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Yep

Well, indeed a strange case this one of yours.

If your site is in Spanish, is geo-targeted toward Spain in Google Webmaster Tools, then traffic should mostly from Spain. Or if any other country is popping up, that should something like Mexico or Argentina.

Sincerely this sounds like a mystery to me... so much that I asked clues to John Mueller on G+. Let's see if he will answer

mmm... sincerely I think that you're confusing apples with oranges.

Inbound.org is a website, and when you submit a link to Inbound.org, well... that's a link from a website and it is crawled by MozScape, hence showing up in OpenSiteExplorer, as well in any others Links' tools and, obviously, by Google, which will apply to the site a fraction of PageRank of the linking page if the link is followed.

Hootsuite, instead is shrinking your URLs and publish them in Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter, which have their firehose closed for Google, therefore Google is not counting them as "real links"... and so all the others crawlers.

Said that, the shortened URLs 301 redirect to the original URL, therefore, if they were crawled - and they are sometimes (just think when you have that kind of link crawled from a Slideshare or Topsy) - they were passing PageRank if they are followed.

But to see shortened links shared on Social in tools like OSE or in Webmaster Tools is totally useless, because links in social shares are not crawled.

Ok... let's try to answer to all your questions :).

Subdomain, subdirectories or country level domain names?

For sure I would avoid the subdomain option. Even though you can geo target a subdomain in GWT, it has not the same strenght of a country level domain name and, from a link building point of view, it doesn't help creating a larger link profile and it doesn't take any advantage from the root domain backlinks as the subfolder option.

So you have to choose between country level domain names or subcarpet. The choice, more than to SEO factors, depends on the overall business model you have in mind. If the site is - for instance - for a web based service, maybe the subcarpet is the best solution. If the site should reflect a strong presence in the targeted countries, therefore the best choice is a country level domain name.

Said that, both have advantages and defects:

1. Country level domain names:
   1. Google tends to prize these kinds of domain in the regional Google;
   2. People is used to look for "national" site with its country level domain name
   3. The worst defect is that you have to build as many link building and inbound marketing campaign as the country that are targeted, because they all start with an empty link profile.
2. Subcarpets
   1. You can geo target subcarpet in GWT
   2. Any geo targeted subcarpet take advantages of all the domain name link profile. Let's say. If your domain main version obtain a link from BBC, that links is partly benefitting also the other countries based subcarpet
   3. Subcarpets perform not so well as country level domain names in the regional Googles.

In both option you would remember to implement the use of rel alternate hreflang tag, in order to not having, for instance, the Chile version outranking the Peruan one, or - worst - to have Google considering all those spanish versions as duplicates.

There is a less time/resource intensive route that would give us visibility in ALL spanish speaking territories?

Yes... a good example is the one presented by Apple.com. In fact, it offers www.apple.com /la/ (latin america) subcarpet. They solve the "store" issue addressing the users to its distributors online shops or address.

In the case you have an eCommerce, than you would need to configure all the currencies and prize calculator in order to allow your users to configure the payments using theirs.

Said that, you would need to commit a very strong and "multi-country" link building and inbound marketing campaign in order to rank in every single regional Google with this solution.

Also - if we go with just one of the above (eg ourdomain.com/cl) how likely are we to get traction in other spanish speaking territories?

Theoretically it can happen. But it is mostly an exception, and - sincerely - not very loved by users.

If I look for a content in spanish and I live in Spain (as I do), I would prefer to click on .es or /es/ subcarpet site rather than a /cl/ one of .cl domain name, because I would not consider these latter option useful for my needs.

It all depends on what do you mean for "most important".

What I suggest you is to not limit the examination of the backlinks into OSE (I imagine you are using it for competitive analysis), but to export the raw datas in .csv format and then start using some Excel magic, in order to analyse the backlinks the way you consider the most suitable to your needs.

I have a question for you Ryan: how much time do you spend here at SEOmoz Q&A? You answer every question Good job, really. But I'd like to see you more commenting the blogs' post (just 3 comments...) Ciao!

Actually what you're saying is not correct. In fact you can geotarget also at subfolder (and subdomain) level via Google Webmaster Tools.

So it is perfectly possible for Ariel to tell to Google that all the content under the subcarpet /es/ for Argentina (but then would be better to call the subfolder /es-ar/) and /pt/ for Brasil (again: maybe is better to call the subfolder /es-ar/).

How to tell to Google that you want to geotarget a subfolder or a subdomain? Doing this: once you’ve added your main site (e.g. domain.com) and verified it in Webmaster Tools, simply register a new site in the same account – but set the new site as domain.com/es (or whichever your root subfolder is named). You can use that account to geo-target to Argentina – the option is in ‘settings’ in the left-hand panel. You can repeat the same process for as many folders as you want to geo-target.

