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Category: International SEO

Discussions around international SEO tactics.

  • SEOCT


    Hello, We're looking to internationalise our site so that US visitors will see the US branded version while everyone else will see the global version (currently at .com). This question specifically is about location-based auto-redirects. The literature I've read (including Google) recommends against auto-redirection: "Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site." Insofar as I understand it the theory goes as follows. Google crawls mainly from the US Auto-redirecting by US IP to the US domain will also redirect the Googlebot crawlers Because of this the crawlers will only see the US site / domain and not original .com website Crawlers can't index what they can't see Drop in rankings for the original site However, one of my colleagues has pointed out to me a company which does use auto-redirects. If a user is in the UK and type in their website they will be redirected to the UK version of the site, US will be US etc. I have checked their rankings and they are still ranking highly for relevant terms. I have been asked why they have been able to do this without impacting their visibility. Any ideas? Given their success have the risks of auto-redirecting have been overstated? How can we ensure US visitors land on the correct internationalised domain without auto-redirects in place? Looking forward to your thoughts on this as well as your experiences. Thanks in advance!

    | SEOCT
    0
  • JCN-SBWD


    I have a design portfolio website here https://www.nicholsoncreative.com/ which uses a .com but is currently configured through the Search Console to appear in results for Google.co.uk. I am going to be restructuring the website and optimisation and I want to bring in more traffic/enquiries/business from around Europe. As there's no Google.eu, and as Google also serves results based on the searchers geographic location it would seem difficult to structure and optimise content so that results can be found across all of Europe. I assume simply switching to a .eu domain extension for my own website wouldn't solve the problem? I also assume that creating content in different languages would be a logical (if time consuming) option? Are there any other tried and trusted techniques that can be used to target traffic throughout Europe? I'd appreciate any advice.

    | JCN-SBWD
    0
  • moon-boots


    I use Magento 2 Multistore and have 2 stores set up with identical products, one for the EU and one for the US. The best practice is to allow Google to crawl both sites, but what about the sitemap? Should I only include one store? The reason I ask is that Google has recently started ignoring canonicalized URLs, so even though the second store is canonicalized, it could affect my rank. My rank did drop with the last update when this was rolled out, I stopped some canonicalized URLs from generating and my rank went back up (albeit not as high as before).

    | moon-boots
    0
  • grocare


    My site is www.grocare.com for one region and in.grocare.com for another region. Both of them have the same content except the currency for particular regions. Someone told me that google will take the content as duplicate and not rank either. I have setup hreflang and targeted different regions for both in the search console. I read many article which say canonical urls need to be setup for international seo sites. But Im not sure how to setup canonical urls and whether they are the right way to go . i just don't want my content deranked. Now i have setup hreflang properly after asking the moz community itself. So im hoping to get some help with this query too. TIA

    | grocare
    0
  • grocare


    I have a store ( www.grocare.com ) and I made a duplicate store recently ( in.grocare.com ) for a different region. Both have different currencies and target different regions. I even targeted the new store ( in.grocare.com ) to that particular country in google search console. They both have different href lang tags to mark different regions too. Now its been a month since this has been done.  But the new store is not ranking in the region. The old one is still ranking and I have to redirect the traffic from old to new based on IP. 
    I thought making a new store and targeting specifically would help with rankings. Am i doing something wrong here?

    | grocare
    0
  • alishb1373


    Our site is a multilingual , and its our structure for different lang : for en :domain.com/myPost for Arabic : domain.com/ar/myPost and most of the page and post in main site , have Arabic version also. and we want to generate href lang tag for all pages and posts.(for both language) and its my problem ; if i have a post or page in main site( English ), but the Arabic  version not published yet and the href lang in English site pointed to the arabic url page (the page that doesn't exist yet) {arabic version almost will publish after 4-5 days } is it harmful for our SEO ? that href lang point to the URL that doesnt exist?

