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Hi there!

To target countries the best way to go is with ccTLDs and if you don't have the ccTLDs then it is with subdirectories within a generic TLD, so you'll have:

• For the US: yourbrand.com/category-a/
• For the UK: yourbrand.com/en-gb/category-a/
• For Spain: yourbrand.com/es-es/categoria-a/
• For Mexico: yourbrand.com/es-mx/categoria-a/

Please keep in mind that the "name" of the directory here it's not important but is just to keep it usable and short and follow the language naming conventions. What it is important is that each country has its own consistent directory structure.

It's fundamental that the look and feel as well as all of the elements of each ones of your different country versions (in the different directories) are localized to target their audience: From the translation of the URLs, titles, descriptions, headings, text, etc. to the appropriate language, using the right currency, etc.

In order to geolocate each directory and inform Google that they're targeting different countries you can do it through Google Webmaster Tools with the "Geolocate" option by registering each directory independently and targeting it.

Additionally, if you have many country versions with the same language (US & UK or Spain & Mexico), in order to avoid having content duplication issues, informing Google that each one of these pages are in these languages but targeting different audiences you should use the hreflang tags as specified here.

By doing this you'll make sure you'll have the base set to target your different country search audiences with Google without running into content duplication issues.

For more information about how to establish and identify the best strategy to follow take a look at this post I wrote some time ago about International SEO strategy.

If you have any question just let me know!

Your registrar usually gives you the option to choose if it's a temporary or a permanent situation so it forwards with 302 or 301 depending on that. Nonetheless, you can check directly yourself very easily with: http://web-sniffer.net/ by taking a look at the HTTP response header of the forwarded domain (and see if it's a 301). Good luck with the new domain

Hi Thomas,

The "ideal" scenario to target different countries is through ccTLDs: yourbrand.es, yourbrand.com.mx, yourbrand.co.uk. If this is feasible for you (from a technical and resources perspective), then you shouldn't use sub-directories, but show the content directly through your ccTLDs, targeting each relevant country with them.

On the other hand, if ccTLDs are too expensive for you at the moment, what you can do is to buy them so you can "protect" your brand for the future, and right now only use sub-directories for each country that you want to target inside your generic domain: yourbrand.com/es/ for spanish, yourbrand.com/uk/ for the UK, yourbrand.com/fr/ for France, and directly show your country targeted information through each one of them.

Since you will be using sub-directories to show the information to your international audience, then what you should link internally through your site and share with your users are the different sub-directories versions (not the ccTLDs), although since your ccTLDs will be "parked" you can 301-redirect them to their relevant countries sub-directories, just in case someone arrive to them.

Then what you can do is to geotarget each subdirectory through Google Webmaster Tools to the relevant country, where you can register each one of them independently.

Additionally, you can use the hreflang annotation in the different country versions, pointing out the language and country of each HTML.

For more information about international SEO please take a look at this checklist that I just published a few days ago at Moz, with the main aspects that you should take into consideration when going International.

I hope this helps and if you still have any question please let me know!

Hi there!

It's ok (and needed) in these circumstances to use a parameter in the URL since you cannot simply add a direct link otherwise your mobile users who select to switch to the desktop version will end-up in a redirection loop. What you can do to avoid any type of content duplication issues in this type of settings is:

• Add a link rel="alternate" tag in each of the desktop URLs referring to their specific mobile URL versions and a link rel="canonical" tag in all of the mobile URLs referring to their specific desktop URLS versions, as specified here by Google. Take a look at an example here
• Configure the appropriate canonical tags in your Desktop URLs as specified here by Google, so they always refer to their original URL versions (without parameters). This means that in http://www.website.com/?m=off you should add this canonical tag:```
  pointing to its original URL version... and do this with every URL (referring to its own original URL version).

By doing this you won't have any content duplication issues. If you want to learn more about Mobile SEO take a look at the Webinar I did sometime ago in SEOmoz here and this post where I answer the most common Mobile SEO questions.

