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Hi Tom, What I would look into is check what kind of competition you have in the US, to make sure you can find out what they're doing better then you there compared to your performance in the UK. You can than see if it's really up to the content on these pages and if they're optimized the right way or it's more up to the quality + amount of links that you have there. If the latter would be the case I would make sure to look into making sure that your strategy would result in getting more links from the US. Martijn.

Make sure they are linked up with hreflang tags which would help search engines determine which pages are their language equivalents. If you do a lot more promotion of the Dutch content, it will rank better than French pages (assuming equal competition). However, because there is a "these pages are the same but in 2 different languages" hreflang markup on the site, it should help you rank for the French pages as well.

This same question has more answers at this URL: https://moz.com/community/q/international-url-paths. so I close this thread for not having split them.

Before answering, it is me having a question for you: why the hell do you need to put spanish content under a french subdomain if you already have it in the spanish version of the website? Is this nothing but complicating everything :-)? Said that, as Steve said, the hreflang itself solves any potential duplicate issue, so you don't need to cross canonicalized any url. Simply remember to use the correct combo of hreflang ISO codes. In the case of the spanish version of the french subdomain, the hreflang should reference the fr.sudomain.com/es/... and have as pair these: "es-FR", so to target only the spanish speaking people in France. This way you are not going to messed up with the same kind of URL in targeting spanish speaking users in Spain ("es-ES") or in Great Britain ("es-GB") and so on. However, it would have been more logical to have only one spanish URL for the videos, and have their hreflang set up as "es" only, so to target all users speaking spanish in every country.

In general that kind of implementation is correct. I do something similar for a client, who has a similar problem but more on the logistic side (different warehouse depending on the continent). Said that, considering that some products are only for the European market, I don't see useful to use an hreflang like the "de", which would target all the German speaking users no matter from the where they are... I mean, if they are in the USA, I believe that they are not allowed to buy products that are meant only for the EU geography even if they are German or Austrian. Regarding IP redirection, it's not an alternative... moreover, it's not an alternative obliging people to be sticked to one country/website because that it not allowed by legislation now. For instance, if someone from the USA want to see the EU site, he should be allowed to do it (this is also valid - obviously for Googlebot, as it is a user at the end). What you can do is working on the basket process, and there using the IP recognition for allowing or not a bought depending from the country someone is trying to buy a product or not. Doing so, you will also avoid the frequent dumping issue (e.g.: European buying in the USA because it is cheaper).

Hi AARAINDIA, I do have countries set in Google search console for both site. Although my seo extension was writing french texts on spanish site. BIG MISTAKE ! Thanks for office and phone number tip. Great one ! Is that a snippet to write in the header ? Maybe I should try a geolocalised pop up on french site to send spanish trafic to spanish site. Best regards.

Thanks! Glad to have been of assistance.

Howdy. Hreflangs implementation works along with browser settings. So, getting rid of hreflangs and rely on browser settings alone will not fix your problems. I wonder if all those errors have something to do with your hreflangs not working properly. Other than that, you can use IPs for "helping" browsers to determine the location. You can use suggestive popup or banner for languages etc like: Examine the Accept headers sent by the browser. Use IP geolocation to determine the user's location and guess an appropriate language. Force the user to explicitly select a language, as exemplified by Wikipedia. Hope this helps.

Hey Danny, sounds like you have a big migration project ahead of you! As others have said, you're going to have to do mass 301 redirects to the site you want everything to live on moving forward. You should also engage with an international SEO consultant to help you out with this, because you're likely going to need country-specific subfolders and use HREFLANG to send the search crawlers for the right languages to the right pages and rank them accordingly. Happy to recommend some if you'd like.

Refreshing content on the same URL based on the users IP is a very bad decision in terms of international SEO, because Google will see only one of the two versions. What you have to do is, eventually: or change the visible prices and currencies depending on IP of the users (but letting them still being able to change the currency for UX) but not changing the content. or creating a second version (in subfolder for instance) targeting the other market you desire to target. The second one is the best solution Yours is not.