    | alishb1373
    0
  • tah06


    I have 2 websites: a UK health blog covering a wide range of topics (professional medical advice, diets, mental health), core business, strong brand, content ranks well, lots of valuable traffic, only 100 external links but all of good quality. We also sell some of our UK consultancy services on the site. small niche blog just covering fitness, every page has robots=noindex, 100x more traffic, 100% of traffic is from 500,000 external links on other websites talking about fitness matters (these range from spam to medium quality) , 95% of traffic is from countries we cannot serve, probably only 1% of the remaining 5% of traffic would be considered our target market, but the main concern is that the content is very out of date and should anyone see, it would be damaging to the UK health blog My dilemma is what do we do with the fitness website to make most business use, while ensuring little maintenance? Suggestions have been: Keep fitness blog running but make very basic content updates and remove robots=noindex Redirect fitness website urls to appropriate pages on UK health website We are on the verge of choosing option 2 but I have some SEO concerns about the impact of the redirects on the UK health website. Due to the volume of external links which mostly all reference 'fitness', is there any risk through redirects that Google might start thinking the UK health website is just about fitness? If so, is there any way to prevent this through certain redirects eg 307? Also with the fitness website having some spam related external links, is there any risk to the UK health website if these aren't disavowed before redirects are setup? If so, on which website should these be done? Thanks!

    | tah06
    1
  • Substance-create


    We have a site in English. We are considering translating the site into Dutch. If we use a hreflang attribute does that mean we have to create a duplicate page in Dutch for each English page, or does Google auto-translate?  How would duplicate pages, even if they are in a different language, affect ranking?

    | Substance-create
    0
  • EvilTIGER


    Good day everybody. My website is www.evilrpm.com and ii have drop in rank and traffic in 1 day without reason... still fighting with that issue .. from that moment i starts to get the errors and in search console if i make testing pages  .. after test they can show like warning or error page but in console its green.. i was check everything, and i think that problem in server.. because it happened when i write the truth about my experience with Shopify... this is extraordinary organization i feel like they from the starts was don't give me the way to grow...  any idea what the problem? thanks for your support!

    | EvilTIGER
    0
  • rashmibhardwaj86


    I have fixed the issue found in strctured data testing tool. Even I removed entire schema. Till now I have submitted reconsideration request 5 times and it rejected every time. Don't know how to lift this penalty. Any advise?? Need help guys my websites are going through very critical situations in terms of traffic from getting this manual action from Google. This is related to Pharma Industry.

    | rashmibhardwaj86
    0
  • seobac


    I want to know that how we are going to check that the Robots.txt File of the website is working properly. Kindly elaborate the mechanism for it please.

    | seobac
    1
  • Ty1986


    Hi mozzers, Prior to my arrival, in order to support and better serve the international locations and offering multiple language versions of the same content the company decided to restructure its URLs focused on locale urls. We went from
    https://example.com/subfolder to https://example.com/us/en-us/new-subfolder (US)
    https://example.com/ca/en-us/new-subfolder (CAN)
    https://example.com/ca/fr-ca/new-subfolder (CAN)
    https://example.com/de/en-us/new-subfolder (Ger)
    https://example.com/de/de-de/new-subfolder (Ger) This had implications on redirecting old URLs to new ones. All important URLs such as https://example.com/subfolder were
    302 redirected to https://example.com/us/en-us/subfolder and then 301 redirected to the final URL. According to the devs:  If you change the translation to the page or locale, then a 302 needs to happen so you see the same version of the page in German or French, then a 301 redirect happens from the legacy URL to the new version. If the 302 redirect was skipped, then you would only be able to one version/language of that page. 
    For instance: 
    http://example.com/subfolder/state/city --> 301 redirect to  {LEGACY URL]
    https://example.com/subfolder/state/city --> 302 redirect to 
    https://example.com/en-us/subfolder/state/city  --> 301 redirect to 
    https://example.com/us/en-us/new-subfolder/city-state       [NEW URL] I am wondering if these 302s are hurting our link juice distribution or that is completely fine since they all end up as a 301 redirect? Thanks.

    | Ty1986
    1
  • seobac


    How to configure correctly the Robots.txt File of the website. Need proper process to follow.Because a lot of my website URLs are excluded by google with the issues in the Robots.txt file.

    | seobac
    1
  • marshdigitalmarketing


    We currently have a global site that is set up this way: Subfolders to designate countries. Content in same language is re-published on other country websites. Since we are re-launching at the end of the year, we are doing away with re-publishing content on different country sites and will just maintain a single copy of our content (to be populated on different pages using content tags). We are planning on doing this so that there is no need to apply href-lang tags on our content. My questions: Is maintaining just a single instance of an article good for a global website? What are the possible complications that may come up from this approach? Since there is only one version of the article that is being indexed, is a rel-canonical tag even needed? Should href-lang tag still be applied to high level pages (homepage, etc) to ensure that the correct homepage shows up in the appropriate geography? This question is quite long,  so any feedback will be helpful. Thanks!