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Michael,

For Belgium, if you want to target both the French and Flemish speakers and you have identified that have enough search volume for the keywords that you would like to rank and convert that will compensate the development of these two versions from a technical and content perspective (remember that they will need content in each relevant language), then you would need to enable a directory for each one:

• www.headoverheels-fashion.com/be-fr/ With content in French targeted to Belgians
• www.headoverheels-fashion.com/be-nl/ With content in Flemish targeted to Belgians

In this case, both directories should be registered and targeted independently in Google Webmaster Tools to Belgium, nonetheless, the data you would get in each will be unique since they will related to the keywords in different languages.

You can also use the hreflang annotation for each one of your different country versions to specify its country and language as Google describes here.

I hope this helps. If you still have any doubt please let me know!

Hi there,

In order to increase your rankings in German speaking search results it's recommended that you:

• Use the rel="alternate" hreflang="de" tag, as specified here by Google in order to inform them that this content is in German and targeted to these users.
• Build links from specific German speaking websites, from blogs, communities, forums, news sites, etc. specially those hosted in German IPs and with German  (.DE) or Swiss (.CH) ccTLDs
• Since I understand that you're using a .com domain to rank for all of the German speaking countries with the same content, both Germany and Switzerland and not specifically targeted to a specific country (so your site is language, not country targeted) in this case you're not able to geotarget it in Google Webmaster Tools which would be also an additional possibility if you had for example, a specific German version targeting Germany with: yourdomain.com/de/ or targeting to Switzerland with: yourdomain.com/ch/, nonetheless, if at some point you are, is important that you also know of this setting. Moreover, if you switch towards a country targeted domain structure, instead of using a generic domain such .com the best is to switch over a .de targeting Germany and .ch targeting Switzerland.

These additional signals should help!

Hi Kyle,

For Baidu search rankings check Rank Tracker (desktop) and Rank Watch (Web based), they both do it.

I hope these help

Hi again Dan,

I would recommend that you first follow this checklist so you make sure your whole migration is SEO friendly and that you're not forgetting anything in the migration process and that you validate everything well.

The best process is the one the most straightforward one: do the migration as simple as possible (from one domain to the other with 301 redirects) and avoid changing many things at the same time. Please keep in mind that redirects will help but is not the only thing you should do, take a look at the checklist and you'll see.

It's actually natural that in the following days after the migration your rankings drop, search engines need time to crawl and index again the URLs in the new site, identify that you have moved your content from the old domain to the new one and with the help of the 301-redirects.

Among the additional things you should do to have an SEO friendly migration that you'll see in the checklist are that you should notify Google that you've moving your domain through Google Webmaster Tools (there's an option for this), create a new profile and generate a sitemap for the new domain, verify that the 301-redirects are all well implemented, that the content relevance is also kept in those pages for the keywords they were ranking with, that external and internal links going to the old urls are updated and now go to the new ones, prioritizing those landing pages that had the most highly relevant traffic, trying to change the minimum from the structure -keep one change at a time to be able to identify any issue-, check and follow-up on crawling errors). If you do everything what is recommended on the checklist little by little you should see how you start regaining your rankings again, but you need to give time (usually at least a couple of months if everything goes right).

So, there are a lot of other factors and I will make sure to follow the recommendations to minimize the negative impact, although is impossible of not having it. What is definitely not recommended is that you are updating many times your URLs or that you redirect many times, this is why this process should be effectively planned and designed validating all the aspects from the beginning and making sure that the more relevance signals you can keep (like the keywords in the appropriate elements of the pages) the best it is and making one change at a time makes things much more simple (first migrate, then one the effects of the migration have gone you can start optimizing and changing the new domain architecture) otherwise it can get really messy and this is what you're already experiencing I'm afraid.

I hope this helps! Aleyda

Hi there!

There can be geolocation factors that could affect your mobile search results, additionally maybe some of the sites that you're competing against for desktop are not that relevant towards that location but your site is, or maybe for some of these sites Google identifies that they're not suitable to be displayed in Mobile and even if you don't have a specific Mobile version your site can be still identified as suitable to be shown in Mobile search results and for any of these type of reasons you might you end-up ranking better.

