Using hreflang for international pages - is this how you do it?

[katemorris]

That tool is meant for the business as a whole.

Are you willing to (or are they, the client/company) put the work into differentiating the content per country? Is that needed? If it is just the form that changes, you can just change the form depending on what country they input into the form. Would that work? Then there is only one site to maintain and all you have to deal with is translations (german, spanish, japanese, french, etc. The languages, not the countries).

All that said you have two choices:

1. One site, different translations (using hreflang in between) with some changes to what happens with the form.

2. Multiple country sites that are operated differently to target each region. These can be ccTLDs or on the same domain but need to be treated as separate sites. No need for hreflang, but major need for different content.

[Caro-O]

Kate,

What they have is:

1. a subfolder for the German content which has 6 pages that will be targeted to German speakers both inside and outside of Germany - which I'm assuming will need hreflang code specifying language but not country, right?

2. URLs for the English pages targeting English speakers outside the USA that are simply different page names. So:

USA page - www.company.com/product-A
Equivalent International page with different form - www.company.com/product-A-international (we've identified 5 countries we want to show up in, and then any other one by default)
And I'm assuming hreflang is not appropriate for the international page, but I'm not sure what one does  instead to avoid dupe content.

Does this help?

[katemorris]

Does anything about how people search for the product change in the 5 countries?

[Caro-O]

No, hardly at all.

There are two major phrases they all use, with modifiers at the end:
EG:
keyword
keyword solution
keyword software
keyword product
keyword download

etc

[BlueprintMarketing]

Yes sorry about that. The code for Germany is DE–DE the code for the German language is DE

I am sorry about that I tried to make it as easy as possible to understand but even I was getting a little  tired towards the end.

excellent catch.

I would definitely customize the folders so that the languages in German Including URLs.

Kate makes an excellent point about a real choice that you have with going with subfolders or a unique domain.

There is an extraordinarily larger amount of work with multi-Geo domains however if you're starting from scratch and you think about it most of the URLs from the country are targeting will benefit your site in Whatever country or ( whatever content is on the site that linked to you)

Also if you're going to focus in the future hypothetically let's say Japan or China you will want to target different search engines other than Google these will be dependent highly on your IP address. There are ways to proxy it and make it work but infrastructure it's expensive and so does essentially doing SEO for a site per a language.

hreflang will allow you to keep the subtle differences in English for instance in the UK and elevator is a lift in Canada color is spelled differently small things do make a difference, and you should have those subtle things in your content.

I understand what you're saying about just using English and pushing it out there. You could generalize English and target no country whatsoever I would be interested to see how that worked out. Obviously, you have more than one copy Of English without hreflang you will have problems with duplicate content.

Kate brings up a very good question how big your team is? Who else will be assisting does everyone understand that search is impossible to do if you do not know the language as well as PPC. So you'll have to have native speakers I'm sure you do just want to bring up a couple of points.

What are you using for a CMS for have you made that choice yet? What are you going to do to host the site?

Hope this is helpful,

Tom

[BlueprintMarketing]

corrected the Deutschland tag good catch.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Kate keeps giving great advice.

If you have a multilingual, SEO, PPC & content team Further the budget for the infrastructure ( it's going to be very expensive either way, to be honest)

You will get more out of multiple domains ccTLD's

I would love to hear how big the company is that you're doing this for and exactly how many people will be working on this project?

If this expansion works well and your business decides to go after China and Russia you have a deal with two more search engines. Also if you go to Japan, you want to focus on Yahoo as well.

If you start using

• https://www.yandex.com/ Russia Ukraine

• &

• http://www.baidu.com/ China

• http://www.yahoo.co.jp/  Approximately 30 to 40% of Japan

• the good the bad and the scary about Google and Yahoo Japan

• https://www.clickz.com/who-does-it-better-yahoo-japan-or-google-japan/26403/

• You will have to deal with regulations as well as differences in the way the search engine handles traffic. IP addresses matter

Companies like Fastly & Akamai will offer a type of super pop that gives you a static IP although it's not inexpensive.

I imagine It's possible for you to end up in Asia from what it sounds like? if there is a return on the investment. Remember in Japan people like Yahoo quite a bit.

• https://www.ajpr.com/search-engine-market-share-in-asia-january-2016/
• http://searchengineland.com/library/baidu
• http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-25/china-tightens-internet-rules-for-baidu-and-other-search-engines

I hope this is of help did not mean to go off track but you are talking about quite a few languages.

Sincerely,

Tom

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[Caro-O]

Kate, although the pages are the same as the USA ones, there's no reason we cannot switch up the language a bit for countries outside the USA...alter the message a little. If we did, would we then be able to use hreflang to indicate to google that there's a different version of the pages for select other markets and prevent them from thinking it's duplicate content?

[Caro-O]

Tom, thanks.

The company is small-med and is growing fast, with a presence in some other countries to handle business there as it grows. I think I understand how we have to handle the foreign languages. We may be able to go with ccTLDs as we introduce more languages instead of the subfolder we currently have for Germany only.

But the real issue that we're trying to zero in on is a small group of 'international' English pages designed for non-USA/Canda visitors that have some differences in how the free trial for the product is processed. We want to make it clear to Google that these are not duplicate content. We will be promoting them via advertising etc, but we still don't want them seen to be duplicated content.

Thanks,
Caro

[katemorris]

Changing the duplicated content will take care of it by itself. It will have to be rewritten for each market though. It is up to you to decide if that is the best course of action for you. If you translate the content using regional dialects (have someone in that region write the page fresh), then hreflang is useful. That's when the en-us and en-ca, etc. come into play. Would something like that be possible?

[Caro-O]

Thanks Kate...I think this will be our best option for now...differentiate the content as much as we can. I'll refer back to this thread when we're ready to move forward with foreign language pages next year.