Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The redirect service is the gray area here for me. I don't know them or their services. With that parameter in play, you need the self-referring canonical. The hreflang is set up right now, but I don't know how all of this is interacting together.

I'd suggest starting by addressing the hreflang with the parameters in them. Make sure those parameters are not in the hreflang tags.  Also, do you have sitemaps for both languages submitted to Google?

For what it is worth, I don't see things wrong in the SERPs. You are still on the first page for 'NASA gifts' and 'meterorite gifts' in the US. What other drops are you seeing? Some adjustment is expected when making changes like this.

Can you tell me specifically what is plummeting? Just this page? All US, All UK pages? If you can share specifics, I can try to ID what is up. My theory is that the canonical is messing with things, but since you had the issue with parameters in some indexed URLs, it seemed relevant to keep in.

In face, I am digging a little, and when I google your name from my location in the US, this is the first page:

view-source:https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/archive?utm_source=georedirect

The hreflang there has that utm source in it. There is something that might be messing things up. Any idea where that thing is coming from yet? It seems very prevalent.

Also, how is the traffic to your site? With your rankings down, I'd assume a major drop in traffic. But if the URLs with that parameter are taking over, you might still be getting traffic, just to the wrong URL.

It is possible that fluctuations will happen once the canonical is removed. That tag was equating the two pages and google was in the middle of trying to figure out that they were similar but not the same. So removing that canonical is going to reset the pages for a bit. If you are seeing a drop, I expect it to come back up shortly as long as the hreflang is there.

I looked at: view-source:https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery

And am seeing:

<link  rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery</a>" /> <link  rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">en-US</a>" href="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery</a>" /> <link  rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">x-default</a>" href="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery</a>" />

So with the above, you are confusing Google. That is says that it is it's own canonical (good) and is a language variation but you provide no others (including the strong page that is the UK). Rather than the above, it should be this: 

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery</a>" /> <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">en-US</a>" href="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery</a>" /> <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">en-GB</a>" href="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.thespacecollective.com/meteorite-jewellery</a>" />