In order to verify well how you attract the visibility with your desktop site with mobile search results:

• Take a look at your Google Analytics, verify specifically the organic search traffic coming only from mobile devices. Identify which keywords are bringing this traffic and the pages that these visitors are going to.
• Go to Google Webmaster Tools and select the "Traffic >> Search Queries" and select the "Mobile" filter and see which keywords and pages are giving you mobile search visibility.
• Use a mobile emulator or a user agent switcher to simulate a mobile search result and closely analyze how your current pages are shown there, who you're competing with, your link popularity and relevance against them, etc.

All this will give you a much better idea of your current mobile search situation. If you identify that you're already getting a reasonable amount of traffic and there can be potential, I would suggest that you do a Mobile targeted keyword research, following the steps that as I described in this Mozinar... you might identify much more opportunity through Mobile SEO.

I hope this helps!

That's another question that has nothing to do with hreflang usage but about the best International SEO targeting to follow in your case and that will depend a lot on your business and capacity. I wrote about it here: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-to-international-seo/ if you still have questions you might want to open a new thread specifically asking about that topic.

You shouldn't remove them. If you implement the 301-redirects and do everything what's described before, although it might take some time, they should be eliminated from the index while referring their value with the redirects.

Hi Wesley,

If you enable a new language version totally optimized in another language (From the URLs, to titles, descriptions, text content, comments, etc.) there shouldn't be any problem. If you want to help Google to identity that this is your French version (in this case algo specifically targeted to a Belgium language), you can use the hreflang tag specifying the language and country, as explained here, in your pages html head section. Additionally, you can add the hreflang annotations in your XML sitemap as described here. You can also use this tool to facilitate the process.

Best regards,

Aleyda

Hi Mark,

The best way to approach if your client wants to target each country with a gTLD is enabling specific subdirectories for them:

yourbrand.com/sa/ for saudi arabia 
yourbrand.com/ae/ for the UAE 
.. etc.

and then register and geolocate each one of them in Google Search Console International Targeting: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

Besides this, you should use hreflang annotations in order to inform Google the relationship of the different pages you will have for each country & language, and make sure that they rank the right version for the right country/language results. You can generate them easily by using: http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/

Like this, with the geolocation in Google Search Console + the hreflang usage it's going to be understood that they're not duplicated pages, but pages targeting to different countries and versions even if the content is pretty similar or the same, although of course, I would also recommend that you really localize the content to make it very specific and as much relevant as possible to every audience -always in their own language, using their own terms-, even if they speak the same language, there are always terms and preferences that will be different, and therefore a need to personalize the content to target them.

I hope this help

Hi Matthew

The IP location it's a signal although it used to be stronger in the past but is still is. Take into consideration that is not the only signal to inform Google that your site is relevant towards a specific country: The usage of a ccTLD or geolocating in Google Webmaster Tools, plus specifying the region also in the hreflang annotations and your content itself: adding the location where it's targeted to in the different elements of the pages, are also additional signals that you should align as much as you can to inform Google where is your relevant country market.

So when someone asks me this question looking to move their site towards a local hosting or a service that can provide the IP of the country where the site is targeting what I ask is that if it also makes sense to make the move for other reasons (better speed for your visitors in that country, better support, etc.) and from a cost perspective, then they should do it. Nonetheless, if it's a painful migration that will cost too much and they still have other factors to optimize, then I would likely recommend to see first the impact of these other aspects that won't cost that much to implement.

In your case is different, since from what you say is about "moving away" your server from the relevant country, then in this situation is about saving or earning in other aspects that are not SEO since you will be taking away a signal that you were already providing. So instead of this what I would do first is to try to find another service that can keep providing you the UK IP and that also meets your other requirements, trying to keep the signal you were already giving while achieving the goals you're looking to have by changing your hosting service.

In the case this is impossible, then yes, you would likely have to assume you will be losing a bit of the "geotargeted" relevance you were already giving, and in dependence how you're optimizing the other relevant factors towards this, it might have a stronger or weaker effect.

Thanks!

Hi there,

As Marcus mentioned before, at the moment geographical targeting is country based, not per continent, so you're correct: hreflang works for languages or / and countries and the geotarget option in Google Webmaster Tools (when you're not using a ccTLD) is only for countries.

