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Thank you Oleg. This partilly solves the problem. Google will still show English title and the click-through rate from the SERPs will be relatively much lower. I guess the only way to solve this is to remove the hreflang tags, but I have some concerns.

As a 2014 follow up to anyone reading this thread, Google later released a tag labeled "x-default" that should make the self-referencing canonical question moot. Read more at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

I know this is an old question and I don't have anything to add myself but I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has any thoughts on this because we're looking at doing a similar thing.

Google selects the location for SERPs based on the IP address of the searcher. The only detriment to having your site hosted in another country would be if they are in what could be considered spammy locations. For example, my company is in Wisconsin, my server is hosted in California. No harm no foul. If my server were hosted out of India, it would be considered unnatural and spammy. I think UK to Belgium is reasonable and wouldn't be considered unnatural.

I enjoy Serpbook. Not sure if its the best but does very well.

Thanks Robert, I know this that we can have such feature strictly tell Google our target audiences is in this specific region and list us within that country search engine only, or better to use this having country level domain to set default. So, I again my same question - I want rank on every search engines globally on my search term: hair transplant hair transplant india hair loss treatment hair restoration etc You might have seen above snapshot, Google behaving really very strange here giving our website rank every search engine except India. Let me help MOZ people?

For  full SEO suite you can try out dragon metrics For everything else Advanced Web Ranking has Baidu tracking as well.

Update - all sorted !! whilst i had all the above permissions apparently there was still a higher level of admin/user access my client has now given me so should all be cool

My apologies for overlooking your response. A good tool is https://github.com/jpatokal/script_detector. It is a library for Ruby and you can use the interactive Ruby console (irb) to use the function to identify script in an easy way. If you need help/guidance with that drop me a reply here or by private message and I'd be happy to help.

Hi guys thanks for the replies. Its kind of a weird situation because although both sites are for the same company and product they serve / served different purposes. The word press site basically just presented some content and gave a broad stroke over view of what we do. The Magento site is set up to actually present the content, allow users to log in and download premium content... As a downloadable product. The word press site never went as deep into it and did not have individual product pages or user log ins and downloads. The sites are laid out in 2 entirely different ways, so its not so easy to just match product pages to product pages and category pages to category pages. They have 2 totally different ways of presenting content. The sites are 2 different domains. The word press site did have a blog filled with very mediocre content that I have no desire to bring to the new site. Im fine with it completely disappearing.. All of the above is what lead me to believe the best approach might be just to snag whatever juice possible out of the old site. thanks for any further replies.

I would suggest using the Padauk font from SIL instead. This uses the Unicode standard and you should be able to use CSS font embedding to maximise the support for other browsers. Google should be able to understand the content as long as it is encoded in a standard character set (UTF-8, for example). Even though Zawgyi is not compliant with the Unicode standard your pages should be being served with the UTF-8 character encoding so Google should be able to index the content. I don't think Google pays any attention to the font in use by the design but it is an interesting point which I haven't particularly considered before and which I had to think about carefully before posting this response.

Hello I've worked on a big project like this. The best option is to go for TLD, but it's ususally not possible. In your case what I do recommend is Get .com as the main domain Create folder with language option if you feel it'll make a difference /en-us /nl-de otherwise just keep /[language] We used it on ibremarketing.com and so far I'm very happy of the results !

I agree with Andy. However, you could look at new visitors vs returning visitors within direct traffic. Typically returning visitors are coming back DIRECTLY to your site and new visitors (assuming they didn't see an advertisement elsewhere) aren't coming DIRECTLY to your site. That's my best approach; if I see a large number of new visitors, (assuming not a large ad just ran), then I can assume fairly reasonably that those are long tail keyword search terms.

Sure.

It could be, if they made the switch improperly and Google isn't transferring link equity or can't find new pages. I like checking on services like Archive.org to get backing for my ideas, but I think that you should probably reach out directly to your client and ask about their activities in April. Hope this helps! Kristina

The simple answer is they're using a generic TLD(gTLD) and then a county TLD(ccTLD). Google has long said that it recognizes that the same content on different ccTLDs will not count as duplicate because they understand it's geotargeted Ets7nHOV1Yo

No, the Geo targeting in Web Master Tools is not for boosting the Geo keyword (in your case "India") so it's not going to boost : "SEO services India" for your site because you have the GEO setting to India. The GEO setting in WMT is just to clearly state what is your target audience - and in this case is India -> so your site should do better for all searches from India. It might actually decrease your chances to rank in US based on that - so you have to chose GEO location settings only if you are really targeting mainly a specific location... Hope it make sense.

Correct, apart the last phrase (If the content is similar/duplicate, also make sure you're setting up hreflang tags). If content are duplicated, than use cross-domain canonical, being the href of the canonical tag the one of the most important site. Hreflang, though, must be implemented in order to tell Google to show one URL to its specific geotargeted audience, despite of the canonicalization being present. Why, because hreflang and rel="canonical" are two different things and hreflang does not substitute rel="canonical".

Sorry for viewing this just now... but - forgive me if I am wrong due to a bad understanding of the question - but I think Tom answer is not correct. You are telling that your main site is in English, but that has also a Spanish subdomain with just half of it localized in Spanish. If this is the correct interpretation of the origin of your doubts, than, in the Spanish subdomain the hreflang should be implemented so: IN CASE OF SPANISH SUBDOMAIN URL WITH SPANISH CONTENT <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc> IN CASE OF SPANISH SUBDOMAIN URL WITH ENGLISH CONTENT <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc> Why? Because those "en" and "es" mean "English Language" and "Spanish Language", so you cannot declare as Spanish something that Spanish is not. As well you cannot declare both URLs as to shown to English speaking users, because that would create an hiccup to Google, who would not know what of the two it has to finally show to English speaking users. More over, if you don't want to extend the use of the hreflang suggesting also the countries where to show some given URL, then you should canonicalize the spanish.domain.com URL with English content to the original www.domain.com URL. The idea of using also the country code ISO could solve - somehow - this issue, because writing something like this: <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc> Then you will be telling Google to show the spanish.domain.com URL to the people using english in Spain (Google.es), and the English one to all the people speaking English in the rest of world. Be aware, though, that Spanish people using Spanish will see in the www.domain.com URL in their Google.es SERPs, because the x-default is telling Google that all the people not using the language indicated in the hreflang="x-X" annotation (which is English), will have to see the main domain URL, and not the spanish subdomain one. Hreflang is quite a sudoku, but it is extremely logic.

What are the pros and cons for referencing all page versions in sitemap and for include just general (English/Desktop) version in sitemap? Let me clarify, you want to know the pros and cons of putting all page versions in sitemaps, or just doing the english/desktop and letting Google figure it out. List All Content in Sitemaps Pros If the sitemaps are set up in a logical fashion, this makes for an easy way to see indexation issues. You can use hreflang in the sitemaps rather than on the page. This reduces page code and ups page speed, albeit slightly. You are guaranteed that search engine will find all of the content. Cons Lots of sitemaps to make and maintain. Sitemap just main content (desktop/english) Pros Easier to maintain. Search engines are much better today at finding most versions of content. Cons Run the risk of content not being indexed correctly. Some content might not be found and indexed. You could not easily verify indexation. If any onsite code was removed that told Google where to go, then the possibility of indexation issues increase. Hope that helps answer your question!