    | marshdigitalmarketing
    0
  • vanGoGh-creative


    On this link you can see the sitemap: http://bit.ly/2XC9J5G.
    I don't understand what the error is.
    From the search console I have the following indication: "The XML Sitemap cannot be analyzed because it contains one or more prefixes of the unassociated namespace. For example, the error is generated when xhtml:linknot preceded by xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" is detected in a Sitemap.
    Will you help me, please solve?
    Thank you very much.</xhtml:link> Massimiliano

    | vanGoGh-creative
    0
  • SEOCT


    Hello, We're building out a small number of pages for the US in a sub-folder .com/us. The idea is to show US specific pages to users in that location. However, we also have a number of pages which we will not be creating for the US as they're not relevant. I am planning on geo-targeting the US folder to instruct the search engines that this subfolder should appear in the US SERPS but since it isn't an exact science, there is a chance that US visitors may land on these non-us pages which could potentially give them a bad user experience. What should we do in instances where a US user lands on a non-us page with no equivalent page? Any help would be much appreciated!

    | SEOCT
    1
  • SEO-Mediabros


    Hi! I have a problem with the results in Google. My website ranks, but all countries appear in the search for example from Argentina.
    I have the correct hreflang tags. How can I "block" the results of other countries? This is the site and this is the search example. Thank you! 🙂

    | SEO-Mediabros
    1
  • SEOCT


    Hello all, I wonder if you can help me... I have a question about subfolders in multi-regional / multi-lingual SEO - more specifically in reference to targeting the UK and the US. Having looked at some global websites these are the types of implementations I've most commonly seen: UK subfolders .com/uk .com/gb .com/gb/en-gb | .com/en-GB .com/gb-en .com/en-gb .com/uk/en US subfolders .com/us .com/us/en-us | .com/en-US .com/us-en .com/en-us .com/us/en Are any of these approaches better than others or is it all a matter of personal preference? What's the reason for using .com/gb over .com/uk (or vice versa) for example? Secondly, my assumption is that the examples above which include language subfolders do so because these companies are targeting different speaking users within these countries. Would I be right to think that since the organisation I work for is only targeting the American speakers in the US, we wouldn't need to go so far as to have language subfolders in addition to location subfolders? Would be great to get some feedback / suggestions! Thanks!

    | SEOCT
    0
  • SEOCT


    Hello, When doing international SEO I've read that it's not good practice to automatically re-direct users to the correct part of the website based on their IP address. But what alternatives are there to this? Let's say you're targeting the US and the UK through multiregional SEO. What can you do to ensure that users from the US go to the US sub-directory and that users from the UK go to the UK sub-directory? In Moz's international SEO guide it says that: "If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice. Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused. Pair this with a good XML sitemap and the user can have a great interaction. Plus, the search engines will be able to crawl and index all of your translated content." Can anyone explain this further? Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance

    | SEOCT
    0
  • Frankie-BTDublin


    Hi! We're looking at expanding into new countries, and will probably go with the subfolder route. Our main website is focused on Ireland on Search Console (and probably always will be), so will this be affected if I add subfolders onto the end? And can I shop the main  site from crawling the new URL's in the subfolder. So if www.example.com is focused on Ireland, and we add www.example.com/de for Germany, can we let Google know not to index the German pages in Ireland? And will I need to do anything to the Irish version (e.g, change www.example.com to www.example.com/ie)

    | Frankie-BTDublin
    0
  • MichaelAtMSP


    I have seen a massive increase in International Visitors on our website and visitors within the United States dropped off hard this month (by about 20%). Could it be possible that not having any hreflang tags can lead to an increase in International Customers visiting the site even though your sitemap is set to "Target users in United States" within the Google Search Console? In the Google Search Console, I have International Targeting set to  "Target users in United States." However, Google Search Console is saying our site doesn't have any hreflang tags. In the Google Search Console, it says "Your site has no hreflang tags. Google uses hreflang tags to match the user's language preference to the right variation of your pages." I'm not sure when that was flagged, but recently we have seen a massive increase in International Visitors to our site from countries such as Russia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the United Kingdom and so on. This poses a problem since our chances of turning one of those visitors into a customer is extremely slim. Along with that, nearly every international customer is contributing to an extremely high Bounce Rate. Attached is a screenshot of the Error about hreflang tags. https://imgur.com/a/XZI45Pw And here is a screenshot of the Country we are targeting. https://imgur.com/a/ArpWe9Z Lastly, attached is a screenshot of all of the Countries that visited our site today:  https://imgur.com/a/d0tNwkI

