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Category: International SEO

Discussions around international SEO tactics.

  • Iannaude


    Hi I have a question regarding country specific SEO and what would the best approach be? I have website A which is currently ranking well in Google country A, I would now like to introduce a new website B which is only specific to users in Google country B. The only difference between the 2 websites is that website B will have different prices and products for the users in Google country B. From a development point of view we would like to only have one instance of the website which can be served to users in country A and B all that we would do is change some of the content and prices based on the user IP which means that users in country A see a different version of the website to users in country B. Is this approach fine from and organic point of view? Or would we need to have 2 separate websites and make use of Href Lang?

    | Iannaude
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  • muzzmoz


    Here's the scenario: I have a client currently running one Shopify site (AU) They want to launch three more country domains (US, UK and EU) They want each to be a standalone site, primarily so the customers can purchase in their local currency, which is not possible from a single Shopify site The inventory is all from the same source The product desscriptions will all be the same as well Question: How do we avoid content duplication (ie. how will canonical tags work in this scenario)?

    | muzzmoz
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  • jamiericey


    My client has an online ecommerce store which he is due to launch later this week. He owns both the .co.uk and the .com   - the site is hosted on .co.uk and the .com domain redirects to the .co.uk The client wants anyone who visits the site from the .com to see permalinks when later going through the site as .com as opposed to .co.uk permalinks. Is this possible/any suggestions? Thank you!

    | jamiericey
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  • Brando16


    I've been doing a lot of research on hreflang and had a question regarding the implementation with location targeting. I have a translation for Brazilian Portuguese, I'd like to target Brazil with this translation on my site but also provide it as the default for other users that speak Portuguese outside of Brazil. Can I use the same translation for two different sites? So my hreflang would look like this: So in this example the pt-br and pt sites would be duplicates but with one being specifically targeted to Brazil and the other for all other people speaking Portuguese anywhere else in the world. The default language of the site is English so the full implementation would look like this:

    | Brando16
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  • ToniFarrington-Allthingsweb


    What are the SEO implications of having a website hosted in Singapore (as a subdomain of the global website) when the website is targeting the UK audience? Will it be hard to get it to rank? Will there be problems with search console?

    | ToniFarrington-Allthingsweb
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  • Andrea_howey


    Hi all, I have a bit of a search engine predicament and I can't find the answer anywhere. It's a bit of a complicated one so please bear with me 🙂 ... I'm a Freelance Copywriter, I recently started the business, I've also recently moved to New Zealand. As such I'm looking for business back in the U.K. (As that's where my network is), but also locally, in NZ. I've purchased both the .co.uk and .co.nz domain names (http://www.inspirecontent.co.uk and http://www.inspirecontent.co.nz) The way that the domain provider / host has set these up is for one to redirect to another. Currently if someone visits www.inspirecontent.co.nz it redirects to the U.K. Site. That's less than ideal for me, because I dont want NZ traffic (i.e potential leads) to think I'm a U.K. Based business. my questions are as follows: 1. Will the redirect to the U.K. domain prevent me from appearing in NZ search (I.e if someone searches via google.co.nz) I'm really struggling to rank at the moment, I'm working on more content but if the redirect is a problem then I need to know about it so that I can find a work around. 2. Any suggestions on the best approach to the work around? It would be great if the URLs didn't change! So that you wind up from the U.K. on the U.K site, and if you're from NZ, you land on and stay on the NZ domain, but I'm not sure how to achieve that. One option, I think, would be to have two different websites, hosted separately, but I hear that duplicated content is bad for SEO? Thanks all in advance Kind regards

    | Andrea_howey
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  • ccox1


    Hi Everyone, I have a client that has two sites (example.com & example.co.uk) each have the same English content, but no hreflang or rel="canonical" tags in place. Would this be interpreted as duplicate content? They haven't changed the copy to speak to specific regions, but have tried targeting the UK with a ccTLD. I've taken a look at some other comparable question on MOZ like this post - > https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/community/q/international-hreflang-will-this-handle-duplicate-content where one of the answers says  **"If no translation is happening within a geo-targeted site, HREFLANG is not necessary." **If hreflang tags are not necessary, then would I need rel="canonical" to avoid duplicate content? Thanks for taking the time to help a fellow SEO out.

