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Mmmm... when I enter in KFC.com, I'm not automatically redirected to Spanish (my language accordingly to IP... as if it was a user agent on browser detection, being my browser set up to English, I would have not seen the option hover selector).

I think that that's a good use of IP detection, because it doesn't involve an automatic redirection to the most "presumed" suitable version of the site. That, in fact, would be a problem because googlebot, having an American IP, would be endlessy redirected to the US version of KFC.

Then, if you want to use subdomains (as KFC does), or country code level domains or subfolders, that's something that only you must decide over the base of business questions more than SEO ones:

1. do you have enough presence and visits from the targeted country so to justify a ccTLD? Yes? Go for it. No? Consider subfolder or subdomain;
2. do you have an Ecommerce and, therefore, you have a very complex dbase of products, must deal with very specific country laws about whatever thing (i.e.: products you can't sell, products that may have a special legislation in a given country, VAT issue...). If it is so, then consider the ccTLD or the subdomain option
3. note that 2. is also valid for any huge website. Subfolders, in fact, can be the less optimal solution from a technological point of view when it comes to multicountry
4. You site is not so big and you want to "test" the success it may have when targeting other countries/languages or, maybe, it is still not so strong in terms of visits and conversions from other countries than your mother one, than subfolders possibly are the way to go.

For everything else, then, look at the Aleyda checklist Matt linked in his answer.

Hi Angelo,

I was wondering if you were able to solve this issue or if you ever saw my question above?

Should be this question closed or are you still looking for an answer?

Hi Bulserik

regarding those two questions, if we look just at Google, they are not taken into consideration by Google for International SEO.

On the other:

1. because they don't harm a site;
2. because they are used by Bing for geolocalization and geotargeting (Bing does not use the hreflang)

then, it is a good idea using them.

Check this old but still valid post on Bing about how to geotarget for them: http://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-websites-country-and-language/

Finally, just to be sure:

remember to create Google Webmaster Tools profile for each subfolder and geotarget them for their corresponding countries.

Did you think about blocking in robots.txt Googlebot (or bots in general) from crawling the GTranslated versions of your site?

Your mistake is that you probably used relative URLs and not absolute ones (these are the ones like: http://www.domain.com/)

So, the hreflang in sitemaps.xml for your home page should be this (please note that I put /it/ but you should put the real italian version home page, and that is valid for all URLs:

<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/</loc></url>

As for your second question - mixing matching and not matching URLs in the hreflang annotations - I would not suggest it.

Sure.

Yes.

I suggest you to look at this sources:

1. http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist
2. http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust (don't consider the hreflang chapter, though, because that information I gave is outdated, About it look at the post below);
3. http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights
4. http://www.slideshare.net/aleydasolis/maximizing-your-content-for-your-seo-process-seozone2014

Was the previous site in the your same niche?

That would explain its "stubborn" high visibility in Google.nl, because you should also consider all the not linked mentions the site may have had in its history.

Hreflang surely would be of help, but sincerely I don't know how you can implement it, because it was not thought for sites targeting only one country, but for multilingual and multi-country, hence Google Webmaster Tool could see it as a mistake and won't consider it.

The ideal should be maintaining the same structure of the site, hence /en/blog.

Said that, if that is not possible (i.e.: different cms for the site and the blog), using the other solution (blog/de/, blog/nl/...) would be fine.

That meta is not taken into consideration by Google, but only by Bing (for which is essential).

So, if you don't care about Bing (and I think it is so, being a very tiny percentage of the search market in Belgium), you can avoid it.

You answered yourself.

Use the cross domain canonical in domain1 (domain.be/fr/), being the href of the rel="canonical" the corresponding one of domain2 (domain2.be).

This other tip, then, is a a possible addition, if you have also visits from outside Belgium:

1. Implement hreflang in both domain1 and domain2;
2. In domain1 and domain2 the mark-up referring to the french versions should be:

<rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="http://www.domain2.be"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.domain1.be/fr/"></rel="alternate">

Doing so you will ensure that Google will show always the domain2 French URLs to french speaking people in Belgium, but it will show the French URLs of the domain1 to all the people speaking french and searching from outside Belgium.

note 1: even if you use the hreflang the cross domain canonical should be used as explained at the beginning.

note 2: if you use the hreflang, remember to use it also for expliciting the target of the German and English URLs, and from what I understand, it would be multilingual, not multicountry, hence something like:

<rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.domain1/en/"></rel="alternate">

One fundamental question: is the redirection based on IP detection or user agent?

Because if it is over IP detection, then that's something Google deprecates.

Instead, if it based over User Agent, then 302 and 301 are substantially the same for Google in this case, even though with a 301 you are sure to pass link equity.

On the other hand, why have not you considered these two options:

1. Making the root domain luxury.com the country selector page, so people land there then choose the country they want;
2. Dedicating the luxury.com root to the main country target, not using redirections at all and adding a over alert to all the people entering in the root that exist a version targeting their country (alert based on IP Detection, this time correctly).