    | MichaelAtMSP
    1
  • gravymatt-se


    UPDATED 4/29/2019 4:33 PM I had made to many copy and pastes. Product pages are corrected Upon researching the hreflang x-default tag, I am getting some muddy results for implementation on an international company site  older results say just homepage or the country selector but…. My Question/Direction going forward for the International Site I am working on:  I believe I can to put x-default all the pages of every country and point it to the default language page for areas that are not covered with our current sites. Is this correct? From my internet reading, the x-default on every page is not truly necessary for Google but it will be valid implemented. My current site setup example:
    https://www.bluewidgets.com Redirects to https://www.bluewidgets.com/us/en (functions as US/Global) Example Countries w/ code Site:- 4 countries/directories US/Global, France, Spain Would the code sample below be correct? https://www.bluewidgets.com/us/en/ (functions as US/Global) US/Global Country Homepage - https://www.bluewidgets.com/us/en/ US/Global Country Product Page(s) This would be for all products - https://www.bluewidgets.com/us/en/whizzer-5001/ http://www.bluewidgets.com/us/en (functions for France) France Country Homepage - https://www.bluewidgets.com/fr/fr/ France Country Product Page(s) This would be for all products- https://www.bluewidgets.com/es/es/whizzer-5001 http://www.bluewidgets.com/us/en (functions as Spain) Spain Country Homepage - https://www.bluewidgets.com/es/es/ Spain Country Product Page(s) This would be for all products - https://www.bluewidgets.com/es/es/whizzer-5001 Thanks for the spot check Gravy

    | gravymatt-se
    0
  • spjain81


    Dear friends, We have a multi-regional website in English language only having the country selector on the top of each page and it adds countrycode parameters on each url. Website is built in Magento 1.8 and having 1 store with multiple store views. There is no default store set in Magento as I discussed with developer. Content is same for all the countries and only currency is changed. In navigation there are urls without url parameters but when we change store from any page it add parameters in the url for same page hence there are total 7 URLs. 6 URLs for each page (with country parameters) and 1 master url (without parameters) and making content duplicity. We have implemented hreflang tags on each page with url parameters but for canonical we have implemented master page url as per navigation without url parameters Example on this page. I think this is correct for master page but we should use URL parameters in canonical tags for each counry url too and there should be only 1 canonical tag on each country page url. Currently all the country urls are having master page canoncial tag as per the example. Please correct me if I am wrong and **in this case what has to be done for master page? **as google is indexing the pages without parameters too. We are also using GEOIP redirection for each store with country IP detection and for rest of the countries which are not listed on the website we are redirecting to USA store. Earlier it was 301 but we changed it to 302. Hreflang tags are showing errors in SEMRush due to redirection but in GWT it's OK for some pages it's showing no return tags only. Should I use **x-default tags for hreflang and country selector only on home page like this or should I remove the redirection? **However some of the website like this using redirection but header check tool doesn't show the redirection for this and for our website it shows 302 redirection. Sorry for the long post but looking for your support, please.

    | spjain81
    0
  • Wagada


    One of our clients services the US and the UK, but having looked at the report over an extended period of time we can still see that the vast majority of traffic is coming from the US. I.e. our last report for March indicated that there were over 3,000 users in the US but only 6 in the UK. We know that Google Analytics works out a user’s location based on where their IP is located and not their physical location, and that this means that the data needs to be taken with a pinch of salt as it won’t always represent what you expect. That being said, we know that the traffic figures for Europe are largely inaccurate and would like to get some more accurate stats to report on. Is there a way to do so at all within Google Analytics?

    | Wagada
    1
  • HashtagHustler


    Hey everybody. In Moz when I compare link profiles to my competitors my domain is showing up as only having 4 internal follow links, and 0 nofollow. I know for a fact this is not the case however it is disconcerting. Is there any reason why Moz wouldn't be able to pick up my internal links? Is there a difference when linking internally by "/page_a" vs actually spelling out the entire URL i.e. "https://www.mysite.com/page_a"

    | HashtagHustler
    0
  • Atalig2


    Hi SEO expertises! I am currently working with a client that initially have an English website targeting UK users but want to expand their market into four new regions (Europe, America, APAC and EMEI) keeping English as a main language. I would like to request your help here as I told the client ISO location and hreflang it will be just possible per language and they must need to localise each English region with local keywords, however I would like to double check if it will be any way (Sitemap, Hreflang) we can tell Google we are targeting per region and not per country? Thanks a lot!

