International search: how to show different domains in Google+ Local?
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Baumr
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Published on 2013-06-26T14:49:58Z
Indexed on
2013/06/26
16:30 UTC
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Background
A site has multiple ccTLDs:
example.com
for people in the US,example.co.uk
for UK users,example.de
for Germany,example.fr
for France,- etc.
Searching for certain city keywords will return a list of Google+ Local (formerly Places):
Each links to the corresponding company website that is visible.
Problem
When searching on www.google.de, the domain of the site intended for US users (example.com
) appears instead of the corresponding ccTLD (example.de
) aimed at German users.
This applies to all languages.
In my opinion and for the purposes of this business, it's not good user experience: searchers would most likely prefer to book on a site localized for them (e.g. in their language and currency).
Question
Is it possible to return different ccTLDs in these local search listings for users across the globe?
Currently, Google+ Local seems to only support supports adding a single "Website" field.
Solutions I have considered
- Creating duplicate Google Places listings for each URL would be spammy (and not viable when there's 100s of locations, each needing a listing in 8 languages).
- I don't see the
hreflang
annotation helping either, and GWMT geotargeting is already set.
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