Correct, apart the last phrase (If the content is similar/duplicate, also make sure you're setting up hreflang tags).

If content are duplicated, than use cross-domain canonical, being the href of the canonical tag the one of the most important site.

Hreflang, though, must be implemented in order to tell Google to show one URL to its specific geotargeted audience, despite of the canonicalization being present.

Why, because hreflang and rel="canonical" are two different things and hreflang does not substitute rel="canonical".

Sorry for viewing this just now... but - forgive me if I am wrong due to a bad understanding of the question - but I think Tom answer is not correct.

You are telling that your main site is in English, but that has also a Spanish subdomain with just half of it localized in Spanish.

If this is the correct interpretation of the origin of your doubts, than, in the Spanish subdomain the hreflang should be implemented so:

IN CASE OF SPANISH SUBDOMAIN URL WITH SPANISH CONTENT

<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

IN CASE OF SPANISH SUBDOMAIN URL WITH ENGLISH CONTENT

<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

Why? Because those "en" and "es" mean "English Language" and "Spanish Language", so you cannot declare as Spanish something that Spanish is not. As well you cannot declare both URLs as to shown to English speaking users, because that would create an hiccup to Google, who would not know what of the two it has to finally show to English speaking users.

More over, if you don't want to extend the use of the hreflang suggesting also the countries where to show some given URL, then you should canonicalize the spanish.domain.com URL with English content to the original www.domain.com URL.

The idea of using also the country code ISO could solve - somehow - this issue, because writing something like this:

<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

Then you will be telling Google to show the spanish.domain.com URL to the people using english in Spain (Google.es), and the English one to all the people speaking English in the rest of world.

Be aware, though, that Spanish people using Spanish will see in the www.domain.com URL in their Google.es SERPs, because the x-default is telling Google that all the people not using the language indicated in the hreflang="x-X" annotation (which is English), will have to see the main domain URL, and not the spanish subdomain one.

Hreflang is quite a sudoku, but it is extremely logic.

Thanks Lynnp for your answer, but unfortunately the suggestions given and documented with those previous Q&As are not valid anymore, because Google has since few months offered a new interpretation to the hreflang/rel="canonical" co-existence issue (read my answer).

If the hreflang is set up correctly, then the answer is NO.

hreflang and rel="canonical", as stated by Google itself, are two completely different kind of information.

• The first tells Google what URL to show depending on the language and location of users;
• The second tells Google if the URL it is crawling is identical to another one, which is referenced as href in the rel="canonical", therefore to consider it for indexing.

Check this post by David Sottimano, that is quite claryfing (and reports what Google really says now about this kind of situation)

When both annotations are used, we are practically saying this to Google (pardon me for the maybe poor metaphor):

Ok Google, I'm telling you that this URL - A - must be canonicalized to the URL B, so please don't count it as duplicated content. On the other hand, though, for me it is extremely important that you show URL A to the all English speaking users in Great Britain (Google.co.uk). Therefore, just for the situation don't filter out URL A.

Disclaimer: this is true in 99% of the cases, because we know also that the rel="canonical" is not a directive, but a strong hint we are giving to Google.

Because of this it is always a good idea - in the long term - to localize the content, even if American English and British English seems so similar (they aren't). Google has become smart enough to understand the different "flavors" a language may have in different territories.

Hi!

1. Even if it's true that Google determines the importance to give to content - especially internal and external links - depending in what section of a web page it is (header, sidebars, footer, main body), it is quite a myth thinking that "additional" content explaining, for instance, the league table, should be put before for obtaining a better impact. Moreover: is it the table the most important element of your content, the one your users are interested the most? Then burying it under a "text" explaining it would be offering your users a poor experience.
2. Topic modeling should be not perverted into a something needed just because so "Google" will make the page rank better. The consequences will inevitably be horrible, as creating "SEO texts" with almost no value for the user, and even dangerous, because Google could start applying spam filters as keyword stuffing et al. Write naturally, as if you were describing something to someone speaking. If during the description make sense using synonyms and/or introducing related concepts (i.e.: electric guitars in a page about acoustic ones), then go for it. If it doesn't make sense, then don't it. Finally, if with topic modeling you mean "LSI"... then know that LSI is another myth.

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.

Mmm...

if your site has not been translated yet, the correct should be rel="alternate" hreflang="en-FR", but - yes - that would mean that people searching in French from France won't see the /fr subfolder.

On the other hand, using as hreflang "fr-FR" would not be correct.

My best suggestion, in cases like this, is using the hrelang="x-default", where the href is the country selector page, so that people searching in French from France will be pointed to the selector page and, from there being able to click on the french version link.

Another suggestion is to create personalized message telling the French people entering in the site but seeing it is in English that the site is going to be soon translated in their language, but that the products and services are already available for the French market, so inviting them to not bounce back, which should be the most common reaction the users can have.