Different site behind the flag

[Tz_Seo]

Hello,

I am in a very complicated situation.

I have a site in Itaian which is targeted in Italy by webmaster tools so the majority of the organic traffic comes from there and everything is fine.

However this site got a link from a major international site. So now I get traffic from all over the world but I can't take advantage of it. From the Italian traffic I get from this site I see high pageviews numbers and many minutes in average visitor time.

The problem in this situation is that for many reasons this website cannot be translated so I can put many language choices in this site.

I want to ask, If I put, let's say an English flag in top of my site, that will indicate the English language, but instead of the user to see an English version of the site he/she will be redirected(no follow link) to another site of the same content in English, will this violate any of Google's guideline or hurt the seo of the original site?

Thank you all!

[Keszi]

Hi there,

Basically you are saying that you'd like to host every language on different domains. That shouldn't be an issue. If the text is translated, you could even create a sitemap for language targeting and submit it. This way Google will know that Page A is a translated version to english of Page B.

You can read more about the HREFLANG here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

There is also a tool for generating the correct sitemaps, which will make your job easy. You can check it here: http://www.themediaflow.com/tool_hreflang.php

I hope it helped, Keszi

[gfiorelli1]

Your solution is fine... and Google doesn't have problems with sites having different language version hosted in different domains (if it was so, Amazon should be invisible...).

However, a better and complementary solution would be asking to your devs to create a rule so that, everytime the site receive a visit from an IP different from the Italian ones, an over box will be shown suggesting the visitors to visit the English version of the site and offering them the link to that version.

This is a good thing also in terms of usability, because users will immediately know what to do and do not need to discover the English flag or feeling as if they were in the wrong web site.