    | Atalig2
    0
  • fareli


    international seo serp features

    How can I be included in http://www.google.com/flights section in Serp for other languages like Persian e.g the keyword: بلیط هواپیما

    | fareli
    0
  • LisaGerecht


    Hello Moz friends, I am new to the tool and I was wondering if anybody has a best practice for international markets. I used to work with a different tool before and handling international markets has definitely been a challenge for it. What is the best way to set up campaigns/ keyword lists? By country? By topic? How helpful is the keyword explorer and reporting for international markets? I really appreciate your help.

    | LisaGerecht
    0
  • wright335


    Hello All, For my ecommerce site at my homepage there is an Language option of 9 different countries. My main site - abcd.co.uk and other sites are like this se.abcd.co.uk, fr.abcd.co.uk, es.abcd.co.uk etc From my main site if user clicks on fr.abcd.co.uk then France site will open but when he click on any link it will redirect to my UK site. On France site homepage if user hover the cursor then links are visible of UK site only. My query is ;- Do it required here to implement hreflang? As only homepage is in different language? Do it anything wrong in google point of view? Thanks!

    | wright335
    0
  • ari_seo


    Is there a risk around creating a website for each country in the world with similar to identical content depending on the language? We need to serve prices and the local currencies and be compliant with regulations. We're planning to use rel=canonical and HREFLANG tags to help with consolidation and GEO-targeting.

    | ari_seo
    0
  • WebMarkets


    It seems like GDPR was a whole lot of hype, but fizzled away quite quickly. I know of the penalties and much depends on audience traffic. Which even for the most local of local sites, can easily obtain Euro traffic. Just curious to know the experience of others.

    | WebMarkets
    0
  • AviramAdar


    301 redirection problem - Major lose of ranking in Google Search results
    (site was almost completely removed from google search results) Hello,
    I had a website ('DayUse' style) with the following url:
    https://www.roomsindex.co.il/ Couple of days ago, I've made a 301 redirection to:
    https://www.hour.co.il/ The redirection was made on 2 levels:
    1. Server side- on htaccess file.
    2. Google Search Console - Change of address page. Bare in mind the following things: The site's structure (url addresses) & the code hasn't changed (for sure). Both redirections are 100% valid (for sure). All the website pages were indexed (for sure). There isn't a penalty on any of the above domains (for sure). The website was almost completely removed from Google search results. For example: Before the redirection the website was ranked 10 in my main keyword "Rooms by hour" (translation from Hebrew), now the website removed. Also, the website removed from almost all the search terms it was ranked before. My question is, off course, WHY???
    By the details on the following page, a proper 301 redirection shouldn't cause to such page ranking loss (As I mentioned- It almost completely disappeared)... https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049?utm_source=wnc_807001&utm_medium=gamma&utm_campaign=wnc_807001&utm_content=msg_914100&hl=en-IL search-console-change-of-address.png

    | AviramAdar
    0
  • Mat_C


    Hi, I have a question concerning multilingual SEO for webshops. This is the case: the root domain is example.be, which has several subdomains. One of these subdomains is shop.example.be which is used for two webshops (Dutch and French), being shop.example.be/nl and shop.example.be/fr .
    The other root domain is example.lu (for Luxemburg) which is only used for the subdomain for the Luxemburg webshop in French, being shop.example.lu/fr.
    The content on the .lu/fr webshop is a small part of the content on the .be/fr webshop, and the product descriptions are the same and are both of course in French. The webshops will be redesigned and restructured, and the question is what to do with the .lu/fr webshop. There are two possibilities: Integrate this webshop for Luxemburg in the existing .be webshop, since most of the products are the same and the .lu webshop doesn't get a lot of visitors because of Luxemburg being a small country. The only thing to do then would be setting up a 301 from the .lu webshop to the .be/fr version to transfer link value.
    People in Luxemburg already sometimes get pages from the .be/fr webshop in the SERP anyway because these already have a bigger authority than the .lu/fr pages. Keep the .lu/fr webshop and use hreflang tags so the correct pages with similar content are shown in the correct country. I know that when using different TLD's this normally isn't an issue anyway, so implementing hreflang tags even isn't really necessary. Please feel free to share your thoughts about what would be the best approach. Thanks!

    | Mat_C
    1
  • lcourse


    Any ideas how to increase the Yandex Site Quality Index via onpage changes?

