How to Hide www.example.com and www.example.com.au

Hello Firends,

Am having websites like (www.example.com and www.example.com.au) one for India and another one for Australia. My question is, if I search in google.com.au both links are displayed in search engine. If we search in Australia www.example.com website should be hide. Can you please tell me the solutions ?

Disclaimer: Note that Iā€™m not an SEO expert.

Personally, I would not try to ā€˜hideā€™ anything from Google. But, I know that you can specify for what country is your website for in Webmaster tools. Did you already do that?

It depends on your use case, but what I would do is that I would detect from where the person comes from and just add a small alert (or something similar) telling them that there is a specific version of the website for their country.

Also, the URL you gave us isnā€™t really possible (www.example.com.au), unless you own the domain name .com.au. Is it a sub domain like au.example.com? or a URL like example.com/au/ ?

EDIT: the tld .com.au exists, I didnā€™t even knew :blush:

In Google Webmaster Tools, go to example.com, and under ā€œInternational Targetingā€, set the country to India.

(You donā€™t need to - and canā€™t - do anything with example.com.au, as the domain is already country-specific.)

As it isnā€™t going to be perfect as to which site gets displayed you might consider placing a link somewhere at the top of the home page of each that goes to the other so that those who end up on the wrong one can easily swap to the right one.

Itā€™s true that you can adjust the International Targeting setting in Google Webmaster Tools - and thatā€™s a useful thing to do. But itā€™s just one of several signals that Google uses to determine which sites to show to searchers from a given country. Google also takes account of the top-level country code (au, in this example), the phyical location of the hosting, and possibly other signals such as the mailing address shown on the site.

As xMog rightly says, itā€™s better not to try to influence Google in this way. Better to focus on a method of alerting your visitors to the fact that a separate version of the site exists for their country, and giving them an easy way to reach it.

Mike

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Already I fixed the International Targeting to both the domains. But still its showing in google.com.au.

Eh? www.example.com.au is a possible domain name, with the TLD of .com.au. i.e. apple.com.au, microsoft.com.au, etc.

EDIT: In both of my examples, those domain names redirect to a .com/au or .com/en-au/ site but the domain name itself is complete valid.

Ah youā€™re right. I never saw any .com.contry-code URL beforeā€¦ weird :expressionless: | I updated my post.

No worriesā€¦ the .com.au belongs to Australia, that huge country full of spiders and snakes down under :wink:

Donā€™t be in such a hurry. It can take days or weeks for Google to take notice of the change. And even then there is no gurantee it will make a big difference.

Mike

Just for sample I mentioned www.example.com (example word), This is not my domain link. Donā€™t confuse friends.

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