    | ccox1
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  • SEOIntouch


    I am tasked with optimizing a US site for a company that has many international sites.  Currently, if you search for just the main company name and don't include "USA" in your search, it won't even give you the US site on the SERP.  It displays the Italian, French, etc etc sites - even though I'm searching on Google in the US with a preferred language of Engilsh.  Unfortunately I don't have any control over the other sites, only the US one. Is there anything I can add to the US site (aside from setting the country code in GSC) so that when someone searches from within the USA, they get the US site and not all of the other ones? thanks!

    | SEOIntouch
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  • Brando16


    I'm launching translations on a website with the first translation being Brazilian Portuguese. If I use the following hreflang: If a user is outside of Brazil and has their browser language set to just Portuguese (Not Portuguese (Brazil)) will Google still serve them the Portuguese version of my pages in search results?

    | Brando16
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  • webtematica


    Hi everyone, in a case for a site with two languages like spanish and english, how would do you deal with it? I can see 4 cases, which is better?? 1. With differents domains: mydomain.es (for spanish version) and mydomain.com (for english version). 2. With subfolder mydomain.com/es/ and mydomain.com/en/ 3. With Subdomain: es.mydomain.com and en.mydomain.com 4 With URL translation (any url is translated in ther languages but not use of subdomain or subfolder): mydominain.com/hola and mydomiain.com/hello Thanks very much for your answers (i love this forum). 🙂

    | webtematica
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  • SmiffysUK


    Hi Could anyone offer some advice on the best way to structure sub folders on a website that we are launching worldwide. We are a UK based business and currently run a UK site on www.website.com and we are planning on launching into Europe using a sub folder structure. We will use /de, /fr, /es for the new countries that are coming on board but the question is should the UK site url be: www.website.com or www.website.com/uk As have an established web presence in the UK I'm thinking it should remain as www.wewbsite.com but are there any advantages / disadvantages to changing it to .com/uk Many Thanks

    | SmiffysUK
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  • znotes


    Hi Moz Community, Our e-commerce site is trying to gauge the opportunity of certain queries for specific countries. I'm trying to use the search console data presented in GA to do this. I'm looking at the top queries filtered by each country and also the top landing pages for each country as well. The non filtered data for queries and landing pages is completely different than by country and some if it looks wrong. For instance, our most popular query by impressions shows 0 query impressions in the US once filtered by country. Our site is based in the US so this doesn't make any sense, the same is true for landing pages. Is the queries and landing page data in GA under search console a combination of all countries? Since our target is set to the USA in search console is this data technically US based? How is this data so off? Thanks for answering!

    | znotes
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  • vtmoz


    Previously I have asked about the replacing of internal redirects with actual live pages. The answer is, yes it'll work but may not be huge impact. Now I am concerned with external redirects. We have enough number of external redirecting links. I am thinking to replace them with actual landing pages. Will this improve SEO? Thanks, Satish

    | vtmoz
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  • Yeeply.com


    Hello, We do have a client with a site in multiple versions (one domain per country). French and Spanish versions work really fine, but the problem comes up with the .com and .co.uk versions. This is my hreflang piece of code: When I go to Google.co.uk and search the exact match domain keyword "how much cost an app", I only find the howmuchcostanapp.com domain (1st or 2nd page) instead of howmuchcostanapp.co.uk. The UK one is not appearing! This is very strange. I have spent a lot of time trying to solve this, but I don't know what else to do. Thanks a lot in advance for your comments and help!

    | Yeeply.com
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  • DA2013


    Moz, Hi Moz, Can multiple hreflang tags point to a single URL?  For example, if I have a Canadian site (www.example.com/ca) that targets French and English speakers can I have the following: or would I use: Any insight would be very helpful and greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance!

    | DA2013
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  • Bush_JSM


    Hi Mozzers, Got a quick question and while it is partially answered in Moz Q&A I have an answer to the contrary on another site so I wanted to get an opinion. I have a UK and US site - I have tagged the home pages with the relevant tags to the US doesn't rank in the UK and vice versa. Do I need to tag every page with each URL at category and product level or is the home page sufficient along with targeting the UK or US in Google Webmaster tools. Any feedback welcome - thanks b

    | Bush_JSM
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  • VERBInteractive