    | lcourse
    1
  • harrycox


    Hi! I'm currently working with a brand that is well established in the UK and is looking to expand it's reach in US. The UK site has a solid link profile and I think that creating a sub-folder for the US site is by far the best solution. My only concern is that the UK site uses a .co.uk domain. Would it therefore be counter-productive to use a subfolder that looks like this: www.example.co.uk/us In an ideal world I would advise the brand to acquire a location neutral domain (e.g. www.example.com) however the [brandname].com isn't available and options are otherwise very limited! Steps would be taken to ensure all other technical bases are covered (hreflang tags etc) but I'm struggling to find any further insight on this issue. Any feedback from the community would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks, Harrison

    | harrycox
    0
  • JohnWeb12


    Hi I have a client that is having two subdomains showing up SERP when you Google their name.  Here are the details. They have two subdomains us.companyname.com and en.companyname.com us.companyname.com is for the US and has completely different products and content than en.companyname.com en.companyname.com is the site designed for Europe and it is in English. How can I make it so that only the us. version shows up in the search results?  Thanks in advance!

    | JohnWeb12
    0
  • Matthew_Edgar


    Hi. I have a client with international websites targeting several different countries. Currently, the US (.com) website outranks the country-specific domain when conducting a search within that country (i.e. US outranks the UK website in the UK). This sounds like a classic case for hrelang. However, the websites are largely not 1:1. They offer different content with a different design and a different URL structure. Each country is on a country-specific domain (.com, .co.uk, .com.au, etc.). As well, the country-specific domains have lower domain authority than the US/.com website - fewer links, lower quality content, poorer UX, etc. Would hreflang still help in this scenario if we were to map it the closest possible matching page? Do the websites not sharing content 1:1 add any risks? The client is worried the US/.com website will lose ranking in the country but the country-specific domain won't gain that ranking. Thanks for any help or examples you can offer!

    | Matthew_Edgar
    0
  • moon-boots


    So I am merging two ecommerce brands together and have decided to do so either under a Subdirectory or gTLD. My aim here is to increase the quality of my SEO for the weaker site (this would be the second italic domain shown in A and B below), thus taking domain authority from the dominant site, while 301 redirecting all pages from the old domain which will hopefully boost the authority and rank for the merged site). My options for the merged site are: A. www.website.com & www.website.com/hreflang=en B. www.website.com & www.website.com/us Or a combination of A & B (below): C. www.website.com & www.website.com/us/hreflang=en Factors: Option A and C results in a longer URL structure for the merged domain which has a negative impact on SEO, while Option B is much more succinct. Both Option A and Option B are the same distance from the root directory, weakening the SEO credibility of the merged domain somewhat. While option C would be further still. Here are my questions: Option B consolidates Domain Authority, but do Option A and C do the same? Will the first domain receive a boost in Domain Authority and Rank due to 301 redirects targeting the second italic domain? Will any option cause duplicate content issues (some categories/products are identical on both sites)? And if so, how best to avoid them (having Google ignore the subdirectory/gTLD is not an option). One website will target the UK/EU while the other will target the US, will the merged italic site be able to rank well in the US? Are there any other ranking factors I have missed or should consider? I know this is quite an advanced series of questions, so I would appreciate the opinions of others so I can make the most informed choice. Thank you

    | moon-boots
    0
  • westcoastcraig


    We run an ecommerce website and sell to customers in the US and Canada. We recently realized that the way we serve content to our users isn't Google's recommended way. We use locale-adaptive pages in that some content changes slightly depending on where we think the user is located based on their IP address. But the URL doesn't change. Google's stance on locale-adaptive - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en&ref_topic=2370587 That being said, the changes are quite minor. It is usually only pricing and currency that changes depending on if we determine the user to be based in Canada or the US. However, I understand that there can be problems related to this configuration because of GoogleBot primarily using a US-based IP. We decided that the best course of action for us is to serve US content as our default content on all of our existing URLs. And Canadian content would be served using new url paths such as: example.com**/en-ca/**product1. All of this would also be configured to use hreflang tags. The problem we have run into is that it is a pretty huge development challenge to reconfigure how the site serves content when we have been using locale-adaptive for over a year. So developer resources would be taken away from other tasks and put toward this one for a relatively long time. Based on this information and the fact that we would like to both rank better in Canada and to follow Google's recommendations, how important would you say this change would be? I realize this isn't a black and white question and it depends a lot on business goals and preferences. However, I need to be able to gauge as best as I can how necessary it is to do this in order to make the decision of whether to do it or not. Any input is greatly appreciated!