The X-default is meant for pages that allow the user to select a country and/or language for a big company like IKEA or fedex. 
```

No canonical at all for either side, rather they should have hreflang tags that act as canonicals but not as strong (they are specific for language differences).

Ah, apologies on the logs thing! You can read more about it here: https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/blog/server-log-essentials-for-seo

It's not something you can see from search console. You'll need to get to your logs from your website host. Do you have a developers you can talk to or a website host team that can help you out?

The canonical!!!! Yeah, that is a problem! You should not use a canonical when dealing with international signals. You need to use HREFLANG. https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

On the linking, if Moz isn't showing anything, consider looking at search console. There is a links area, and if you can find the URL in the list of top pages, Google will give you an idea of where they found that URL.

It can have SEO impact as Google primarily crawls from the US. They will from other locations but this has flip flopped over the years. This might be something that is causing this problem, if they are getting redirected to the US side but see many people mentioning the main domain (what you call the UK side).  You can check by looking at your logs for when Google crawls and check the IP address in their list mentioned here. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en That will narrow down if it is a problem.

However, I do want to stress that using IP based redirects is frowned upon from a usability perspective. Giving people more choices is almost always better. A situation to consider outside of the issue that Google itself crawls from the US: When not in COVID times, people travel. I once tried to design my IKEA kitchen when traveling for work. I went back to continue my design I did one night in my hotel room, and it was gone! Little did I know, the design I did was on the UK side. People travel and you don't want to stop that from happening.

I get your point though, which is why it is preferred to do something like, funny enough they figured it out, IKEA does. If you go to ikea.com fresh, they welcome you with a message that they think you are in the US. It doesn't have to be a whole page, many sites use popups. But I would strongly urge you to consider this. And with that, I promise to drop the subject

Now, back to ranking. I see you at #6, and I am fresh eyes in the US space. I looked for NASA gifts and got this at exactly #6.

Where are you looking at ranking? Moz or Google Search Console or ?

I do see the issue with the meteorite jewelry. I see the URL https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery?utm_source=georedirect -- It's canonicalized properly, so Google is being ... annoying. I would, if you have time, take a look at how that is exact URL is linked to. Somehow, that one is seen as particularly powerful, so if you can narrow down where it is and get that parameter removed, that should change over time.

My guess is no. It might correlate someday, the number of messages and how generally popular you become, but messages are not public data. Google and Bing can't crawl that data, so they can't use it. Social signals like likes, replies, reviews, etc are available metrics, so they can at least be taken into account. However, it was and still remains not a direct signal, more of a correlation.

First major thing, you are auto redirecting based on the user's location. I would not do that, rather ask the user where they want to go. But that is more of a usability thing.

Second, I don't see an issue with one search for "nasa mercury memorbilia" - the US page showed up for me. Can you be more specific about the terms and pages that are seeing problems? Below was my earch result and it is for the US page (I checked to  be sure, not just going to the page).

Oh yeah, remove away.

Direct traffic is almost always going to be one of your top traffic sources. There are a number of reasons people end up in this bucket.

1. They open a new browser and go straight to your site. There is no referrer to track here and is what people think of when they see the Direct bucket.
2. A user was on your site, but kept the tab open. Hours or days later, they get back to the tab and engage again. That is a direct session since there was not a referrer.
3. A user is blocking the information of the referring site through their own computer settings. You can't control this.
4. A mistake happens on the referring site's side. You can't see this either or do anything about it. A company I worked for saw a spike in Direct traffic that ended up being Snapchat ads once. There wasn't much to be done.
5. A mistake is happening in your setup of Google Analytics. This is unlikely, but if you have a custom setup, talk to the person that is in charge of that on your site.

There are more instances here: https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/blog/guide-to-direct-traffic-google-analytics and some tips on cleaning this up if you suspect some traffic isn't being tagged correctly.

I'm going to disagree with TGOOSE. You should try to not have two pages targeted at one keyword. Think about it from the user standpoint. If they are looking for that term, which page is best? What answers their question best? If both are still the answer, then merge the two pages.

1. Combine Page 1 Text  + Page 2 Text in a way that makes sense to the user
2. Place new content on Page 1 URL
3. Redirect Page 2 URL to Page 1 URL

That's how you should handle this situation. The number of keywords on the page and the use of meta tags isn't going to make a large difference.

Hi Mike!

Moosa has the best behind the scenes answer, but everyone here is dead on. Both structures work really well when it comes to search because they are both descriptive and short. That's really what you need to focus on. If I had to pick though based on your examples:

www.mysite.com/marketing/digital/research/...

www.mysite.com/digital-marketing/research/..

I'd go with marketing/digital/research .. that way as you content changes, you can change the types of marketing research and if digital is just understood later as marketing overall, then at that time the research can just be put under marketing, but I think you'll always want to distinguish the types of marketing. This will just account for all possibilities.

Also, having all marketing focused content under /marketing/ allows you do be able to do some quick calculations inside of analytics on multiple scales. You can filter to see traffic, sources and more data for all marketing (all with /marketing/), just research (anything with /research/), and so on.

Hope this helps!

Hi Kyle!

Before I go into this, let me explain one thing. Search engines operate by country, not language. So if your client has made a German language version of their site, a duplicate of their English site, then it should not just target Germany. There are many other countries and people that speak German. Rather, I would submit a sitemap to google of the german content only and let them crawl the content in German. The indexation should raise over time naturally, and if you track that subfolder in Analytics, you should be able to see what countries are landing on the German language content naturally.

