Canonical's, Social Signals and Multi-Regional website.

[destinyrescue]

Hi all,

I have a website that is setup to target different countries by using subfolders. Example /aus/, /us/, /nz/. The homepage itself is just a landing page redirect to whichever country the user belongs to. Example somebody accesses https://domain/ and will be redirected to one of the country specific sub folders. The default subfolder is /us/, so all users will be redirected to it if their country has not been setup on the website. The content is mostly the same on each country site apart from localisation and in some case content specific to that country.

I have set up each country sub folder as a separate site in Search Console and targeted /aus/ to AU users and /nz/ to NZ users. I've also left the /us/ version un-targeted to any specific geographical region.

In addition to this I've also setup hreflang tags for each page on the site which links to the same content on the other country subfolder. I've target /aus/ and /nz/ to en-au and en-nz respectively and targeted /us/ to en-us and x-default as per various articles around the web.

We generally advertise our links without a country code prefix, and the system will automatically redirect the user to the correct country when they hit that url. Example, somebody accesses https://domain/blog/my-post/, a 302 will be issues for https://domain/aus/blog/my-post/ or https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ etc.. The country-less links are advertised on Facebook and in all our marketing campaigns

Overall, I feel our website is ranking quite poorly and I'm wondering if poor social signals are a part of it?

We have a decent social following on Facebook (65k) and post regular blog posts to our Facebook page that tend to peek quite a bit of interest. I would have expected that this would contribute to our ranking at least somewhat?

I am wondering whether the country-less link we advertise on Facebook would be causing Googlebot to ignore it as a social signal for the country specific pages on our website. Example Googlebot indexes https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ and looks for social signals for https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ specifically, however, it doesn't pick up anything because the campaign url we use is https://domain/blog/my-post/.

If that is the case, I am wondering how I would fix that, to receive the appropriate social signals /us/blog/my-post/, /aus/blog/my-post/ & /nz/blog/my-post/. I am wondering if changing the canonical url to the country-less url of each page would improve my social signals and performance in the search engines overall.

I would be interested to hear your feedback.

Thanks

[JordanLowry]

Generally social signals do not hold much sway in terms of ranking. John Mueller from Google stated that Google does not use social signals in its ranking algorithm. More than likely there is an underlying factor playing a role in why you may be ranking poorly. Go to opensite explorer and paste the url to your site and see if there are any technical errors that may be playing a role in you ranking poorly. I also recommend crawling your site with screaming frog or one of Moz's tools.

Also, you said your system automatically redirects users with a 302 redirect these pass little to no link juice I would try and see how many 302 redirects you have in place and consider changing them to a 301 redirect. Moz has a good page about redirects.

Hope this helps some!

[destinyrescue]

Hi Jordan,

Thanks for the response. Good to know about social signals.

In terms of the 302, my original understanding (through online research) was that by using a 302, google would report the original URL in search results but grab the display content from the page that it was redirected to. This is due to the fact the the redirected URL is based on the geographical location of the user.

If 302's do not pass any link juice, does that mean that we wouldn't be gaining any benefit from all external websites linked to my root domain /, given that when they hit the root domain, it ends up with a 302 to their geographical region?

Thanks.

[JordanLowry]

From my understanding and the research I have done 302's do not pass much if any link juice. Matt cutts has an article here explaining some of the differences and Moz does an excellent job as well explaining the benefits between the two. Since I do not have your url I can not dig into the issue too much. If you would like you can send me your businesses url and I can take a look for you. But I do not think the issue with the site is social signals it could be a technical issue.

[destinyrescue]

Hi Jordan,

I've sent you a private message.

Thanks mate.