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That notification seems confirming my supposition that Google is consolidating that homepage with some other of the existing ones... hence, I'd test the canonical hack I explained above.

Hi!

I see that the website you link to in your question is a WordPress.

So, my question: do you have Yoast SEO installed?

If the answer is yes, then you should be aware that since April 2018 Yoast SEO changed how the default set up of the media attachment URLs of WordPress are treated by the plugin.

Since then, you must explicitly tell the plugin to not let those URLs (created by WordPress, not Yoast, to be clear) indexed.

Many other websites using Yoast are suffering this kind of issue (this is the bad of not reading the plugin updates' specifications), so that Yoast itself published this post few days ago https://yoast.com/media-attachment-urls/, which explain how to correctly set up the plugin and what to do to purge the Index of your media attachment URLs (aka deindexing them).

I hope this will help you out.

EGOL was right asking more information also for one precise reason: in some website a "thin page" maybe the best thing the same website can offer to a visitor because that page answers exactly to what the user needs from it.

That is why so often the Googlers say that thin content per se it's not a problem.

It's a problem if it is due to some technical issue or because of bad on-page SEO (i.e.: a page with a photo and no caption and written description of the photo).

So, to better answer your question, we need to know more about the nature of those thin pages you are talking about.

p.d.: using "noindex, follow" is not anymore suggested by Googlers. In fact, few months ago, John Mueller declared that if Google sees a page with a noindex,follow for a long time, then it will start considering the "follow" as a nofollow", so the original reason of its use won't be satisfied.

Enriching your keyword thesaurus with the words Google bolds in the SERP for your main keyword is correct.

In fact, they are synonyms or what Google as "synonyms" of your keywords or "query".

I do the same, and it works... albeit it's a very manual procedure, so I wouldn't recommend it as a general task you do for every keyword you are targeting.

Apple is doing what is doing because it decided to go the subfolders way for their main website, but they obviously own also the ccTlds for brand protection and redirect them.

Once, though, it was using subdomains for its ecommerce part (now they are subfolders under each country section.

Actually, it is not correct to say that one solution (subfolders, ccTld or subdomains) is better than another. It all depends on the specific business needs and, secondly, on technological needs.

However, it is true that when a company is starting an internationalization of its business, a better option is going with subfolders, so to give them some strength via internal linking, while not forgetting to improve the popularity and authority of the country targeting subfolders with localized link building and digital PR campaigns.

On a middle/long term, though, and traffic and conversion metrics justify it, it may be better to move the subfolder to a unique domain name geotargeted to the marketed country. The reason of this choice can also be found out of the SEO world (i.e.: in the UK the marketing strategy is different than in the USA because of nuances of the same UK market or different seasonality).

Regarding hosting... having a site hosted in the country the site itself is targeting is not anymore a ranking factor in International SEO since when cloud hosting became mainstream.

However, it still remains a (tiny) geotargeting signal for Google, as they repeated sometimes on Twitter and Google Hangouts.

In the case of markets where Google is not the main search engine, but others like Baidu in China, Naver in Korea, Yahoo in Japan and Yandex in Russian speaking countries, then I would strongly suggest to go for ccTlds, because those search engines do not work the same way Google does (hence, SEO it's different. A good example of this is Naver).

Hi vtmoz!

Did the issue you described here still present?

Hi... I'm sorry to tell you that the answer offered by Gaston is not totally correct.

So, in your Spanish page you have these hreflang and canonical annotations:

This is not correct because you are not adding also the self-referential hreflang annotation

Google is very precise about this, and it states its need in the help pages as well in many Googlers tweets and webmaster office hangouts.

The rel="canonical" is correct. Remember that the self-referential and the alternative href URLs must always be canonicals.

Finally, regarding the subfolders blocked via robots.txt, yes! that's totally incorrect:

if you're blocking Googlebot from accessing the Spanish, French and Italian subfolders, then Googlebot won't be able to parse the code of their pages, hence it won't be able to see also the hreflang annotations... with obvious erroneous consequences.

Your question is quite convoluted, so I hope to answer it correctly :-).

My first thought when reading your question was: "Why do they want to associate two so different set of products?".

I mean, I fully understand that you are moved by SEO consideration, but - honestly - SEO should not enslave business considerations and logic.

Widget and Gears are two totally different kinds of products and, especially, they have very different kind of buyer personas. In other words: the buyer personas targeted by the widgets website not necessarily are interested in gears.

Plus, also on an entity level, there's no connection between widgets and gears, hence also for Google would be hard to start understanding for what entity set is relevant the website if it is not presenting itself as a broader ecommerce store.

So, strategically, I would not start with SEO (bear with me...) as the main channel for the new gear website, but on branding, creating a dedicated website in a dedicated unique domain name.

Hence, I'd create campaigns to support the launching of the new website and line of products, so to create a solid backlink profile from the start, which will obviously help in rankings.

Said that, I would take advantage of the visibility of the Widget website for announcing the new Gear one (I suppose the widget site has a news section and an About Us section, under which you can create a landing page explaining what other "companies/websites" are part of the "Businesses company owning the Widget website".

First of all, the answer given by Kate is totally correct, so consider it.

However, I will try to answer your question from a different perspective and starting from considering that there's a serious reason why your client needs to have different websites for targeting different countries where the same language is spoken (i.e.: some products are not available in every geography, or the client is marketing the services/products with different messages or, simply, the business company has also a physical presence in the targeted countries).

So, considering that starting point, we can find ourselves in 2 situations.

The first is the ideal one: the websites - albeit substantially identical in their purposes - are localized (different content or simply a different "writing" of the content from site to site, attention to the country level nuances of the language (i.e.: respecting British English orthography in the UK website).

