Subdirectories geo-targetting: Tagretting a language to a single country affects in other countries?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

We have enabled a plugin which translated our site to subdirectories. We are going to geo target certain language sites to their countires. Like Portuguese site website.com/it/ will be targetted to rank in Portugal. I wonder what to do with language sites where the same langauge is spoken in multiple countries. For example, if we target english site website.com to US; will it effects the ranking in other english countires like UK, Australia, Canada, etc....?

Thanks

[katemorris]

Few warnings to start with:

1. Automated translation is a horrible user experience. I highly recommend you wait on translation until you are in a financial place to get human translators.

2. Geo-targeting country=language is a false association. For languages like English, Spanish, French, and Portugese, there are multiple countries that use that language as their primary language.

I recommend using HREFLANG markup to tell search engines that there are different language versions of your content. That is all that is necessary here. https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag