Welcome to the Q&A Forum

As written by David Sottimano in a comment to my post about International SEO, first consider this:

"Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site." - support.google.com source

__That's just general advice.

Ask your client this: is it absolutely necessary to deliver the Irish user exclusively to the Irish site? Should the Irish user be able to see other sites?

If the answers are yes and no respectively, you can get away with IP sniffing & server side redirects as long as you do not force redirection on American IPs (Note: Gbot still crawls from the US, but if they change, this won't work). The downsides; usability issues, and the fact that American IPs can see anything they want.

You could also use client side redirection (javascript) with even American IPs with no real consequence (Gbot shouldn't* execute the JS). This is a bit more flimsy, and won't work at all with JS disabled users. Maybe use http://www.wipmania.com/en/api/ for example, and maybe test to see what pisses people off less?

Said that... I would not use geo redirections, but present a box hover or bar (as it does Google when you visit, for instance, Google.it from Finland) where asking if the want to visit the .eu site or prefer to visit the US one (and vice versa). That way you are sure your site will be crawled with not problems (at least not this problem).

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For the duplicated content issue, check out what I write about the rel="alternate" hreflang in my post here on Moz.

Hi,

first of all, even if the EMD Update never rolled out outside of Google.com and English, I would try to avoid just relying on the advantages of having an EMD in order to rank.

That means that you would need to try to make of your domain name your brand name. I know it may sound difficult, given the domain name, but that what with time a tourist portal as Booking.com did (can you imagine a better EMD than booking.com?).

So, usually that can be done making the brand name the same of the domain name, hence including the tld .nl in the brand name. That can be obtained putting the domain name at the end like this: blah blah blah | vakantiehuizen-italie.nl

In the beginning of the Title tag you can put a semantic variation of the domain name... something like: Enjoy the best holidays in Italy... (being holidays a synonym of vacation, which is the first meaning of vakantienhuizen).

Said that, making your EMD a brand is not just a question of things like these ones of On Site SEO. You should try to create content or occasions that start people actively searching for your brand name (your domain) in association with your keywords (i.e.: trip to Italy, hotel in Rome...)

Related to the Class C ip question... it's all matter of not offering evident footprints to Google.

If you are linked from site in the same Class C IP, that maybe may mean that you are receiving links from a web ring. The same if you link out only to site in the same Class C IP... it seems you are creating a web ring with other sites.

And if the register of the domains is always the same, that is an even easier way to detect something sneaky

In your case I would use the hreflang mark up like this:

That way you are saying to Google that whenever a search is realized in English (and independently of the country, because the code used is just the ISO language code), it must present the English home page URL.

Vice versa, if a search is done in flemish (independently of the location), it must present the Flemish home page.

This should be repeated for all the pages of the site.

As always, it depends.

Is your site an ecommerce site with thousand hundreds if not more products. Or a news site? Then, maybe, the best thing to do should be using country code level domains, because - apart better for geotargeting - the technical maintaining of three complete ecommerce/news sites under in a subfolder system is not the most agile (especially if the site is custom made).

If the case if the one described above, but the ccTLDs are not available, then subdomains can be an alternative.

If your site is not an very technically complex ecommerce or news site, then use subfolders, but consider, if you see that one of the subfolders has very good metrics (sessions, conversions) to move it to a ccTLDs in the middle/long term.

No chatter today about an update like Panda or Penguin.

Sincerely I think you site has been banned from Google... doing a site command no document of you site comes out.

This happens when something like cloaking, malware, doorways or something of that kind is present on the site.

Sincerely I had not the time to check your site deeply..

_For each subdomain (es.example.com/blah-blah for this example), I need to place the hreflang tag pointing to the page the subdomain is on (es.example.com/blah-blah), in addition to every other 28 subdomains that have that page (it.example.com/blah-blah, etc). In addition, I need to place a canonical tag pointing to the main www. version of the website. So I would have 29 hreflang tags, plus a canonical tag. _

Everything correct but the canonical part (but maybe I misunderstood what you wrote).