So there are really two alternatives: language targeting (although each language is different in each country) or country targeting (which is the ideal in order to connect with each audience, localizing the content as maximum and leveraging all types of local characteristics).

With language targeting you will avoid having content duplication issues (since it will be only one English or one Spanish version), nonetheless, as I mentioned, it can be tricky: The Spanish spoken in Spain is different than the one from Mexico and each other Latin American country. Seasonality and currency are different. People's culture, tastes and local characteristics too. So language based versions might serve to have a "generic" approach to these audience but not really targeting them as specific markets.

On the other hand with country targeting if you have two English versions you can refer each one to the appropriate country with hreflang, ccTLDs (if you use a generic domain, then with the geotarget option in Google Webmaster tool) and then by doing local link building focused on each country, to enhance the popularity of each version there. This would be the recommended approach. If you can't enable many countries because of resources restrictions then start with the most important ones.

More over, from what you mention about targeting Europe as a whole, even if you enable a domain of the type: www.yourbrand.eu for Europe, it is likely to be treated as a generic domain as Google specifies here, and then inside this domain what you would really have --as I understand from your description-- are language versions targeting Europe in General:

• www.yourbrand.eu/ in English (UK, Ireland, etc.)
• www.yourbrand.eu/fr/ in French (In France, Belgium, Switzerland)
• www.yourbrand.eu/es/ in Spanish
• www.yourbrand.eu/de/ in German (for Germany, Switzerland or Austria)

The issue comes when you have the same content in English for your American audience in www.yourbrand.com or in Spanish (for Spanish speakers in the US) in www.yourbrand.com/es/ that could cause a content duplication issue with www.yourbrand.eu/ and www.yourbrand.eu/es/.

If this is the scenario, then the best you can do is to differentiate the content, changing them by giving signals that one is targeting the US audience and the other, well, what would be English speakers in Europe. But again, there's no real support or straight-forward solution for this scenario since beyond what Google supports, is not "natural" or the best alternative from an "international audience targeting" perspective.

If you have any other information that you think would be relevant to give you additional recommendations please let me know.

I hope this helps!

Hi Thomas,

Why do you want to merge them on a single domain? If you want to consolidate everything on a single .com domain -which is recommended in case you don't want complexity and capitalize your authority better, while targeting international markets effectively-, then it would be to:

• Migrate by 301-redirecting your current domains to their relevant country directories that you will enable in your .com, and that should be geolocalized independently each one through the Google Search Console (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en) to their specific countries: .com/gb/ to the UK and .com/us/ to the US, so each one of them can effectively be geo-targeted. Since you have an independent mobile site on an "m" subdomain this case you also have to do the same for them: m.yourbrand.com/gb/ geolocalized to the UK and m.yourbrand.com/us/ geolocalized to the US.

• Use hreflang annotations (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en) to specify for each one of the site pages their language and country alternatives, for example:

• Since you will be moving domains anyway, I'll directly migrate to the new .com site already using SSL, instead of splitting these two migrations by migrating to the .com first and then doing a migration towards the https version of the .com a few months after, the direct migration towards the https version will add maybe a bit more of complexity and additional validations to make, but since you're migrating anyway many of them you'd need to follow and do anyway.

• Finally, be aware that after any change of a Web structure, specially from one domain to another (and if this other doesn't have a highly authoritative link profile yet) will always have a short-term negative effect, so is important that you start an SEO process not only to make sure you follow best practices when migrating but to validate afterwards and grow the new domains results based on what has been found on a technical, content and link profile audit and the desired results: Optimizing the new Web structure, Optimizing or creating content,  optimizing or creating links, etc.

I hope this helps!

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Melissa,

To avoid your Mobile URLs to get indexed on the desktop results you need to:

• Add rel=canonical annotations in each Mobile URL pointing to their desktop URL versions
• Add rel=alternate annotations in each Desktop URL pointing to their mobile URL versions

As Google specifies here and you can see in this graphic. Additionally, you can also see in those Google recommendations how you need to set 301 redirects to refer between your mobile and desktop URLs according to the user agent (mobile or desktop) used, as you can see in this other graphic too.

If you look to optimize more your site towards Mobile SEO, you can also take a look at this Moz post I wrote some months ago.

Thanks!