Example.com for english and example.es for spain. Will .com still rank for english querys?

[advertisingtech]

Hello,Due to various technical questions we have decided to implement our multi-language support in a way that example.com servers the English search query's and example.es Spanish.

Now there is big volume for English query's in Spain serp. If i have example.es domain for Spain and use language tags will searchers find my .com still for their English terms or automatically only .es will be served for google.es?We would just specify hreflang=EN for the example.com and es for the example.esThank you,

[Joe_Stoffel]

Hi there,

Yes, if you are using hreflang tags search engines should be able to deliver the correct page based on the users language. I recommend reviewing Moz's hreflang attributes guide, very helpful for setting this up.

Here is how you will want to set up the tagging for the homepage, do not forget to include self-referencing canonical tags for both sites.

Hope this helps!

[katemorris]

Be aware that a ccTLD is meant for people in that country, it does not mean it is targeting all people who speak a language of the same name. Spanish is spoken in more countries than Spain, so if you wish to reach all Spanish speakers, I would recommend a .com site (which is country agnostic) and having English and Spanish language content there.

If you wish to target Spain citizens, the .es domain is perfect.

The way you have it set up above though, what will most likely happen (but this depends on your industry, competition, etc) is that the English language queries coming from Spain will see the .com version of your site as they should be searching in English. If someone in the US or Mexico is looking in Spainsh, they might not see the .es site as it is targeted to Spain, not Spanish. That doesn't mean they won't see it at all - if there isn't much competition they will see the .es if it is the best result for their search, but .es is meant to Spain based businesses and you can't change the country targeting on a ccTLD like .es

You can try to help Google understand with HREFlang as Joe said, but do understand that you'll be sending mixed signals with a .es domain if you are trying to get Spanish speaking searchers from other countries.

Hope that makes sense!