    We have a site currently in development that is using the Google Translate API and I am having a massive issue getting screaming frog to crawl and all of our non-native English speaking employees have read through the translated copy in their native language and the general consensus is it reads at a 5th grade level at best. My questions to the community is, has anyone implemented this API on a site and has it a) helped with gaining traffic from other languages/countires and b) has it hurt there site from an SEO standpoint.

    | VERBInteractive
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  • karl62


    Hi, I need to create an international seo proposal and wondered what are the best bits of international SEO I should include? I have been reading up on loads of blogs wondered if anyone had some great ideas 🙂 Much appreciated.

    | karl62
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  • Teklan


    I'm having an international Drupal website and the hreflang module is in use. However, I'm still not sure how to optimize the pages. Perhaps it's easier to ask with an example **International: **www.example.com/products/product1
    Here we have the master content of the product **US: **www.example.com/us/products/product1
    Here we have exactly the same content as international. Nothing is localized. **UK: **www.example.com/uk/products/product1
    Here we have almost the same content as on International. Here and there some local terms and extra text. **German: **www.example.com/de/products/product1
    Here we have a translated version of the international page. Questions Do I add hreflang from all to all pages + to itself? Where do I add canonicals? How should I optimize the content on the US and UK pages?

    | Teklan
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  • Brando16


    We've translated product description videos, typically we upload the videos to YouTube once they are complete and then embed them on our website. Should I create a new YouTube channel targeted to the locations for which these videos have been translated?

    | Brando16
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  • Brando16


    I'm wondering if there are any guides out there that list how subfolders should be structured for Internationalization? The first language/location that I'm targeting is Portuguese in Brazil so should my folder structure be: www.example.com/br/pt/ or www.example.com/pt-br/ I did find the guide below but was wondering if there was perhaps anything from Google? http://www.lingoes.net/en/translator/langcode.htm

    | Brando16
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  • mcmnetjames


    Hi Moz Community, I'd appreciate any advice you can offer on this. We have a client with international offices, and we manage the website and SEO for some of these offices, including UK. Others, such as their US office, are managed by another agency. All websites have the same domain name, but differ in their sub domains depending on their targeted country, e.g. uk.domainname for UK, us.domainname for US. All are .com. The US office's agency re-desgined their us.domainname website earlier this year. We noticed a couple of months ago that the US website started to outrank the uk.domainname website for branded searches on Google from the UK. After some investigation, we found that their agency had incorrectly implemented hreflang tags and set the us sub-domain as the hreflang="x-default" instead of www.domainname. They corrected this and uk.domainname is now the first organic result on Google. However, us.domainname has remained in 2nd place for organic brand searches (from Google UK) for the past two months, when we were hoping that this would have dropped out of the rankings by now. We have asked the US office to ensure that their International Targeting is set to United States in Google Search Console, but have no way of knowing if this has actually been done. Does anyone have experience of this? Is there anything else we could try to stop the US site ranking for Google UK, or is it just a matter of waiting? Many thanks, James

    | mcmnetjames
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  • wright335


    Hello Everybody, 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 Now if I donot use hreflang for Multilingual site then google will consider it as subdomain or duplicate site? But content of the sites are in different language. Thanks!

    | wright335
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  • viatrading1


    Hi, On my website, we are showcasing many products in both English and Spanish. We originally create each a product description in English, then we translate to Spanish. But sometimes, due to having numerous products, we don't translate to Spanish, and we just pull the English description on the Spanish page (so it has menus etc in Spanish, but the long Product Description in in English). English Example: http://www.viatrading.com/product.jhtm?id=34608
    Spanish Example: http://www.viatrading.com/wholesale/product/TIGR-LN-APP/Ropa,-Relojes,-Gafas-y-Accesorios.html?cid=4 Could that be considered duplicated (or near-duplicated) content? For SEO, would it be better if the Spanish product page was redirected to the English one if not translated? Thank you,

    | viatrading1
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  • danfrost


    Hi all, I have a client that currently has a .com domain that ranks in both the US and the UK for various search terms. They have identified a need to provide different information for UK and US visitors which will require 2 versions of all pages. If we set up a .co.uk domain and keep the .com obviously that will be a brand new UK site which will have zero rankings. Any suggestions as to the best way to introduce this second version of the content without losing UK rankings? Thanks

    | danfrost
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  • accpar


    Is anyone familiar with other tools like SEMRush for competitor research in Canada to see what sites are currently ranking for? I'm not sure that SEMRush has the most comprehensive database for Canada and I'm looking for THE tool in Canada. Thanks!

