Welcome to the Q&A Forum

My pleasure!

Hi Gianluca, Thanks for responding. I took a look at your guide, and I definitely understand the gold standard would be to get everything translated professionally, and provide a completely native experience. Unfortunately due to our catalog size that would be prohibitively expensive, so I need to think of another solution. It sounds like from your guide that we are doing more harm than good, even with alternate language syntax in place. Based on your answer, my thought would be to meta noindex any product page where the site language is not the same as the product. That way every page in the index will be 100% localized for potential visitors. So if its a Spanish product index: site.com/es/product, but meta noindex site.com/de/product, site.com/product, etc. If we follow that path, does it make sense to remove the alternate language syntax, since all the linked URLs will be no index? Thanks again for your help.

Hi Fdep, The server move could be impacting your rankings. However the ideal set-up is your site is hosted in the main country you want to rank (assumed Australia). However you have moved from the US to Asia Pacific Region, therefore the location shouldn't be an issue in this case, as you haven't moved from Australia to Asia. Check Google Webmasters Go to Google webmasters and check the the error logs. If you're getting lots of issues in there because your host isn't handling the site/traffic correctly it could be affecting your rankings. Algo Updates Check the algo updates here on the mighty SEOMOZ http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change If the ranking drop happend on the same date as one of these, then it's more likely this is the cause of the problem. Thanks Iain - Reload Media

You will face ranking issue in your .jp domain because you have duplicate content on this site as well as you are using the image from .com version. I don't think your US site ranking get hurt from because it has unique content.

Hi , I really do not think so. Can you believe that this question of ours here on SEOMOZ appeared on searching "Medicare doctors PG County Maryland" in google Position #23!. S.H

Hi Alex, This is a good question. If you want your users to find you when they search for you in english then you would need to create english content and submit the site to www.google.RomanianExtension If the searchers are going to be searching from Romania then the site should be hosted in Romania, if it is hosted in Romania and you want your users to find it by searching in Romanian then your content should be written in Romanian. Hope this helps.

Hi, thanks for your answer. EE.UU is United States. In Spain we use this acronym. Then, I will follow the same steps that for spanish sites. ¡Thanks for your help!

Glad to be of help.

Superb! This really opens up a huge discussion and is very interesting. We are a small-medium sized company, so I don't think I will go with different domains, although I own them. I have redirected them for now. I have gone into Google Webmasters and changed my preference from US to 'unlisted.' This might help and give it that international understanding. Not sure. I may very well set up a UK homepage, an AU one, and perhaps South Africa or Canadian one. But, that will be in the future. I just don't want to lose the links I already have. It seems that getting links from these countries to your homepage would help saying to Google, "Hey, this is an international site in English and is appealing to all of these countries." It may not make me #1 in the SERPS, but it cannot hurt. Thanks again! Thomas

As an add-on, I would really suggest you to implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X" tags in your sitemaps.xml in order to better your international SEO efforts and geotargeting. Check this official post by Google

Alice Thank you for the reply and it was very useful. I will talk to my SEO consultant about  canonicals and geo-taregtting (through Webmaster) and see how we can implement it. Best, Sudha

Hi Bo, Thanks for the additional information about your business model. So, if in-person transactions happen at each office, and each office has its own address and own phone number, sounds to me like you're good to go for pursuing local inclusion. Just be sure to follow all of the rules carefully: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528 And, yes, you can create a unique page on the site for each locale. Sounds like a plan! Best of luck!

In that case, I'll go for the Alternate link tag as mentionned before: By using it, you will guide Google and tell him to show the flemish version in first position for your user in Belgium and vice-versa for the dutch users in Holland. Hope this helps! Maxime

My bad completely but as you said: Seeing that this business (example.com) will be based here in the USA and theirs (example.nl) is in the Netherlands and they are both completely different models, is this ok? I am not saying you will or plan to hijack traffic but some of the traffic will move to your domain (as many people do try .com instead of the country level tld).. But yes I got your point and from that angle my answer was of less or no help! Sorry about that!