If the different country targeting pages are in different languages, then you don't have to point the rel="canonical" to the main www. version. NOT AT ALL, because they are not identical. You will start seeing the search snippets of the URLs of those geo-targeted versions (shown because of the hreflang) using the title tag and meta description of the www. version page. So, for instance, the search snippet of the Italian version having the Italian URL but everything else in English. If you need to use the rel="canonical" it should be self-referential (if not another in same cases, but of the same subdomain)

I'd add one condition:

we do really want our images to rank in Google Images? Maybe we don't want that, especially since Google Images is not anymore that great source of traffic it was before its layout changed (we can see photos directly inside Google without clicking the "see the page" link). If it is so, I would prioritizes the image sitemaps.

But if you want your images indexed, picked up (and hotlinked) by other site or directly stolen but with you being able to find who used them without credit, then the image sitemap is needed:

here an example directly by Google: http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1/sitemap-image.xsd.

I don't know what CMS are you using, but if it WordPress, the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin automatically generates the image sitemaps.

Hi David.

You are right... creating three identical sites on three different geo-targeted domain names can be a problem.

However, if you implement the hreflang tags in order to tell Google what URL to show depending of the geography of the targeted user (see more here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en) will avoid the risk of duplicated content and to see the stronger domain outranking the one meant, for instance, for Japan in Japan.

Said that, this "full duplication" strategy can be only very temporary, because it does not have much sense targeting users living in different countries with the exact matching content:

1. American English is different than British English;
2. In Japan people simply don't search in English, and maybe neither use Google as main search engine (it is Yahoo).
3. The culture, hence how people use internet and search on the web, is different in the three countries (slightly different in the case of USA and UK, enormously in the case of Japan).

So... yes, the strategy proposed is not the most effective one, despite of the advantages of the hreflang mark up implementation.

The answers you received here in the thread are correct:

your sitemap implementation is wrong, because it commits a classic mistake: self-referencing hreflang annotations are missing.

In other words, you must declare that the URL http://www.example.com/uk/dvrs-kits is the one Google must show to English speaking users in the UK.

So you must add this:

Seeing the changes taking place in the SERPs is not immediate.

If I understood well, your .com website has good traffic from the USA, albeit you’re targeting the UK as a market.

the solution I see it to create a mirror website under .com/is/ and geotarget that subfolder to United States in Google Search Console, while geotargeting the domain to UKz

Then, I’d implement the hreflang tags so to indicate to Google that it must show the UK URLs to people searching from UK (hreflang=“en-Gb”) anddto show the US ones to USA searchers.

However, being the 2 versions identical, I’d canonicalize the USA versions n toward the UK one. Be aware that this is not how Google suggests to implement the hreflang, but John Mueller himself confirmed to Glenn Gabe that this is the correct thing to do for avoiding Google to consolidate the duplicated content using a version which is not the one you prefer.

fianlly, if you still want to target also English speaking users not from UK or USA (I.e.: Canadians), you could add a third hreflang annotation like this: hreflang=“en“.

Mmm... Patrick, albeit you're sharing good resources and giving good general advices, you are not giving a proper answer... and as a moderator about International SEO Q&A I saw you tend to do this frequently.

For instance, you are talking about the hreflang annotation toward the /fr/ homepage, but you are not advising that it is missing the hreflang annotation to the /nl/ version of the site and URL. Using the hreflang would be probably more effective that using the rel="canonical" in a case like this one.

So, you are not really answering to the problem "Happy SEO" has, which is why Google is indexing the root domain despite of the canonicalization toward the /nl/ subfolder.

Please, don't take it personally, but it is something I had to point it out.

Many are already listed. So... I'm proposing::

1. Brand marketing SEO > from unknown online eCommerce to recognized brand (this could involve the concept of Entity);

2. Link building in super competitive and with not immaculate reputation fields: e.g. Gambling and Co.

3. Schema.org and its SEO implications

4. SEO for small business tourist sites (aka: hotel not in a chain, b&b...) >> how to compete against the Tourist Review Sites (e.g.: Booking, Expedia...). Not strictly related to Local Search.

5. International SEO, Inbound and Web Marketing (that could include something about the concept of different CRO for different cultures...)

Surely I will find other topics

Hi "Happy SEO",

first of all, my question is:

Why do you really need to have the /nl/ subfolder shown in the index, if the root itself is in Dutch by default. Experience tells me that it is much easier to receive links to a domain than a subfolder, so pretending to have this one indexed is somehow adding a difficulty in term of link building.

Said that, if you really want the /nl/ subfolder to be indexed instead of the root domain, why don't simply redirect 301 the domain name to the /nl/ subfolder?