    | accpar
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  • UnbounceVan


    I’m currently working with my team to sort out the best way to build out the international versions of our website. Any advice on how to move forward is greatly appreciated! Current Setup: Subdirectories to target languages - i.e. domain.com/es/. We chose this because… We are targeting languages not countries Our product offering does not change from country to country Translated site content is almost identical to the english version Current Problem: Our site is built on WordPress and our database can’t handle the build out of 4 more international versions of the site. The database is slowing down and our site speed is being affected for multiple reasons (WordPress multilingual plugin being one of them). **What to do next? **My developers have said that we cannot continue with our current subdirectory structure due to the technical infrastructure issues I’ve mentioned above (as well as others I’m yet to get full details on). Now I’m left with a decision: Change to a subdomain structure Change to a ccTLD structure Is there an option 3? From what I’ve read it does not make sense to build out language targeted sites on a ccTLD structure because that limits the ability for people outside of the targeted country to find the content organically. I.e. a website at www.domain.es is targeted to searchers in Spain so someone in Columbia is less likely to find that content through the engines. Is this correct? If so, how much can it hurt organic discovery? What’s the optimal setup to move forward with in this case? Thanks!

    | UnbounceVan
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  • RobertChapman


    Greeting Mozzers. I have a question for the community, which I would appreciate your input on. If you have a single gTLD that services multiple countires, what do you think is the best homepage UX for the root homepage and why? So the example would be you own website www.company.org and target content to Germany, Japan and Australia with content through the folder structure eg. www.company.org/de-de If someone comes to the www.company.org from a region, would you: Redirect them based on location IP – so if from Germany they land on www.company.org/de-de Let them land on the homepage which offers location selection Let them land on a page with content and offer location selection eg. pop-up or obvious selection box Something I’ve not thought of… I'd appreciate your input. Thanks

    | RobertChapman
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  • UnbounceVan


    I realize it's important to use hreflang tags when your site is translated into multiple languages and that content is very similar if not identical to the original language. However, is there value in having hreflang tags implemented for every blog post that gets translated? Does the same value hold true? In my case, the blog posts which get translated into different languages can somewhat vary from the original. By no means are they a direct translation. They are often adapted to meet the needs of that language and audience.

    | UnbounceVan
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  • Online-Marketing-Guy


    Hey there, we have recently implemented hreflang on the sitemap level for our global website. The website has 57 sitemaps that are all referenced in a sitemap index file (www.buschvacuum.com/sitemap.xml). Google is showing several errors in search console ("Sitemap provided URLs and alternate URLs in 'en-AU' that do not have return tags."). However when I try to verify this I do find the return tags. Can this be caused by the fact that my hreflang tags span several sitemap files? To pick one random example (see screenshot for search console error message):
    The Originating URL-hreflang-Tag is in www.buschvacuum.com/sitemap_3.xml, the return tag is in www.buschvacuum.com/sitemap_4.xml. It would be great if someone with experience regarding those errors could help me explaining that behavior. Thanks a lot. Jochen WXYQoUH.png

    | Online-Marketing-Guy
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  • EnjinFrance


    Hi there, I have an issue with some subdomain rankings, my client sell all over the world and has divide countries with subdomain like this : fr.xxxx.com for France,be.xxxx.com for Belgium, ca.xxxx.com for Canada,..... The issue is that pages are all in french and some keywords on Google.fr are referenced with be.xxxx.com so it count "not in top 50" on moz report. The code looks correct to me (for example belgiums's pages : "fr-BE">"). Anybody have an idea where to look at to resolve this ? Many thx in advance.

    | EnjinFrance
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  • ggpaul562


    I was wondering, What if I went with international sub-directory route (not ccTLD), for example: sitename.com/fr (fr being france)...But the question is, what's the best practice for MOBILE?sitename.com/mobile/frORsitename.com/fr/mobileORm.sitename.com/fr Again, ccTLD is not an option (currently, sites are in ccTLD but we are now transitioning to sub folders)Now, the next question is WHY is it best practices for it to be sitename.com/mobile/fr or sitename.com/fr/mobile or m.sitename.com/fr ? Please cite source. Thanks!