I would not worry about those kind of links. They are very common and Google knows very well that they are somehow automatically generated by the systems behind those sites.

Sincerely, even if they are followed, I quite confident that Google simply discount any potential PageRank (usually very minimal) those sites may pass.

As an add-on, I would really suggest you to implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X" tags in your sitemaps.xml in order to better your international SEO efforts and geotargeting.

Check this official post by Google

Hola Cesar...

de Mozzers castellano hablantes están muchos.. si estuviste al tanto del concurso de MozCation del pasado mes de Mayo, habrás notado como tanto Latino America como España fueron de los más fuertes en competir... tanto que ganaron (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/and-the-winning-city-for-mozcation-is).

Como decía Jennita, lo unico es que por costumbre aquí todos escribimos en inglés, siendo la lengua mayoritariamente utilizada en SEOmoz.

De otra parte, no existen "grupos" formales como puedes encontrar en otros Forum.

Pero sí existimos y somos un buen porcentaje de personas y aumentando.

What Ryan says is perfect...

but i'd like to add another think you should start asap in order to:

1. to start the brand recognition of your client's site;
2. to put the base for future link buliding outreach

Create social profiles (twtiter, facebook and linkedin to start) for your client and start actions like social media marketing, comment marketing (not comment spam marketing), forum, Q&A sites, guest blogging and so on.

Ideally you client site should have to have a blog, and start using it since the day 1 writing NOT PROMOTIONAL posts about its market area and use that same content in order to perform the the inbound actions suggested above.

On Page is surely the start, but inbound should follow - metaphorically -after 5 minutes-

Sorry for the delay in my answer.

When you have detected all the 404 of your website, you can use the "Explore URL" search in Siteexplorer. If are still existing backlinks to those pages, Yahoo Siteexplorer will show them.

To be sure I just did a try with an 404 of a new client of mine, and just discovered that one 404 page was linked by a Yale University page... obviously I've just made an 301

The only way you will tell what is happening is if a manual penalty is corrected and removed, or SERP positions start to climb after an algorithmic penalty.

Not totally true. You never really recover the same ranking when a penalization is lifted, simply because you deleted or disavowed those links that were making your site rank high.

Therefore, as in many extreme cases I saw, if 90% of your link profiles was toxic, and you have both deleted or disavowed, you're site will still be buried in the deepness of SERPs.

That's why every cleaning of the link profile should be accompanied by the creation/earning of new links.

Hi Scott,

sorry to tell you that you're doing International SEO quite bad. No offence, but what you describe is how not to do International SEO.

If you are targeting Spanish end users, you must localize in Spanish everything:

• template elements;
• URLs
• products description
• Titles
• e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g

It is not just a question of SEO, but of usability too. Just revert the situation: what would be your reaction if you enter in a site, click on the english version and everything is written in Spanish?

Obviously, if you have the spanish version of your all in spanish, that will help a lot ranking for spanish queries.

In order to find an answer to your doubts, I warmly suggest you to read this guide to International SEO I wrote here on SEOmoz few time ago: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Ciao

Hi Ian...

for this kind of question I suggest you to use the feedback option (identical to the one you can see here on left with the heart icon).

The help desk will promptly reply to your question.

Ciao

Sha gave  a great answer, but i offer you an alternative:

host the site in YouTube but:

• create a video sitemaps in order to specify that the video is on your site. That way, it is possible that Google will show your video "attached" to your web page in the Unversal Search (both as organic and video result). A quite good video sitemap generator is "A1 Sitemap Generator". If you run on Wordpress you could use this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xml-sitemaps-for-videos/

Then, follow what Paddy Moogan suggests in this post on Distilled: Getting Links and SEO Value from your YouTube Videos

That post explains very easily how to create an embed code for the YouTube video embedded in your page in order to offer the opportunity to others to use it in their sites... and with an attribution link to your site.

Personally it is not my first worry.

But to run a validation check up doesn't cost a lot of time, so I usually do it. If it finds red marked problems, I solve them. But I don't get crazy with the many less important ones.

Apart the good options given by DC1611 (a more human username was bad?), I must tell you that if Flang is telling that your hreflang annotations are not correct, then there are 99% of possibilities that they are not correct.

I declare over the base of my daily work as International SEO, because I never found an occasion that the DejanSEO tool was wrong in its analysis.

Moreover, if you could share the URL that is having this issue highlighted, we could help you better. Or, if you can't for "business" reasons, try to explain better what is your concern and the details causing your doubts.

Ciao

Gianluca

Ecuador, as Mexico, offer both .ec and .com.ec (also Spain does it).

So you can choose one of the two. What's sure is that both will be geotargeting Ecuador.

Only organic searches.