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Category: International Issues

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  • Hi Gianluca, thanks for chiming in! I will look into getting this setup.  Should this solve our issue?  It seems that currently, the hreflang setup for just the home page isn't working.  Google is not showing the US site in Google US or showing the appropriate international site for Google in that specific country. Any other tips?  Hreflang setup for HTML will have to be applied for all pages, for all country-language sites, correct?  Where does the canonical point to? Lastly, if all of this is setup, do I remove country geo-targeting in Search Console? Thanks!

    | SylviaH
    0

  • Hi there, Appologies for the late response... Here's our url's from the page https://www.example.com.au/product-name

    | tinyme
    0

  • I think that this one is best: https://moz.com/ugc/accidental-seo-tests-how-301-redirects-are-likely-impacting-your-brand (i can describe same, but this is article with diagrams and lot explanation). Also think about this let we have two pages - PageA about Coca Cola and PageB about Pepsi Cola. Let both pages have content optimized for them and have ranking. If we 301 PageA to PageB do you think that PageB will getting same positions about "Coca Cola"? That's right - will be lost positions because content is different. Of course there is special case when you get ranking for some keywords with anchors even if such content doesn't exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb That's why when wise people talk for about "over 200 ranking factors" they're damn right!

    | Mobilio
    0

  • Hi Peasoup, I would surely advice to not simply copy the content to the 4 different domains. I have a few good links for you: https://moz.com/learn/seo/cctlds more info on ccTld's https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-on-multinational-sites  Exactly your issue: make sure you read the comment of Gianluca Fiorelli. Hreflang: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en Good luck with it!

    | Tymen
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  • Well on mine first answer there is number for 54M population of hispanic/latin in US. But you can't know how many of them do searches in english or in spanish? I can talk about Bulgarians. Even if they migrate to other country they still talk in Bulgarian in home, watch Bulgarian TV, read online Bulgarian newspapers, purchases Bulgarian goods. And more interesting - they still search in Bulgarian. Example - even if google.co.uk you can get Bulgarian searches and results. Real case - a friend of mine own TV repair service center and get phone call from London about TV repair. Just lady's there want to find someone to fix his mother TV. Funny - distance between service center and home was almost 100-200 meters. You don't know what you don't know...

    | Mobilio
    0

  • hreflang and geo-targeting are in fact two different things. If you have exactly the same content, no changes for the regional variations in the language, hreflang is not intended for that. Why do you have two sets of pages that are the same? If you have the same content on .com with no geo-targeting, then Google is going to offer up the original content on .com rather than /lu because you never changed the content in any way to target Luxembourg. Had you changed the content to translate or really geo-targeted the content to that audience, I think the situation would be different. Check my tool here, answer the questions and see what is right for your situation. Then follow the instructions at the end. http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/

    | katemorris
    1

  • Thanks for your response! May I ask how you achieved this? I have a client that wants to show different content based on US State Location. Thanks

    | underdogmike
    0

  • Hi Gianluca, Is that only if your site utilizes sub-domains or would it be the same if you utilize a sub-folder structure?

    | Ryan_Henry
    0

  • Hi Peter, in this article it talks about a simple depending on users localization redirect, in the same domain. In my case are two domains. the first www.sea-aeroportimilano.it with a redirect 302 to a landing page in italian or english in another domain (www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_it.html). I would like to follow the google guide lines for redirection and to set a 301 between www.sea-aeroportimilano.it and www1.seamilano.eu/landing, and after that a 302 for the language. Of course I will add hreflang for IT and EN. What do you think? Massimiliano

    | vanGoGh-creative
    0

  • Hi Gregory, Did you get any further with your query above? I am considering implementing the same thing... Thanks, Dan

    | SEOBirmingham81
    0

  • Thanks so much Gianluca, I'll take all your ideas into account.

    | robertorg
    0

  • Great Stephan, nice to hear and thanks again Regards, Maurice

    | mlehr
    0

  • You are using bad the x-default annotation (I must admit, though, that I did not completely understood the code you copy/pasted in your question). The x-default is meant for showing to Google what URL to show to those users, who are not explicitly targeted by a dedicated version of the website. For instance, if we are targeting both USA and UK, but we know that the USA version has traction also in other countries like AU, NZ, South Africa and Spain, then we could use the x-default so to suggest Google that the USA URLs should be shown to all people independently of the language (in my example, not only English speaking users, but also Spanish speaking ones) and geography (not only the USA, but also all the others countries). The only exception will be the UK, because with the hreflang="en-GB" we are telling Google to shown the UK version of the site to English speaking users in Great Britain. The only solution I see in your case is consistency between the two versions. You must choose with which architecture option to go and use just that. Only after you should think in the hreflang implementation.