No problem. Your best bet would be to avoid subdomains and have separate entities via ccTLD as you've mentioned is the plan. You could do a sub-directory structure (.com/au, .com/us, etc..) but honestly that gets pretty messy. I've got a client that has some countries on different ccTLDs and some that share a TLD, and the ones that share the .com are the messy ones.

Hi Jamie, I think I'm a little confused by the situation/question. If he wants users who land on the .com domain to stay on the .com domain, this is the default behaviour of a website so he could simply remove the 301 redirect. Doing this would double the maintenance and SEO work required so it's rarely a good idea unless he has a lot of resources to throw at it. Also, having 2 websites that are absolutely identical is dangerous; you won't get 'penalised' for it but the rankings would likely be pretty bad. If he were to go down the route of running 2 sites, the best way to handle this is to write content that appeals to the users in each of those locations. The most obvious difference being UK English vs US but the way content is written for each country will typically contain regional differences too.

Hi Toni, Hosting location isn't going to play a big role in your rankings. Server stats are going to have more to do with that (i.e. is it shared/private/dedicated etc.). You won't have any difficulties or problems with Search Console. In terms of rankings, you will have the traditional issues of ranking a subdomain (split link juice, the need for unique content, etc.) but nothing out of the ordinary. If you are targeting a UK audience, the domain should probably be set up as a .co.uk domain, and you should ensure that you are following SEO best practices in setting it up. You will also want to ensure that you are generating backlinks from UK sites to show relevancy. If you stick within those guidelines you will be just fine. Let me know if you have any follow-up questions. Cheers, Rob

Hi Andrea, To answer your questions: The redirect you mention will impact your rankings for keywords that are locally based (New Zealand copywriter, for example) or for folks using specific search engines (google.co.uk/google.co.nz) which will identify your website according to relevancy (UK to UK, NZ to NZ). The redirect should probably point from your UK site to your NZ site, since your contacts in the UK can still find your site using google.co.uk, which will redirect them to your NZ site. Meanwhile, your NZ leads will be able to find your NZ site more easily if it is optimized for New Zealand. What that redirect is currently telling Google is that you moved from NZ to the UK, and are carrying forward your domain, which is essentially the opposite of what you have actually done. There are a few ways to move forward: a) You create 1 website which optimizes for both NZ and the UK. Create a "locations" page of sorts which optimizes the same keywords for different geographic areas. (i.e. have  a "New Zealand copywriter" page and a "United Kingdom copywriter" page). You can remove the redirect if you like, or keep it. This would be best utilized on whichever page currently has better rankings, although ideally you would use your NZ domain since that is where you are based. Not an ideal answer since keyword relevancy will be lacking for one country or the other depending on your choice of domain. b) You cancel the redirect and optimize both websites. This is probably your best option but requires twice as much work. Duplicate content is an issue to some degree, but it won't really hurt you. Duplicate content is more of a "you won't gain any benefit from your content, but it won't hurt you" issue. You can use canonical tags to minimize the damage you do to your rankings for each site, or you can create unique content for both sites (this is your best case scenario). It would probably be best to separate your hosting (at least have these 2 sites on different servers) in order to avoid any cross-contamination if/when you conduct linkbuilding for your site. In an ideal world, you create unique content for both sites. In a pinch, you duplicate your content from the site you plan to use most to the site you plan to use least, providing canonical tags for content on your main website. There will be a lot of work on your plate when it comes to optimizing both sites, but that is the best way to move forward, in my opinion. I'm sure other Mozzers will have more to say on that. Hope this helps and feel free to follow up with me if you need any more help! Cheers, Rob

The correct way to get .co.uk to rank the in UK and .com to rank elsewhere is to use Hreflang tags, but only if content on the two sites is different. If it's the same content i.e., it has not been localized to UK, then you are better off using only 1 website. Google often ignores Hreflang markup when it encounters duplicate content. So you have 2 options: Retire 1 of the websites because it's useless to have duplicate content. Use Hreflang and make sure that content is NOT duplicate but localized for at least 1 of the sites.

Hi Brian, How new is the US site? You mentioned "Italian and French" sites. Are those geo-targeted sites that are operated separately from the US site or are they translated content? If you can provide more information including the URLs of the US site you expect to show, the branded term, and more about the company setup, I can help give you some things to do. I know this is frustrating but it is fixable.