From the little I know about your site, that would be the most logic thing to do

Robert gave a great answer, but I may offer you an alternative.

It is true that all your sites linking one each other may seem a classic link wheel, but sometimes - and maybe it is your case - there are occasion when a business company runs more site for its different brands.

In that case the fact each site links to the others in not absolutely a spammy thing, but a brand consistence necessity.

But, in order to make clear you are not doing any suspicious link wheel, the best way is to create a good About Us page where you tell the nature of the site and that is part of a bigger project which see also the existance of other sites, which you briefly describe and link to (and maybe in a subsection with H2 heading: "Our international sites" or "Our international presence).

Doing that way you link your sites one each other, but editorially and just in a very topically defined page (the About Us).

So, you will also avoid to the links in places which are surely devaluated (i.e.: footer links).

The Dirk answer points to some potential answers.

Said that, when I click on your SERP's link, I see others sitelinks (just two):

• the first >>> Robes
• the second >>> Вся распродажа.

As Dirk pointed out, your site has detected my IP (quite surely, but maybe it is user agent), and when I click on the second sitelink I see this url: http://www.revolveclothing.es/r/Brands.jsp?aliasURL=sale/all-sale-items/br/54cc7b&&n=s&s=d&c=All+Sale+Items.

The biggest problem, when it comes to IP redirections, is that they are a big problem in terms both of SEO and usability:

1. SEO, because googlebot (and others bots) will mostly be redirected to the USA version due to their IPs, even though Google crawls site also from datacenters present in other country (but much less);
2. Users, because you are making impossible, for instance, to a Spanish user to see the Spanish site whenever they are not in Spain. And that really sucks and pisses off users.

There's a solution:

1. making the IP redirection just the first time someone click on a link to your site and if that link is not corresponding to the version of the country from were users and bots are clicking;

2. presenting the links to the others country versions of your site, so that:

3. bots will follow those links and discover those versions (but not being redirected again);

4. users are free to go to the version of your site they really need (but not being redirected again if coming from those country selector links).

Said that, it would be better using a system like the one Amazon uses, which consists not forcing a redirection because of IP, but detecting it and launching an alert on-screen, something like: "We see that you are visiting us from [Country X]. Maybe you will prefer visiting [url to user's country site]".

Then, i just checked the hreflang implementation, and it seems it was implemented correctly (at least after a very fast review with Flang).

I tried to search for "Resolve clothing" in Spain incognito and not personalized search, and it shows me the Spanish website and Spanish sitelinks correctly;

I tried the same search from Spain but letting Google consider my user-agent (setup for English in search), and I saw the .com version and English sitelinks (which is fine).

Remember, sitelinks are decided by Goggle and we can only demote them.

To conclude, I think the real reason has to be searched not in a real international SEO issue (but check out the IP redirection), but to a possible and more general indexation problem.

Normally the Facebook stream widget (and Twitter timeline one) are iframes, therefore not visible to spyders.

And I am not sure the XFBML version of the widget is visible as well.

The correct answer is: yes, but is it not a major factor.

You can find more insights here: Working with multi-regional sites, an official post published in the Google Webmaster Blog. It is dated 2010, but it is still valid (or better, even more valid about the server location):

It says this about the server location as Geotargeting factor:

Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.

Said that, a best practice is to follow one of these options:

1. hosting the site in the country targeted;
2. using an IP assigned to the targeted country and operate via proxy

Question:

Why https://www.locationshawaii.com/jp/hawaii/hamakua-real-estate.aspx and https://www.locationshawaii.com/hawaii/hamakua-real-estate.aspx appear to me both in Japanese?

(this happens if first I visited the Japanese version).

Second big mistake: your language switcher in the header is Java... cannot be seen by bots. Change it, because I'm quite confident that the message you're seeing are also because of it. In fact, the hreflang annotations are correctly implemented (saw manually and using flang.dejan.com.au test tool).

Finally... try to avoid Google Translate as a way to translate content on site and, please, localize ALL the content (specifically navigation menu, sidebar links, banners...)

Ryan has given a good explication of Creative Commons.

if you want to learn more and understand what all the existing CC licences means and what you have to do for a correct attribution, I suggest to visit this official page http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Instead, a very useful source where to search for content (not just photos) that exists under a Creative Common licence, I suggest you to visit and use this: http://search.creativecommons.org/