    | ggpaul562
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  • TechWyse


    Hello ! In a french browser & french Google interface with no browsing history, I have the french version of my website indexed, but the site links coming along with it are in English ! Is there any way to combat this? Note - we use a 302 language re-direction. See screenshot here: http://bit.ly/25kViB0

    | TechWyse
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  • seoanalytics


    Is it possible and recommended to host a website in Switzerland ending in.com to rank in the United States ? Or is it better to host it in the country you are targeting ? I know in WMT you can choose the country you want to target but is it as efficient as hosting it on a server located in the country ? Thanks,

    | seoanalytics
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  • ThomasHarvey


    Hello, I've never had to deal with an international site before, let alone a site merge. These are two large sites, we've got a few smaller old sites that are currently redirecting to the main site (UK). We are looking at moving all the sites to the .com domain. We are also currently not using SSL (on the main pages, we are on the checkout). We also have a m.domain.com site. Are there any good guides on what needs to be done? My current strategy would be: Convert site to SSL. Mobile site and desktop site must be on the same domain. Start link building to the .com domain now (weaker link profile currently) What's the best way of handling the domains and languages? We're currently using a .tv site for the UK and .com for the US. I was thinking, and please correct me if i'm wrong, that we move the US site from domain.com to domain.com/us/ and the domain.tv to domain.com/en/ Would I then reference these by the following: What would we then do with the canonicals? Would they just reference their "local" version? Any advice or articles to read would really be appreciated.

    | ThomasHarvey
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  • seoanalytics


    Hello Everyone I am not new to SEO but new to the forum  ! I am in the travel business selling high end bicycle trips to the US market. I am about to expand my business and sell cheaper bicycle trips to the European market. My company has a got a name in the industry as well as some amazing reviews on google + and other forums. My 1 st question, would you use a totally different domain name see that is a different market and different prices or would you use the same domain name ? If you were to use the same domain would you do fr.mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com/fr. In terms of web domain, is exact match domain still powerful ? My current domain name is not an exact match domain and surfing the web, I feel like it still gives you a major advantage in 2016 ? If I choose an exact match domain, I noticed I can get  www.mydomain.travel or www.mydomain.bike or get a domain for the country I am targeting www.mydomain.co.uk. Do you have advice on which domain is easier to rank ? or doesn't it change anything ?

    | seoanalytics
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  • O2C


    Hi All, I have the following code in one of our Htaccess files and I'm not entirely sure what its doing. Could anyone shed some light and maybe explain the process its going through? I know its something to do with redirecting the urls dependant on the browser language. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(En|Es)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(En|Es)/(.*)$ $2?lang=$1 [L,R=301] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}|/)$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1/ [L,R=301] Thanks

    | O2C
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  • fourseven


    We have been using moz subscription from last few months & are quite happy so far. We just wanted to explore more out of it & wanted to understand how to approach the optimization for having us rank well in US. At the same time we don't wanted to lose upon what we have achieved till now. I have read through some blog posts & found that changing the international targeting in GWT can also hurt. My vision is to rank well in multiple countries but at the same time do not lose rankings in India. Any help here would be appreciated so whatever we do, we do it right.

    | fourseven
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  • Easigrass


    Hi, we have a large international network. Our main website sits on .com domain and is used by the UK market. We have an international site in a subdirectory .com/dk/ for Denmark for example. We have also purchased the domain name www.ourcompany.dk/. Should we be forwarding the domain name (www.ourcompany.dk/) to point to the subdirectory www.ourcomany.com.dk/ so in the browser it shows up as www.ourcompany.dk or should we be displaying it as www.ourcompany.com/dk/? Are there any pros and cons to this method? Which one is best and are there any benefits in SEO. Ideally we want the .com domain name to have the best domain authority so would this impact it in any way? Any tips would be great.

    | Easigrass
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  • Jbeetle


    Hi guys, I have a client based in the Middle East using a generic top level domain (.com), and they want to target multiple countries in the GCC (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar etc). I’m thinking that using the hreflang tag would be the best solution here, however the pages will mostly have the exact same content. There will only be slight changes on some pages in terms of using localised title tags [client service] followed by [targeted country], h1's and meta descriptions. Is this the correct approach? And if so should this be implemented side wide or can it be implemented on selected pages only? The site will be in English only.

