
that sort of thing.
So the best way to help is to use something called hreflang.
You can do that inside of a web page, where you can mark up--
hey, on ebay.com, the French version of this page
is over here, or the German version of this page
is over here.
Or if you don't want to have that in all the different pages
on your site, you can also make a site map.
And you can just say, OK, over here
is one version for a country, and over here is
another version for a country.
That's really helpful, because we
try to interpret where users are coming from,
what their language, locale, all that sort of thing is.
And then show them the best version of your page.
But if you are able to tell us what
are the actual versions of your page,
we're much less likely to mix that up.
So that's a big high-order factor that I would say.
It's definitely the case that we know
that those sites are related many different times.
And so by using that information,
we can try to make sure that we show the best possible result.
If you tell us, then we can do a slightly better job of it.
Now we might or might not trust links
between any given sites on any given basis.
But for the most part, I wouldn't worry about them being
viewed as paid or unnatural links,
because it is pretty normal for sites that are the co.uk
or the .com to link to each other.
That's a pretty normal, natural reaction.
If you can, I would do it in a sort of organic way.
If you have 50 different sites, I
wouldn't link to all 50 sites down
on the foot of your website.
That can start to look pretty spammy to users.
Instead you might just link to no more than three
or four, five down at the footer, that sort of thing.
Or have a link to a global page, and then the global page
can talk about all the different versions and country
versions of your website.
That's a great way.
You normally don't have to have a ton of cross linking
between all of your different domains for Google
to go ahead and be able to figure out
that sort of information.
Now, if instead of being country code TLDs, you know,
.co.uk or .ch or something like that--
if you've got stuff that's all in one area, like .com,
and you've got 50 or 100 different websites,
that is something where I'd be, really,
a lot more careful about linking them together.
And that's the sort of thing where
I wouldn't be surprised if we don't want to necessarily treat
the links between those different websites exactly
the same as we treat them as editorial votes
from some other website.
But for the case that you're asking about,
which is the top-level different country codes,
I would definitely recommend using
the hreflang, because that's the easiest way to tell us
which sites are which, so that we don't mess it up
when we try to give the best search results to users.