Product Subdomain Outranking "Marketing" Domains

[SimpleSearch]

Hello, Moz community!

I have been puzzling about what to do for a client.  Here is the challenge.

The client's "product"/welcome page lives at

www.client.com

this page allows the visitor to select the country/informational site they want OR to login to their subdomain/install of the product.

Google is choosing this www.client.com url as the main result for client brand searches.

In a perfect world, for searchers in the US, we would get served the client's US version of the information/marketing site which lives at https://client.com/us, and so on for other country level content (also living in a directory for that country)

It's a brand new client, we've done geo-targeting within the search console, and I'm kind of scared to rock the boat by de-indexing this www.client.com welcome screen.

Any thoughts, ideas, potential solutions are so appreciated.

THANKS!

Thank you!

[effectdigital]

You are very right to be worried about rocking that particular boat. If  you de-index a page, it basically nullifies its SEO authority. Since the page which you would nullify, is a homepage-level URL (you gave the example 'www.client.com') then this would basically be SEOicide

Most other pages on your site, probably get most of their SEO authority and ranking power from your homepage (directly or indirectly, e.g: homepage linking to sub-page vs homepage linking to category, which then links to sub-page)

This is because, it's almost certain that your homepage will be the URL which has gained the most links from across the web. People are lazy, they just pick the shortest URL when linking. I'm not saying you don't have good deeplinks, just that 'most' of the good ones are probably hitting the homepage

So if you nullify the homepage's right to hold SEO authority, what happens to everything underneath the homepage? Are you imagining an avalanche right now? That's right, this would be one of the worst possible ideas in the universe. Write it down, print it out and burn it

Search-console level geo-targeting is for whole sites, not pages or (usually, though there can be exceptions) sections - you know that right? What that does is tell Google which country you want the website (the whole property which you have selected) to rank in. It basically stops that property from ranking well globally and gives minor boosts in the location which has been selected. If you just took your homepage level property and told it that it's US now, prepare to kiss most of your other traffic goodbye (hard lesson). If you were semi-smart and added /US/ as a separate property, and only set the geo targeting to US for that property - breathe a sigh of relief. It likely won't solve your issue but it won't be a complete catastrophe either (phew!)

Really the only decent tool you have to direct Google to rank individual web pages for regions and / or languages is the hreflang tag.  These tags tell Google: "hey, you landed on me and I'm a valid page. But if you want to see versions of me in other languages - go to these other URLs through my hreflang links". Hreflangs only work if they are mutually agreed (both pages contain mirrored hreflangs to each other, and both pages do NOT give multiple URLs for a single language / location combination - or language / location in isolation)

The problem is, even if you do everything right - Google really has to believe "yes, this other page is another version of exactly the same page I'm looking at right now". Google can do stuff like, take the main content of both URLs, put it into a single string, then check the Boolean string similarity of both content strings to find the 'percentage' of the content's similarity. Well, this is how I check content similarity - Google does something similar, but probably infinitely more elegant and clever. In the case of hreflangs string translation is probably also enacted

If Google's mechanical mind, thinks that the pages are very different - then it will simply ignore the hreflang (just like Google will not pass SEO authority through a 301 redirect, if the contents of the old and new page are highly dissimilar in machine terms)

This is a fail-safe that Google has, to stop people from moving high rankings on 'useful' or 'proven' (via hyperlinks) URLs (content) - onto less useful, or less proven pages (which by Google's logic, if the content is very different, should have to re-prove their worth). Remember, what a human thinks is similar is irrelevant here. You need to focus on what a machine would find similar (can be VERY different things there)

So even if you do it all properly and use hreflangs, since the nature of the pages is very different (one is functional, helps users navigate, log-in and download something - that's very useful; whilst the other is selly, marketing content is usually thin) - it's unlikely that Google will swallow your intended URL serves

You'd be better off making the homepage include some marketing elements and making the marketing URLs include some of the functional elements. If both pages do both things well and are essentially the same, then hreflangs might actually start to work

If you want to keep the marketing URLs pure sell, fine - but they will only be useful as paid traffic landing pages (like from Google Ads, Pinterest Ads or FaceBook ads) where you can connect your ad to the advertorial (marketing) URLs. People expect ads to land on marketing-centric pages. People don't expect (or necessarily want) that for just regular web searches. The channel (SEO) is called 'organic' for a reason!

[SimpleSearch]

thanks!  Such a great answer.