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Thanks Kate,  the  https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.seroundtable.com/hreflang-google-mobile-first-1511959807.png is really what I needed. Cheers!

Glad to be of help, good luck!

You would use hreflang tags: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

Thanks for the reply! Yep, it is the same company (though each country's website is managed by a different group). Good idea on just doing the home page for the brand terms. Could maybe extend that logic for top-level pages too - target similar topics even if the content is a bit different per site.

A little bit too advanced I think... well, trial and error it is.

hello, Nice article. I have a questions: If you have a multi lang site with Subdirectory: would you use Subdirectory: domain.com for the english version or its bertetr to use straight a redirect from domain.com to .com/en/ ?

Thank you for your response! I appreciate your input.

Hi tcope25, Thanks for the clarification, that helps me to understand better the end goal. To futher clarify, you say "we want every other visitor in the world to visit our international subdomain." Do you mean "every other [English speaking] visitor in the world." ? If so, I think your proposed code is close. It is now just missing a self-referencing element, so it should be: Just keep in mind that even if your tags are perfect, if your English US site has significantly more authority, it may show up in international search results anyway as rel="alternate" hreflang is a signal, not a directive. Hope that helps! Dana

Hi Ewerton, I choosed spanish from Spain because I'm from Spain and my clients are from here, and they want better results for Spain than for other countries in Latin America. Some projects with this conditions have ranked well also in many countries in Latin America. In my opinion you should choose the spanish version of the country in which you prefer better positioning, the one you have. And if you want to rank better in other countries you have to get links from those countries. I mean, if you want to rank better in Spain, try to get good quality backlinks of your niche that are from Spain, specially those with .es and also .cat (Catalonia domain), but focus specially on .es domains or .com domains that you see that correspond to spanish people. The same for Mexico but with .mx bakclinks. But with patience, don't build a lot of backlinks together. Best wishes and good luck!!

Cheers Guys, Great answers here! now I come to think of it the site was already ranking high worldwide for the co.uk site. The reason for the different domains is the difffeent distributors and currencys. Definitely won’t go down this route again. Will try the canonical hack and let you know, how it goes. regards Neil

Hey Jon - I appreciate you posted sometime ago but we have natives working successfully in all of the regions you mention, particularly Germany: http://www.inkmedia.eu Of course, there are no shortcuts here... One needs to be creating high value link-worthy content and building long-term relationships with audiences in these regions. Its then a case of reaching out to the right publishers and demonstrating why your content or product offering is valuable to their audience. Please get in touch if you'd like to learn more about how we could help. All the best, Charlotte.

No...that's gone after a week around.

Hi... I'm sorry to tell you that the answer offered by Gaston is not totally correct. So, in your Spanish page you have these hreflang and canonical annotations: This is not correct because you are not adding also the self-referential hreflang annotation Google is very precise about this, and it states its need in the help pages as well in many Googlers tweets and webmaster office hangouts. The rel="canonical" is correct. Remember that the self-referential and the alternative href URLs must always be canonicals. Finally, regarding the subfolders blocked via robots.txt, yes! that's totally incorrect: if you're blocking Googlebot from accessing the Spanish, French and Italian subfolders, then Googlebot won't be able to parse the code of their pages, hence it won't be able to see also the hreflang annotations... with obvious erroneous consequences.

Your question is quite convoluted, so I hope to answer it correctly :-). My first thought when reading your question was: "Why do they want to associate two so different set of products?". I mean, I fully understand that you are moved by SEO consideration, but - honestly - SEO should not enslave business considerations and logic. Widget and Gears are two totally different kinds of products and, especially, they have very different kind of buyer personas. In other words: the buyer personas targeted by the widgets website not necessarily are interested in gears. Plus, also on an entity level, there's no connection between widgets and gears, hence also for Google would be hard to start understanding for what entity set is relevant the website if it is not presenting itself as a broader ecommerce store. So, strategically, I would not start with SEO (bear with me...) as the main channel for the new gear website, but on branding, creating a dedicated website in a dedicated unique domain name. Hence, I'd create campaigns to support the launching of the new website and line of products, so to create a solid backlink profile from the start, which will obviously help in rankings. Said that, I would take advantage of the visibility of the Widget website for announcing the new Gear one (I suppose the widget site has a news section and an About Us section, under which you can create a landing page explaining what other "companies/websites" are part of the "Businesses company owning the Widget website".

Hola & Muchos Gracias Gianluca Thanks so much for taking the time to respond its very much appreciated ! Ok that's great news thanks ! I was just worried that 'swapping' via hreflang, to the very new & non SEO'd websites immediately would be a mistake since they wouldn't swap 'exactly' due to the brand new UK websites lacking any authority etc. Yes SEO'ing them is a priority, i was just wandering if some months of authority building should be carried out before attempting to roll out the hreflang, to help them swap 'exactly', or therabouts. But will try think of a way to test anyway, at the moment, client is prioritising brand search results at the moment and the new uk site has different pages (and nowhere near as many as the .com) & different structure so the uk version is by no means a copy of the us site (does that have a bearing if not similar content & structure or should hreflang still be deployed ?)...so Home Page needs hreflang i would have thought. (Any tips here welcome Many Thanks again ! All Best Dan

Equivalent means two or more pages that even if are targeting different languages and/or countries serve the same purpose. The easiest example is the homepage of the same brand that is targeting 3 different countries. One may be in Spanish, one in English and one in Italian; plus they can be in 3 different domain names. Despite of all the differences, they are equivalent. The same is for services pages or product pages. If product A is sold in the englis website, and Spanish and Italian one, even if their URLs structure is different and their content is different (for instance for the same different language), however they still equivalent. However, if your site are targeting different countries each one with a different language from the others, you can also consider the idea of not implementing the hreflang, but in those pages where brand name search is prevalent (how me page, contact page). but, yes, the hreflang is a must if two or more sites are in the same language even if each one of them targets a different country (eg: USA, Canada and UK). Finally, the fact that the different website you have are not Morris sites, its a plus and ideally what all websites doing international must behave.

Looks like this has been a bug since 2011? (When looking at the thread https://moz.com/community/q/uk-and-gb-when-selecting-targeted-engines-in-campaign-management.) Jon from Moz said in a comment from 2014 that they would be digging into the problem and updating... but no updates as of today 4/30/2018.

Is there some reason they only want to target the US and UK and not Australia or Canada for instance? If it is alright with them, I would just have one site. Targeted at western-type English speaking travelers. If you can't produce a different site for the US AND the UK separately, then just create one. Unless there is another reason it is just the US and UK. Please share if so!

Hi there, This is pretty much exactly what the rel="alternate" tag is for. Have you looked into that option? This allows you to use the .co.uk for the UK and the .com elsewhere: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en You will have trouble ranking a .co.uk in countries besides the UK, although moving everything to a .com in the future might be an option as well. However, it should be perfectly feasible to rank both sites with proper geo-targeting like this.