International SEO - Mixing country targeting and language targeting in GWT.

[footd]

Hi all!

I want to start with International SEO process for my ecommerce. We sell worldwide with a .com domain, although the business is mainly focused in Spain.

We maintain three languages, spanish, english and french with a non suitable structure. Now, after read a lot about it, I'm considering to use subdirectories for each language, /es/, /en/ and /fr/. And heres it's my first doubt:

Could I avoid /es/ from spanish language as it's the default one? I've understood from recents Q&A that it's not needed although more user friendly. I'm trying to avoid tons of 301 from old urls for my main language. Anyway I want to know the best approach regardless complexity.

My second doubt is about country targeting. After some research, I consider that it'd be interesting target country for /fr/ subdomain but language for /en/. Do you see any problem mixing both strategies?

I know I also need to add the hreflang tag to guide googlebot. But I prefer to clarify these points first.

Thanks a lot!

Best regards.

[carmengerea]

Hi Diego,

We had similar problems as our first language was spanish, then we added english and migrated the website to a new WP. The dev created an /es/ directory. We couldn´t avoid 301 redirects. Anyway, the only thing we have lost was the social media share counter. In terms of organic traffic we saw no impact (overall impact was positive because we started creating more content since then - but this is another story). Actually if I had to do it again, I would keep the original URL as it was and only create the /en/. Someone else has another opinion?

For your 2nd question: Your target user would be an english speaker living in France?

If so, you should use hreflang:

Kind regards,

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Hi Carmen,

Thans for the response.

No, I'd like to target french in france, fr-FR. That for french, but for english i just want to target the language and not the country, just /en/. So, I'd like to know if i can follow different strategies in webmaster tools, targeting country for /fr/ subdomain and language for /en/ subdomain.

Thanks!