    | westcoastcraig
    1
  • tcope25


    My company is creating an international version of our site at international.example.com. We are located in the US with our main site at www.example.com targeting US & Canada but offering slightly different products elsewhere internationally. Ideally, we would have hreflang tags for different versions in different languages, however, it's going to be an almost duplicate site besides a few different SKUs. All language and content on the site is going to be in English. Again, the only content changing is slightly different SKUs, they are almost identical sites. The subdomain is our only option right now. Should we implement hreflang tags even if both languages are English and only some of the content is different? Or will having just canonicals be fine? How should we handle this? Would it make sense to use hreflang this way and include it on both versions? I believe this would be signaling for US & Canda visitors to visit our main site and all other users go to the international site. Am I thinking this correctly or should we be doing this a different way?

    | tcope25
    0
  • Ewerton.RD


    Hi everyone! I need to rank my site with Spanish content in Latin America and Spain. Do I choose a neutral Spanish to try to rank in every country or make content for each country? If you choose a neutral Spanish, which is the most indicated (Spain, Colombia, Mexico, other)?

    | Ewerton.RD
    0
  • nezona


    Hi Guys i have a client who is looking to be found in multiple English speaking countries I.e .co.uk, .com and .com.au At first I advised they would need unique content for each to avoid duplication but then the client showed me this site http://welleco.com/ this is setup via shopify on a multisite. All the sites have the same content and are all indexed. My question is can this be done in WordPress? Via something like WPML. And would it need to have seperte hosting and a seperate site or can this be done by something like IP redirect. Can someone advise if this is good practice or maybe suffer other ways? Thanks in advance.

    | nezona
    1
  • Point_It


    I've got a partner agency (non-SEO) in Europe who wants to send some additional SEO business our way, but I don't currently have a system in place geared specifically towards international, country specific link building. Does anyone know of any resources (blogs, lists, tools) specifically geared towards getting links from country specific TLDs for France, Spain, Germany, Italy and Switzerland? (.fr, .es, .de, .it and .ch are the TLDs.) .co.uk sources would also be handy. A list of potential link building sources in those countries would be most helpful. I fully understand the SEO elements in play for international SEO, I just don't have any decent resource lists for those specific countries. Sites in those countries that accept guest blog posts, language specific infographic sites, foreign PR platforms, high-quality non-penalized directories...really anything would be awesome! Thanks in advance folks!

    | Point_It
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We have recently made major changes to our website and relaunched it. We have changed URLs of some pages. We have redirected old URLs to new before taking website live. When I check even after one week, still the same old and new pages also indexed at Google. I wonder why still old pages cache is there with Google. Please share your ideas on this. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • Avid_Demand


    Hi, Let's say I have a site located at https://www.example.com, and also have subdirectories setup for different languages. For example: https://www.example.com/es_ES/ https://www.example.com/fr_FR/ https://www.example.com/it_IT/ My Spanish version currently has the following hreflang tags and canonical tag implemented: My robots.txt file is blocking all of my language subdirectories. For example: User-agent:* Disallow: /es_ES/ Disallow: /fr_FR/ Disallow: /it_IT/ This setup doesn't seem right. I don't think I should be blocking the language-specific subdirectories via robots.txt What are your thoughts? Does my hreflang tag and canonical tag implementation look correct to you? Should I be doing this differently? I would greatly appreciate your feedback and/or suggestions.

    | Avid_Demand
    0
  • Dan-Lawrence


    Hi I have a question in regard to point 1 in Gianluca Fiorelli first comment on Aleyda Solis old but great international targeting article in regard to hreflang: https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool   it would obvs be amazing if either Gianlucca or Aleyda can answer but if anyone else feels they can do so confidently then that would be great too 🙂   I'm advising someone in similar situation as that (their main brand is USA based on a .com showing up in UK searches too) and they have launched .co.uk sites (without any seo) to target UK brand searches, so obviously the .com is still dominating UK serps for brand, and the .co.uk is ranking on page 4 on average for a brand search.   **BUT **before I tell them to roll out hreflang shouldn't they build up some authority etc first for their new country specific (.co.uk) site ? since they are very new and have no authority or even basic SEO and don't rank higher than page 4 for brand searches (the .com is in no1 in both usa and uk).   I know hreflang needs to be used correctly here but im not sure when it should be, now or later (after authority has built up for the new uk focused sites) ?   In other words I take it deploying the hreflang correctly wont simply cause these home pages to swap positions for brand search in uk (or will it) ? Im worried deploying it immediately could actually destroy the brands current page 1 serps for brand term (since will remove the .com page from the uk serp).   Hence i take it its best to build up the new .co.uk sites seo/authority etc first and at least get that sites brand ranking moving up the listings before deploying hreflang on the .com, to then hopefully remove the .com listing in place of the .co.uk for brand ?   OR does Gianlucca point in his comment suggest that correct hreflang usage on both sites should swap the high authority .com no1 position with the low authority .co.uk for a brand search ?   Many Thanks Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0
  • MetaPaul