In this case - apart geotargeting the domain (if its a generic domain name) via GSC or relying on the automatic geo-targeting the country code domain names have and earning "local" backlinks - you should implement the hreflang annotation in order to indicate to Google what URL to show to searchers depending on their language and location.

The 2nd case is more tricky and, unfortunately, more common: the websites targeting different countries but having the same identical content from site to site.

In this case, you should still need to implement the hreflang but, contrary to all written and available documentation, you should canonicalize all the duplicated website to the "canonical" one while indicating in the href element of the hreflang the canonicalized alternative URLs.

As I said, this is not "documented" in any Google help pages because it's formally the wrong way to implement the hreflang. In fact, we all know that that alternative and self-referential hrefs must always be "canonical" URLs.

However, this is a strong and valid exception, and it has been validated as such by John Mueller in a tweet answering a question by Glenn Gabe about this same situation.

Said all this, when it comes to hreflang implementation in this kind of situation, I always suggest running a test on a limited set of URLs before implementing it broadly.

Finally, you're asking if you can do it this on WordPress. Sure you can.

Equivalent means two or more pages that even if are targeting different languages and/or countries serve the same purpose.

The easiest example is the homepage of the same brand that is targeting 3 different countries. One may be in Spanish, one in English and one in Italian; plus they can be in 3 different domain names. Despite of all the differences, they are equivalent.

The same is for services pages or product pages. If product A is sold in the englis website, and Spanish and Italian one, even if their URLs structure is different and their content is different (for instance for the same different language), however they still equivalent.

However, if your site are targeting different countries each one with a different language from the others, you can also consider the idea of not implementing the hreflang, but in those pages where brand name search is prevalent (how me page, contact page).

but, yes, the hreflang is a must if two or more sites are in the same language even if each one of them targets a different country (eg: USA, Canada and UK).

Finally, the fact that the different website you have are not Morris sites, its a plus and ideally what all websites doing international must behave.

Your question is not very clear, sincerely.

if the product pages that marketing only the USA users iare the only ones existing of those products (aka: there aren’t Uk product pages for those same products), then you must not implement the hreflang.

The hreflang is a rel=“alternate”, which means that it must always show an alternative URL to the current one. In the ISA product page it should signal as alternative UK users the UK ones, and viceversa.

so, if no UK product page exists, then the hreflang does not have an meaning to exist.

regarding your second question, if the USA market is very important for you and you want to market it differently thean you are marketing the UK one, then it may be a good idea to create an USa version of your site.

Despite the efforts, this answer do not respond to the question

Localization of the content of the landing page (from IRL to title tag and meta description to text in the page itself.

Geotargeting the landing page: if it is in a separate subfolders and the domain is a generic domain name, then you can eventually create a Google Search Console for that folder and geotargeting to the intended country in the International Targeting Page of the prope itself.

An alternative to subfolser is having the landing page you want to geotarget in a subdomain and then geotargeting it as I describe above.

If you want to create a landing page in a separate domain, then it would be better a country code domain name like, for instance, .es for Spain.

if the landing page exists in different country versions, then it would opportune to implement the hr so to indicate to Google What landing page to show in the SERPS depending from where the searchers is searching from.

Finally, links from site targeting the country the landing page is targeting too.

having a hosting in the targeted country is not anymore and international seo ranking factor.

Hola!

The hreflang is not something based on authority or popularity: it is a “swapper”.

i use that term consciously because “swapping URLs“ is how John Mueller define what the hreflang does.

When Google sees that we are indicating that a URL is the correct one for a given geography, and in that geography is already ranking another URL, then Google will swap the two URLs and start showing the new one.

This means that Google should start showing the .co.uk URLs instead of the .com mes.

However, I suggest you to test this on a limited set of URLs and see the results. If the swap happens, then you can proceed extending the hreflang to all both websites.

Finally, surely it is fundamental to optimize the .co.uk websites, at least starting with basic on page and tech seo action and then, hopefully, with improving their link profiles.

in fact, even if the swapping works, you then must maintain the rankings.

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“.

I would do exactly the same... but I would do more: if a page in the /ru/ subfolder is not translated to Russian, then I would see if it's possible to not even create a clone that I must, then, canonicalize.

I see "I would see" because I don't the website, hence I don't know if there's a business reason behind this useless duplication.

Said that, my suggestion is the best one, sincerely, also for avoiding crawl budget waste (rel="canonical" doesn't prevent a page from being crawled).

Regarding you worry, you should not worry about it because this is a plausible case for using the rel="canonical".

However, if you're fearing it, you have also this option: implementing the hreflang and setting it up to "en-ru" for the English pages targeting Russia and simply "en" in the ones targeting the English speaking users in the rest of the world.

In that case, you should avoid the cross geo-targeted pages canonical, and implement the rel="canonical" as if you were working on two separate websites.

No.

Gaston, your answer is correct (albeit not complete... see my answer below).

Plus: when linking to posts and guides, even if they are by Moz, always explain why they can be useful.

The answer offered by Gaston is correct, but it's not the only option available.

You can consolidate the three websites under the .com one and geo-target the /fr/ and /de/ subfolder via Google Search Console.

However, I wouldn't install 3 different WordPress, but only one and use the WPML plugin (https://wpml.org/documentation/getting-started-guide/), which works with no issues with all major WordPress plugins usually used for SEO (like Yoast SEO).

I don't pitfalls in a consolidation, but every international strategy really is unique and, not knowing the details of yours I cannot give you a firm positive (or negative) answer.