    | Jbeetle
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  • ABullis


    Hi everybody, So I'm setting up hreflang tags on an ecommerce site. The sites are in the USA and Canada. The Canadian site will have fewer products than the American site, meaning that there won't be as many pages in each category as there are on the American site. What is the correct way to handle hreflang tags on these extra category pages? To put this another way, the American site may have a category with 3 pages of products, while the Canadian equivalent only has 2 pages of products. What happens to this extra American category page (example.com/widget-category/page-3) ? Does it get an hreflang tag linking to the first page of the equivalent Canadian category (example.ca/widget-category/)? Does it not get any hreflang tags because it has no true Canadian counterpart? Does it matter at all if it has a canonical tag pointing to the first page in the series anyway (example**.com**/widget-category/)? Thanks, Andrew B.

    | ABullis
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  • AL123al


    If a website is translated to English and has .co.uk version and a .com which are directed at UK and USA audiences respectively (using localised spellings etc), how do you get the visitor to the right version? It seems clumsy to add two flags on the navigation - one for USA and one for GB English as well as other languages. Should a redirection script be in place based on their IP address? Thanks for any help

    | AL123al
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  • AL123al


    Hello, In a muddle here. A website has a .co.uk and a .com version. They want to target the UK market and the USA market respectively. The content for the UK version has been localised for the UK audience (e.g. spellings etc) but the content is the same in both sites. There are errors in .co.uk version in webmaster tools : International Targeting | Language > 'en' - no return tags__URLs for your site and alternate URLs in 'en' that do not have return tags.**Q 1) What does this mean?**I can see that both the .com and .co.uk version has only this in place:**2) Should they actually have respectively?**3) Do they also need rel=canonical from the .co.uk to the .comAny help would be appreciated.

    | AL123al
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  • jobhuntinghq


    I have a few issues with one of my sites being indexed in Baidu and not too sure of how to resolve them; 1. Two subdomains were redirected to the root domain, but both (www. and another) subdomains are still indexed after ~4 months. 2. A development subdomain is indexed, despite no longer working (it was taken down a few months back). 3. There's conflicting information on what the best approach is to get HTTPS pages indexed in Baidu and we can't find a good solution. 4. There are hundreds of variations of the home page (and a few other pages) on the main site, where Baidu has indexed lots of parameters. There doesn't appear to be anywhere in their webmaster tools to stop that happening, unlike with Google. I'm not the one who deals directly with this site, but I believe that Baidu's equivalent of Webmaster Tools has been used where possible to correctly index the site. Has anyone else had similar issues and, if so, were you able to resolve them? Thanks

    | jobhuntinghq
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  • DigitalThirdCoast


    Hello Moz Community! I'm reaching out since I recently launched a UK and Australia version of my website. Now, each page on the website has 4 versions: 1. www.example.com 2. www.example.com/au 3. www.example.com/uk 4. www.example.com/en <-- this is a by-product of the plugin we're using, CMS is WP each page has the following 4 targeting tags on it: I looked in Webmaster Tools and we're getting an error on what appears to be every Australia page. The error states, ""au"- unknown language code. URLs for your site that have an unknown language code 'au' and their alternate URLs." In Google's own example, they have the language for Australia set as en-au [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en} Has anyone run into this issue before? We had the alternate tag set to "au" at first, but edited the plugin so the alternate tag now says "en-au", but this still hasn't remedied the problem. Any insights into resolving this error are greatly appreciated!