    Hi All, We are working with an international brand that owns several domains across the EU and in North America. Our team is in the process of setting up international targeting using sitemaps to indicate alternate language pages. This is being done to prevent North American pages from being served in the UK, Spain pages from being served in Portugal, or any other combination of possibilities... Currently we are mapping duplicate or “equivalent” pages and defining them as rel="alternate" on their respective sitemaps. The problem is, it’s not always explicitly clear what Google considers “equivalent.” 1. In this instance, URL structures vary by domain,
    2. in most cases the content is similar (but unique),
    3. the landing page templates vary is design and functionality,
    4. and lastly, services often contain nuances that make them slightly different from one another (Professional Liability Insurance vs Professional Indemnity Insurance). All things considered, these pages are offering the same service, but are vastly different (see above). Q: Is it appropriate to use these attributes to serve the correct language / regional URL to searchers? Q: Is there a rule of thumb on what should be considered an "equivalent" page? Thanks All, Paul

    | MetaPaul
    3
  • Dan-Lawrence


    HiI have a question in regard to point 1 in Gianluca Fiorelli first comment on Aleyda Solis old but great international targeting article in regard to hreflang: https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-toolit would obvs be amazing if either Gianlucca or Aleyda can answer but if anyone else feels they can do so confidently then that would be great too :)I'm advising someone in similar situation as that (their main brand is USA based on a .com showing up in UK searches too) and they have launched .co.uk sites (without any seo) to target UK brand searches, so obviously the .com is still dominating UK serps for brand, and the .co.uk is ranking on page 4 on average for a brand search.**BUT **before I tell them to roll out hreflang shouldn't they build up some authority etc first for their new country specific (.co.uk) site ? since they are very new and have no authority or even basic SEO and don't rank higher than page 4 for brand searches (the .com is in no1 in both usa and uk).I know hreflang needs to be used correctly here but im not sure when it should be, now or later (after authority has built up for the new uk focused sites) ?In other words I take it deploying the hreflang correctly wont simply cause these home pages to swap positions for brand search in uk (or will it) ? Im worried deploying it immediately could actually destroy the brands current page 1 serps for brand term (since will remove the .com page from the uk serp).Hence i take it its best to build up the new .co.uk sites seo/authority etc first and at least get that sites brand ranking moving up the listings before deploying hreflang on the .com, to then hopefully remove the .com listing in place of the .co.uk for brand ?OR is Gianlucca saying in his comment that correct hreflang usage on both sites should swap the high authority .com no1 position with the low authority .co.uk for a brand search ?Many ThanksDan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0
  • Dan-Lawrence


    Hi What's the difference search engine wise and which one should I choose, i presume GB since covers entire British landmass whereas UK excludes Ireland according to political definition, is it the same according to Google (& other engines) ? All Best Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0
  • Davide1984


    Hi folks, i have a client who is based in italy and they set up a site that sells travel experiences in the sout of Italy (the site currently sit on a server in Italy). The site has been set up as gTLDs: www.example.com They only want to target the US and the UK market to promote their travel experiences and the site has only the english version (the site does not currently offer an italian version). If they decide to go for the gTLDs and not actually change to a ccTLDs (which would be ideal from my point of view) how are the steps to be taken to set this up correctly on GSC? They currently only have one property registered on GSC: www.exapmple.com therefore i guess the next steps are: Add new property - www.example.com/uk and and set up geo targeting for UK Existing property - www.example.com/ set up geo targeting for US In case the client does not have the budget to optimise the content for american and british languages, would still make sense to have 2 separate property in GSC (example.com for US market and example.com/uk for UK market)? Few considerations: Add canonical tag to avoid duplicate content across the two versions of the site (in the event there is no budget to optimise the content for US and UK market)? Thank you all in advance for looking into this David

    | Davide1984
    0

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