    | gfiorelli1
    0

  • As Maurice wrote, I urge to remember that American English is different from British English, therefore it would be useful to revisit the content in order to make it fit to how English is spoken/written in the USA. That would have an impact in how Americans perceive the site, for localization and, obviously, for SEO geo-targeting. Then, yes, use the hreflang annotations in order to clearly suggest to Google what version must be shown to whom, geo-target the USA site on Google Search Console (and do not forget to do the same in Bing). Regarding what to choose between a new domain name, subfolder or subdomain for the USA website, that choice must be taken considering not only SEO factors. For instance, if your UK website is already receiving interesting volume of traffic, when you can reasonably think to go for an independent domain name (it should be a generic, because in the USA the ccTld .us is not even considered "american"), so that you could create also a very geo-targeted experience for the USA audience. If you have traffic, but not in great proportions, and if your website is not an ecommerce or one with a very complex and big URL structure and database, then you can think opting for the subfolder option. On the contrary, if your traffic from the USA is not big already and the site architecture is complex and the database very big, then it would be better going for the subdomain option. In the last 2 cases, though, the ideal would be to finally migrate the USA site to an independent domain name once the visibility in the USA, both in terms of Search and Brand recognition, has reached sustainable levels. Finally, remember that the .com is much harder than the .co.uk, so be prepared to struggle more than you have done until now for earning in the USA the same results you earned in UK.

    | gfiorelli1
    0

  • There isn't proper way as you want it. You can make .com and .co.uk country preferred with geo targeting: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399 but this doesn't limit indian users that type english queries to see your sites in SERP. This is best way IMHO. If you need true protection against indian users then you need to make some changes. You can get list of GeoIP database: http://php.net/manual/en/book.geoip.php and based on this code to give users access or stop them. BUT this is very risky in real world since all bots comes from worldwide. Example - if you disable US IPs on .co.uk then you will stop GoogleBot visiting your site too. Also Roger will be stopped, Bing and many other bots. No bots - no ranking... This can be recognized as sneaky redirect. So i don't recommend you to do this geo ip limitation without calculating all pros and cons of this.

    | Mobilio
    0

  • You need definitely to check this article: https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights https://moz.com/blog/open-source-library-tool-check-hreflang and fix 302 with correct hreflang annotations. Also don't forget default language. About linkbuilding. After you fix this "hreflang" then you should do both - building links for main (default) language and build links for country languages from country specific resources. Like french sites linking to french directory/pages.

    | Mobilio
    1

  • Hey Guido, don't know if it's the best solution, but could be a temporary fix until the best solution is in place. I suggest to move forward with proper HREF LANG tagging or definitely delete those irrelevant languages. Try to do what I said before about validate each country/language and submit a sitemap.xml reflecting that folder to see crawl and index stats pero country/language. Add a sitemap index and obviously validate your entire domain. Just block in the robots.txt unnecessary folders, like images, js libraries, etc. to save crawl budget to your domain. Let me know if you have another doubt

    | antonioaraya
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  • I understand that. Sometimes it's a little frustrating to rank but I encourage you to ask yourself this questions: I'm trying to run a marathon rather than 100 metres?: try to rank first for less competitive keywords like "dinning tables" or "dining chairs in london" rather than "furniture" Do people know me?: maybe you need a little boost to people know you so you can get some SEO signals (links, social shares, branding). Try to run an AdWords Campaign, get active in your social media niche, make partnerships with niche sites (not just for get links, get visibility to other audiences). I'm measuring the right KPI's?: sometimes ranking for highly competitive keywords is not the best option if you have a brand new domain. Are you receiving organic traffic? Are you getting long tail rankings? How's the conversion rate of organic search compared to other sources? Are you receiving non-brand traffic rather than your brand (in Google Search Console). Hope this can help you. Good luck!

    | antonioaraya
    0