TLD Conflicts in WMT

[Jacobe]

Hi

I'm running into some top level domain conflicts in Google's webmaster tools. I hope you can help me out. Thanks in advance.

Website example.com has sub folders for each language. There's no content at the root example.com. The root 301 redirects to English at example.com/en/.

In Google Webmaster Tools the root site is added because the web developer can't find a Joomla plugin to put the sitemap and robots file in each sub folder. It's all mixed in the root. So only 1 sitemap and robots exists for all the sub folder languages in the root of the site.

As a results Google shows the root site in search results where it should show the appropriate sub folder (in this case Dutch). I see these conflicts occur everywhere.

Soon Chinese, Romanian and other languages will be added. I'm afraid this problem will only get worse.

What can I do to make sure Google treats every sub folder as a distinctive site and doesn't treat the root as a site?

[Keszi]

Hi Jacob,

I would go for a canonical in the index page. This should remove the .com version from index and tell search engines which is the "main" language.

I hope that solves this issue.

Greetings,

Istvan

[Jacobe]

Hi István

Thanks for the suggestion.

Do you mean by: 
_"_I would go for a canonical in the index page"

...you would create a webpage in the root of the site with a canonical to the default redirect /en/?

[Dr-Pete]

Google can be very stubborn about wanting to see content at the root level. The other common problem, though, is that the crawler just may not see the other language variants. Are you auto-redirecting by IP (i.e. geo-location)? One major issue is that Google crawls from the US, so you'll need crawl paths to all of the variants.

The first thing to check is that Google is actually reading/honoring the 301. You'll need to see what the crawler is seeing.

Google has added some new tags for sites in multiple languages (especially if the same language is shared across regions/countries). I don't have a lot of good data on them, but Google reps are encouraging their use:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

You may find life is easier, long-term, if you put the dominant language at the root level, along with navigation options for other languages, and then use geo-location to send visitors to other pages. It also saves you a 301-hop for the primary market and will strengthen your SEO a bit for that language.