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Thanks for your considered response Adam. It is indeed quite possible that the jump is the non-English pages suddenly being indexed/reported as indexed in this WMT account. If there was to be a 'switch over' of the pages from one sub domain to the root domain, we would indeed have expected to see a jump like that. It does still seem odd that (1) it came a long time after the migration and (2) the impressions and clicks (as reported in WMT) have not seen a similar jump, neither when the migration took place or in the last week. The 50% increase in clicks from unbranded organic I mentioned was a genuine increase, as our Analytics previously covered all three language sub-domains anyway. On a side note, regarding the seperate subdomains, I was quite surprised to see how well the hreflang tags worked across sub domains before the migration. It was arguably better handled by Google before the migration to a single domain (more/better sitelinks for branded searches anyway). I think a lot of our uplift in clicks came from new pages and better on site optimization, and that the effect of consolidating the domains was not actually that big (in terms of clicks from unbranded organic). I think that the subdomain/directory debate is not quite as cut and dried as people think. I must say, I love the hreflang tags - they are one of the most underrated tools in SEO in my opinion. Just don't forget that canonical tag or they don't work! Thanks again for your reply!

Hi, Technically if your cms and server can handle incoming urls with utf8 characters in them then you should be ok. I have seen some instances where the setup does not like them and produces 404 errors when you try to include these characters in the url, but most times it is fine. Google will display utf8 urls in the search results without problem (check out the wikipedia result here) There is a further consideration though which is one I face a lot with Greek (similar to russian in some ways) which is how these urls are shared in mails, social media etc. A lot of the times these urls end up getting automatically url encoded and the url shown in the mail or facebook etc is a long, long string of url encoded characters which is impossible to read, gives no indication of what the page is about and generally looks bad (try putting that link above into facebook....nasty). For this reason I usually choose to do 'greeklish' urls which is a latin character representation of the greek characters. There are usually some common practices in regards how the local language is 'recreated' in latin characters, there are for Greek, I would assume there are for Russian also. So with that in mind, if you have a russian speaker who is familiar with that kind of thing I would be inclined to make the urls themselves 'russianlish'. My two cents!

I would pick subfolders. Here's why. IN GWT you can set country targeting for specific folders. This video, by Susan Moskwa, is VALUABLE for any international SEO: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en At 4 min 22 secs she talks about using sub folders to geo target in GWT. It's a must watch for anyone who is thinking about international SEO.

We did it by country for a international shop with more than 10 different languages. Seems as the easiest solution for me as well. Worked fine for us.

Thanks Lynn, I appreciate this is a tough question to answer but I think you have a given me some great information. Much appreciated, Tom

Never worked for Chinese version but as far as search engine Google is concern it will count these two URLs as separate URLs. I mean URL: example.com/Australia and example.com/Australia?al=zh will be considered as different URLs and if the content is available in different languages then there will no duplicate content issue and link juice for both pages will be separate. Hope this helps!

D surely is an option to take into account (see my answer just above). Said that, I would monitor constantly the % of traffic from BE and NL and if one of them starts being relevant, I would use that data so to propose the migration to a .be and/or .nl domain name. Remember that, in that case, you will also start thinking in implementing the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X", in order to solve the duplicate content issue between the two sites.

Hi Daniel, Here's what Google has to say about this issue https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en Regards

Thanks CasperK, I just posted on Matt's site this question. I have seen comments about everything being rolled out in the US first and then English speaking countries. It's a shame, they don't comment about their international roll outs. Thanks Carla

Hi there, The best way to enable a new country version --in this case for Canada-- is: Enabling an international Web structure, ideally with a ccTLD for the country, in this case: yourbrand.ca and if this is not possible due to technical or resources restrictions, then do it through a sub-directory under your current generic domain: yourbrand.com/ca/ If at some point you need to enable additional language versions for a country, you can extend your structure like this: With ccTLDs: For English: yourbrand.ca For French: yourbrand.ca/fr/ With sub-directories: For English: yourbrand.com/ca-en/ For French: yourbrand.com/ca-fr/ When you use sub-directories you can register them independently in Google Webmaster Tools and geotarget them. You can always (whether ccTLDs or sub-directories) use the hreflang annotations to inform Google about your different pages language and country targeting. Make sure to translate and localize all the information of your pages: From URLs in the appropriate languages, to titles, meta descriptions, headings, text, currency, addresses, etc. Always link between the different country versions through a crawlable menu. Avoid automatic redirects, is far better to suggest the appropriate version as Amazon does here with their Spanish version. Build your new countries versions popularity, targeting locally relevant and authority Websites in your sector there. Take a look at this International SEO checklist I published some days ago at Moz with the most important steps you need to take for an International SEO process. I hope this helps!

Your robot text should play no part in this. You should leave the robots.txt however it should normally be for the website. Google knows that if you're serving a different country with a different IP along with a TLD that you will not be infringing on their rules regarding duplicate content because it is natural for somebody to have one site in one country and another site in another country and have the exact same content on those sites but therefore different target audiences so they're not gonna come up in the Google search rankings and they will both be good results for each country's audience. Do not block anything with robots.txt that you do not need to block otherwise Long story short if you're using robots.txt to block anything do not worry about that you can remove that block

Exactly

You're answer is substantially correct, but I remind you all that Google is not perfect and sometimes it pretend a site is in a language, which is not the one used (i.e.: sometimes it consider some Spanish sites as Portuguese or Galician or even Catalan. That hiccup Google have may be due to browser language configuration, IPs of the site or others variants. Sincerely I would not worry that much. Said that, if you were able to share the domain name, that would help all of us in finding a better answer to your question.

Hey Martjin, Thank you very much for you answer. Great article.

Thanks for your response guys! We'll probably give it a go

Can anyone advise on this please?

Hello James, Having a ccTLD definitely provides some ranking benefit in the target country. If the .ca domain is doing well for them I don't think I would consolidate it. Contrary to the other response, it is perfectly fine to have a separate ccTLD/domain for other countries. However you might want to look into geotargeting each domain in Webmaster Tools (setting the .com version to US geotargeting may take care of the 2nd place brand search issue). Of course this is just my opinion based on my own experiences. I will leave the question open for awhile so you can get more input from others.

Thanks - that could be a decent alternative to offer!

It's not against Google guidelines for two of your domains to rank for one query - as long as what Google sees for those domains matches what users see, that's permitted and wouldn't be considered cloaking. I can't speak to the UK legal aspects, of course. Whether it's a a good idea or not is a bit tougher to answer. If your removed geo-targeting and your two sites seemed to have very similar English-language content, it's possible they could compete with each other in unexpected ways or that one could get filtered out. Typically, if that happens, Google will filter out the .com in the Google.co.uk searches, so, at worst, you'd be back where you started. I don't think it's a big risk - just something to keep your eyes open about. If ranking both lets you hit some terms that you couldn't otherwise, their may be a business advantage. I'd just monitor the SERPs closely and make sure you don't encounter side effects. The only thing I would warn about is don't try to trick Google into thinking the .com is the UK site or vise-versa. If Google naturally shows both and that lets you target different keywords, that's fine.

If you just want the language covered Mark's hreflang, coupled with a subdomain or subdirectory, is the way to go. I tend to lean subdirectory in that case but I've not heard anyone make a slam dunk case for either.