If you wanted to launch a site for the German people (citizens of Deutschland), you should recommend that the content and business be developed for that country and either launched as a subfolder or their domain.de acquired. Only if the content is different because different targeting is required should you launch a site (or area) just for a country. In terms of the TLD, this is simply because if you launch a new domain and target to the country, that is a whole other site that will need link building. That's a lot of work. If you launched to target with a subfolder, you could actually target with WMT to the country Germany, but again, the content needs to be different than the main site.

So ask them what the point is, just to translate or to target Germany. That changes what you should do. But I think it's just the language, so I say let it happen, track indexation and the language subfolder in Analytics and make sure the SEs understand that it's german language content. That'll be shown to users in any country that wish their content to be in German.

Kate

Put simply, the marketer sounds right. But the purchase of exact match domains is not a total loss.

What should have been done:

1. Keyword research done, but not for the keywords that just have the most traffic, but rather those that are relevant and have the most traffic. The relevance is key there.

2. Identified the content on the site that should rank for those terms.

3. If no content exists, creating it on the site so that the content answers the query of the searcher and gives a call to action.

4. Worked with the marketer to influence the links to the pages for each keyword.

What can be done now:

1. 301 redirect the domains to the pages that make sense.

2. Only use those domains for sites if there is a reason for another site to be made on the topic. If your site can do it, leave it to one site, it's less work and less link building.

3. Work with the marketer to get GOOD, relevant links to the page on the clients current site. It's not about him being better than you, it's about you guys working together.

Hi!

Your friendly international SEO here. (PS thanks for the call out there Tom)

You cannot point two HREFLANG tags at the same URL because it's impossible to have both languages on the same page. Well, not impossible, just not recommended. I am not sure if you have translations or not, so both possible answers are below.

Translations (FR and EN) Available
If you have a Canadian subsite and it has two translations, you need to use both geo-targeting and HREFLANG. In your case, the /ca would be geotargeted, but then you need to distinguish the two translations somehow. If /ca is how you are geo-targeting, I recommend parameter for translation. So the French translation of the Canadian homepage content would be http://www.domain.com/ca?lang=fr -- for English of the same Canadian homepage content, it would be http://www.domain.com/ca?lang=en.

The canonical set up in that instance is:

Page: http://www.domain.com/ca?lang=fr

Page: http://www.domain.com/ca?lang=en

Note that the HREFLANG tags are the same because you have to reference the current page and all translations of that page.

Translations NOT Available
Now, this answer assumes that you just have the Canadian content in English, or just in French. If that is true, you don't need the HREFLANG. You just need to geo-target the subsite for Canada.

Now I do recommend that you offer translated content for the Canadian audience, but please don't auto-translate content. Just offer it in one language until you can get the resources to have it translated by a real person.

Hope that helps!

When did you change the URLs on your site? A crawl is showing some older URLs so I'm curious.

This is an interesting problem to have! I think the issue they are running into is that your auth file for http is redirecting to https. They want you to remove the http site from your account and then add the https site. Once you have done that, you can use the Site Move tool.

Is that a little more clear? I would love to hear if that works for you. it would be a great YouMoz post!

This is one of the instances that made me change the way I see the HREFLANG tag. So many people disagree but hear me out.

The HREFLANG tag is only for language differentiation. There are language and country codes because, as you point out, there are many countries that speak the same language and some have some major dialect changes. The biggest example being UK and US English. Therefore, if you have a site developed in US English that you want to "translate" to UK English, but not change the content of the site other than that, you would use HREFLANG tags to note the difference in the pages to Google. Since you changed nothing else (no currency changes, no legal changes, no product set changes), there is no reason for country targeting. You are just translating the same content ... aka changing a few words.

Now, let's say that you are operating a site that has a geo-targeted section to South Africa. Depending on the setup, you might not need HREFLANG tags at all. If you are changing the content other than through translation to target South Africa, that is geo-targeting. Targeting the country.

You can do both geo-target AND change language settings. For instance, if you are a Canadian company that legally has to have all of it's content in Canadian French (fr-ca) and Canadian English (en-ca), you would use HREFLANG between those two. But then you decide to move into the US. You might create a subfolder, subdomain, or ccTLD specific to the US market since you can't offer all of your products or services over there due to regulations. You would geo-target the new section/site to the United States, but not use HREFLANG since the content is targeted at a different country. You would want to make sure the content changed enough and the Canadian English pages might rank for a while but over time the US site/section would get stronger.

I hope that all makes sense.

In your instance where you have geo-targeted, I assume that is for a reason. However, because you have geo-targeted that section to South Africa, you cannot geo-target it to the Congo as well. You would either need to great a section for the Congo and geo-target that, or, if geo-targeting isn't really needed, use one big site and country specific translations. Only do this if your content is the same across the board and you are changing some of the wording to local dialects.

If you want to know more, check out my international search tool that might help you find what structure you should have: http://www.katemorris.com/issg/

Did they ever see good rankings and traffic in Australia? Do you have a date that things went south or has it always been like this?

Actually, sorry guys, I am not sure HREFLANG is the right thing here. It might be, but it depends.

Christopher, can you check out the tool at this URL and answer the questions? Once you've done that, let me know what result you get and I can recommend some actions from there.