Expanding into new country & what to do with Seach Console
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Hi!
We're looking at expanding into new countries, and will probably go with the subfolder route. Our main website is focused on Ireland on Search Console (and probably always will be), so will this be affected if I add subfolders onto the end? And can I shop the main site from crawling the new URL's in the subfolder.
So if www.example.com is focused on Ireland, and we add www.example.com/de for Germany, can we let Google know not to index the German pages in Ireland? And will I need to do anything to the Irish version (e.g, change www.example.com to www.example.com/ie)
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First you don't need to change domain for Ireland. You need to add some tags for your main and sub-folder websites like this -
1- Add lang tag on header like this -
For Germany -
if you are using English language, use this tag OR if you are using Irish language, use this - <html lang="de-de"></html lang="de-de">For Ireland -
if you are using English language, use this tag <html lang="en-ie">OR if you are using Irish language, use this - <html lang="ga-ie"></html lang="ga-ie"></html lang="en-ie">2- Add alternate tag like this -
For Germany - (example for English version)For Ireland - - (example for English version)
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As stated above, hreflangs would be your best bet. You can register sub-folders in Search Console as separate properties and you can use the global / regional targeting settings there to let Google know your targeting preferences (e.g: for /de folder, as a separate property registered in GSC, set it to German / Germany)
In terms of your main search console property (.com without any subfolders) - I would not recommend changing the targeting settings there, as that property also contains the subfolder properties so all kinds of issues could be caused
If in doubt then stick with the hreflangs like Rajesh has said
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Thanks Rajesh! Very clear, will pass that on to developers!
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