Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Does it make sense to target my Portuguese translation for Brazil to Portugal as well? Or do I create another version of the site that is hreflang=pr so that people that speak Portuguese in other locations throughout the world will at least get a Portuguese translation?

You can do so, Good luck for your new lauch. @jimmy cleared at first instance.

Hi Coleman, My question is not exactly the same but you have given right answer in different prospective. As you said we have many external links pointing to our non-existing pages of our website. So we been planning to redirect those to right pages rather than creating pager for such incoming links. Will this helps? We cannot create pages as we already replaced with new pages. My actual question is: We had referred to many external websites from our website or blog pages which are not actually direct links but redirecting and landing. Do we need to replace such links with actual landing pages? Will this helps us anyhow in SEO or completely negligible? For example: If we have mentioned example.com/seo and it's redirecting to example.com/sem. Do we need to replace /seo with /sem here? Thank, Satish

No, the hreflang tag is to indicate that the content is localized for a certain market (language + geo). If you simply use hreflang tags without genuinely localizing your content, Google might treat it as duplicate. See John Mueller's answer here where he clearly says this exact thing: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/ezMvrlRWuDk/6XWuM1fIDgA

Just an update for everyone. We use sitemaps, rather than meta tags, to do the circular href lang mapping for our localized domains. In doing so, we've found the HREFLANG XML Sitemap Tool from The Media Flow particularly AMAZING! Talk about saving time! Just make a csv file with a comma for each language/locale, upload it, and then download a zip file with all your sitemaps. Beautiful. watch?v=f85sAafNIUw

Tag all pages with proper links of course and do it on both domains/subdomains: on us "version" and uk "version".

Hi Bernadette, I completely agree with that translation being human. Your are correct it wasn't google translate messing with the crawl, but it was a great argument to get removed Where in screaming frog are you able to crawl slower? I have dug around the program and can't find the option.

Hey Karl! As Patric said you can find most information over here in Moz. Now the main question here is, do you need to do local SEO? I mean, is your potential client a software or a brand with locals? This can drastically change things for you. Here you can find an example of an SEO proposal that may help you get started faster. If you answer the previous questions I can give you a better hand on this.

Answer to the quick question: The reason of having the same content (e.g. solution/product/reference) page, is that the international content can be used for a local (e.g. /us) page as well. Sometimes, it's really needed to localize the content, sometimes the same content as the international one can be used. 1. Good, that's how it's done now. 2. Yes, very good explanation for this question. Thanks Thomas! 3. True. Perhaps we should not look this from an seo point of view but from a market perspective. I got some ideas, thanks

Hi Brandon, It isn't possible to target YouTube channels by location, so I wouldn't recommend creating and maintaining several different channels. Given that you seem to be talking about videos which are designed to convert (or are viewed close to the point when a customer does convert), I'd actually suggest that YouTube is not the right platform for you. The videos that you're putting all this effort into are going to cause youtube.com to rank—not your website. And the click-through rates from YouTube to your site will be poor. To really get the most from this kind of video, use a service like Wistia, because it'll allow you to host the videos on your own site, and get credit for that in search results. Phil Nottingham gave another answer on this forum which explains this really well. In a nutshell, YouTube is good at mass reach, spreading a message, raising your profile—think "Dollar Shave Club"—but performs poorly for video content that's designed to convert. Very few people will click through from product description videos on YouTube, so you'll leak traffic unnecessarily. For product descriptions, demos, etc, you're better hosting it on Wistia and embedding on your site. This will also allow you to fully control geo-targeting, because you can use hreflang on your product pages. Let's say that I have a UK shop in the /en-GB/ folder, and a French shop in /fr-FR/. I can now have the same product listed in each, using the appropriate video and translated description, and use hreflang to tell Google that these pages serve an equivalent function for users in those different locations. Stephan

Hi Gianluca, I also have a translation for Latin American Spanish, what is the best way to target that? Do I need a site for each country? Or should I just call it "es" and use the same site for each country that I need to target?

Best of luck James and please feel free to reach out to me if you need any further help - I tend to live on Twitter as well. -Andy

Want to check you are doing everything right? Check this tool out -Andy

Thank you Chris, that is helpful. Cheers,

Thanks - that helps.

Thank you! We found Ahrefs to have some great data as well

So sorry Cody!! Sub-directories allow you to consolidate domain authority and often provide ease of maintenance. With the proper markup, you can create a clear signal to Google for the geotargeting.  I understand this isn't an option for you. With subdomains, you lose some of the shared domain authority that gives sub-directories their advantage, and generally have to maintain separate installs, etc..  You can specify a geo within search console, but it won't be as effective as a ccTLD. With ccTLDs, you can create a much quicker signal for geotargeting your traffic, but the domain authority for each site is generally wholly independent and will require more substantive effort to build the initial authority of each ccTLD, etc..  ccTLDs tend to earn better CTR from the SERPs in the geo, as they seem more likely to be relevant. In your case, I would go with the ccTLDs.. -Jake

Hello Robert, This is a question many businesses struggle with, as you might imagine. There really is no "perfect" solution for every situation so I won't try to speak in best practices other than to say don't annoy the user. If I'm trying to get to your .com home page but I just happen to be travelling in Germany for business an automatic redirect to the German page would drive me nuts. If it were my site I'd probably take the third option. Specifically, I'd sniff out the geolocation based on their IP address and serve a custom pop-up in the language of that country offering something like "Would you like to see the [Country-Language] version"? If I'm in Germany and land on the English default ".com" page I will not be surprised or frustrated by a pop-up or a custom message on the page asking "Möchten Sie die deutsche Version zu sehen?". I'd probably just X-out of it and move on. That's pretty much what this site does when I view from a US location: https://www.gsport.no/herre/klaer/bukse-shorts . It asks me, in English, if I want to translate to English, and offers two clear options along with a third x-out option. Or I could ignore it because it's pretty unobtrusive on desktop. No matter which approach you choose, be sure to research best practices on using attributes and tags like  rel="alternate" hreflang="x" and rel="canonical". I'll leave this question open for discussion since there are many potential approaches that might answer your question.

+1 to what Gaston said! This is the perfect example of when to use hreflang. It doesn't matter if it's a blog post or a more important page on the site - if you have international versions, use hreflang. Cheers, David