    | DigitalThirdCoast
    0
  • smilinggardener


    My girlfriend is from Saint Petersburg, Russia and now lives in Toronto, Canada. She's been teaching English to Russians for 3 years in person and on Skype, and now wants to start a website to get more 1-on-1 clients and sell online courses, which I have a lot of experience in. If you don't feel like reading my notes below, I'll summarize my main questions here: Would you lean to creating the site more in English or Russian language or both equally... with a .com or .ru or both (2 sites)... hosted in the U.S. or Russia? I've been reading a number of excellent threads about strategies and tactics for online marketing in multiple language (including some here on Moz), but am still confused about how best to approach this. Here are some notes: -Some prospects will search for her services in English and some in Russian (probably more in Russian). -If I build her a site primarily in English, she can take advantage of my experience in English keyword research, SEO, competitor research, and so on. If I build her a site primarily in Russian, I can still do those things, but not as efficiently or effectively. -If I were thinking first and foremost of our users, which is obviously a good place to start, the site would be in both English and Russian, but I've read that if a site has both English and Russian text, and is a .com instead of a .ru, that can really hurt its chances of ranking in Russia's Yandex search engine, which is used more in Russia than Google. Along the same lines, although most SEO sites are saying that it doesn't matter where you host a website these days, an exception seems to be that Yandex does reward sites that are hosted locally. Are these assertions true? -At first I assumed that organic search competition is lower in the Russian language, but I don't really know. I've also read that Yandex really rewards older domains and that it can be hard to beat them, which means competition may be quite high. So my questions again are: Would you lean to creating the site more in English or Russian or both... with a .com or .ru or both (2 sites)... hosted in the U.S. or Russia? Thanks in advance!
    Phil

    | smilinggardener
    1
  • Pandjarov


    I've done everything I can think of to set internationalization between three domains but Google keeps showing my .com results in Spain where .es results should be displayed. The site is siteground.com siteground.es and sitegorund.co.uk. I've used alternate tags which I think are set correctly, siteground.co.uk ranks pretty well in the UK search but in Spain - still can't get .es results and that's been 3 months already.

    | Pandjarov
    0
  • SixSpokeMedia64


    Hello World! Background: I am evaluating a tool/service that a company wants to use for managing the translated versions of their international/multi-lingual websites: https://www.transifex.com/product/transifexlive/ Transifex is asking webmaster to "simply add a snippet of JavaScript" to their website(s); the approved translations are added by the business in the back-end; and the translated sites are made live with the click of a button (on/to the proper ccTLD, sub-domain, or sub-directory, which is specified). CONCERN: Even though I know Google reads JavaScript for crawling and ranking,
    I am concerned because I see the "English text" when I view the source-code on the "German site", and I wonder if this is really acceptable? QUESTION: Is a service like this (such as Transifex using JavaScript to render translations client-side) safe for indexing and ranking for my clients' international search engine visibility, especially via Google? Thank you!

    | SixSpokeMedia64
    0
  • SylviaH


    Hi, I'm trying to setup hreflang for 2 domains.  One is purely a US site and the other domain has the language-country as subdomains. For example: http://www.websiteUSA.com (Targets English - USA) https://www.websiteINT.com/en-CA (Targets English - Canada) https://www.websiteINT.com/fr-CA (Targets French - Canada) https://www.websiteINT/es (Targets Spanish) ..and so on and so forth for about 12 of these international URLs. I created an XML sitemap that looks something like this: <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><url><loc>http://www.websiteUSA.com</loc></url></urlset> <url><loc>https://www.websiteINT.com/en-CA</loc></url> <url><loc>https://www.websiteINT.com/fr-CA</loc></url> Question 1:  Is this correct?  In my actual file, I have all the countries listed and self-referencing. Question 2:  I'm hosting this file at https://www.websiteINT.com/hreflang.xml AND at http://www.websiteUSA.com/hreflang.xml.  Is this correct? Question 3:  Will this help the SERPs direct english speakers from the US to http://www.websiteUSA.com while show SERPs for say English Speakers in Canada to https://www.websiteINT.com/en-CA? Question 4:  For some reason, when I put up the xml site, it only listed each URL once instead of the full XML file.  Should I have uploaded a text file instead?  It doesn't seem to render correctly. Thank you!

    | SylviaH
    0
  • tinyme


    Hi Everyone, Hoping we can get some help from our fellow Mozzers (Mozee's? Mozites?) We have 3 TLD's .com.au .co.uk & .com We noticed an issue a couple of weeks ago where we suddenly lost a lot of our search rankings for keywords on the .com.au site that we'd been top with for a long time. A lot of our Australian visitors were coming through our US site. US & UK sites got increased ranking results. We fixed up what we thought were the issues (Potentially HREF Lang issues and old sitemap issues). Google Search Console is still telling us we have some HREF Lang Errors, (but this could be waiting an updated crawl as the number is decreasing) Our main domain example.com is now showing up as first result in google.com.au search and the example.com.au doesn't show up until page 4 (prior to 2 weeks ago it was number 1) Any input would be appreciated...

    | tinyme
    0

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