International corporate SEO - menu and preferences

[execom99]

Hi all, for internationalization we have used subfolders structure (e.g. domain.com/us/) and since we have approx 150 countries to cover, then country selector is quite a link-base, especially if pages itself can have even several hundreds of internal links as well.

Currently, all links to other countries are set as rel="nofollow" and I'm planning to change them to "follow" to distribute a juice.

Do you please have an experience with such internal links voluminous websites and this follow/nofollow settings?

Also we are having and issue with other countries outperforming local search. So for example in US, searching for kind of "Brand America" keyword, our UK branch outperforms US. Hreflangs are set in the sitemaps and each branch (country) is set in search console correctly as well. Since there are some issues with sitemaps (e.g. not actual links, or links returning 404), I assume that google is not using these sitemaps therefore hreflang information is lost as well. Am I correct ?

thank you in advance,

Tom

[katemorris]

Hi Tom,

Is there any difference in the US page to the UK page?

[execom99]

Hi Kate, yes - it is, US, UK and even International branches are all in the English with different content.

Tomas

[katemorris]

Cool, that rules out one issue. My guess is that since there are mixed signals, that the information through the sitemaps are being ignored. I would work on cleaning that up and resubmit. In the meantime, consider detecting the user's location and if it is different than the page they landed on, asking them if they want to go to that country's content.

Example: US user lands on UK content, popup asks if they want to see US content, user clicks yes and cookie is set for that user so that they always see the US content, regardless. Don't set this automatically as Google still just crawls from the US, you want them to see all the content not just the US content.

As for removing the nofollows, you should be good. Google is good at understanding country/language specific content. Make sure that location selector page has the x-default hreflang indicator.

[execom99]

thank you for answer Kate, following the "x-deafult", we keep also /int branch, which is actually default content in the English language, not targeting to any country. Should we keep "x-default" of any page to this /int, or set x-default only to the location selector ?

e.g.
example.com/uk/product1 ... targetted for UK
example.com/us/product1 ... targetted for US
example.com/int/product1 ... not targetted to any country, it is default english-language page for product1

so hreflang would look like this:

thank you

[Njnbiure45r4]

The menu helps a lot to engage the user for a long time. I have tested it with my page of Belgravia Ace Landed and it's working well.