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Yes.

Hi!

Sorry to see only now this question.

I've experienced this issue once and resulted that it was due to the hl=X cookie and the fact that the cookie.

I suggest you check if it's also your case.

Did you implemented the hreflang annotation using the sitemaps.xml methodology?

I'm asking because in this page https://newbridgesilverware.com/jewellery I don't see any hreflang in the code.

Another question... you're talking about a version for UK/IE and one version for the US, but I see only one site and sub folders like it could be /us/ for the United States ecommerce version.

So... are you dynamically changing the content (included meta titles) depending on user IP?

Because if it is so, then the hreflang doesn't work at all and you should, instead, check out this help page by Google https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en, which is about Locale-aware crawling by Googlebot.

However, to be totally sincere, that Google is advising in red in that same page this: We continue to support and recommend using separate locale URL configurations and annotating them with rel=alternate hreflang annotations... makes me recommend you to forget dynamic serving and create two separate versions of your ecommerce and, once done, implement the hreflang annotations.

The answer of Martin is correct. Moreover, the use of subfolder at the start is a good way of giving some strength to the new geo-targeted versions thanks to PageRank flow through internal linking.

However, in the middle term, I suggest you to start monitoring if the new geo-targeted versions are earning enough traffic and conversions (both metrics must always go together) to eventually justify the migration, for instance, of the french version from the subfolder to a .fr domain name.

In the meanwhile, though, remember that, even if the new geo-targeted versions are living into the .com domain and earning authority from the backlinks earned by the .com site, you should consider them as if they were totally separate domains in terms of authority and relevance. In other words: you must build links for your /ie and /fr versions if you want them to really rank for competitive keywords.

Allan, the Google resource is the base.

However, remember always that:

1. Google suggests using always the rel="canonical", even if it's only self-referential.

2. The href in the hreflang must always indicate a canonical URL. If not, Google will consider it a mistake and won't consider the hreflang.

3. If you're targeting two different languages (i.e.: English and Spanish), the use of the hreflang is not strictly necessary, however using it is another signal you give to Google about how you want your urls target a specific audience based on language or language/country.

Usually these kind of mistakes are caused by not using a canonical URL as href in the hreflang annotation.

For instance, if the url is www.domain.com/product-a?=color&id="red" and that same URL is canonicalized toward www.domain.com/product-a, but the hreflang suggest has alternate href an URL like this: www.domain.com/en/product-a?=color&id="red" as alternate URL for English speaking users, and this one too been canonicalized to its own non parametered version (www.domain.com/en/product-a), then Google will start telling that it doesn't see any return url... why, because in the canonical URL the href is not www.domain.com/en/product-a?=color&id="red" but www.domain.com/en/product-a.

The same is true in the case of the self referential hreflang annotation: it must be the canonical URL the one in the href element of the hreflang annotation.

This same question has more answers at this URL: https://moz.com/community/q/international-url-paths. so I close this thread for not having split them.

Before answering, it is me having a question for you:

why the hell do you need to put spanish content under a french subdomain if you already have it in the spanish version of the website? Is this nothing but complicating everything :-)?

Said that, as Steve said, the hreflang itself solves any potential duplicate issue, so you don't need to cross canonicalized any url. Simply remember to use the correct combo of hreflang ISO codes.

In the case of the spanish version of the french subdomain, the hreflang should reference the fr.sudomain.com/es/... and have as pair these: "es-FR", so to target only the spanish speaking people in France.

This way you are not going to messed up with the same kind of URL in targeting spanish speaking users in Spain ("es-ES") or in Great Britain ("es-GB") and so on.

However, it would have been more logical to have only one spanish URL for the videos, and have their hreflang set up as "es" only, so to target all users speaking spanish in every country.

In general that kind of implementation is correct.

I do something similar for a client, who has a similar problem but more on the logistic side (different warehouse depending on the continent).

Said that, considering that some products are only for the European market, I don't see useful to use an hreflang like the "de", which would target all the German speaking users no matter from the where they are... I mean, if they are in the USA, I believe that they are not allowed to buy products that are meant only for the EU geography even if they are German or Austrian.

Regarding IP redirection, it's not an alternative... moreover, it's not an alternative obliging people to be sticked to one country/website because that it not allowed by legislation now.

For instance, if someone from the USA want to see the EU site, he should be allowed to do it (this is also valid - obviously for Googlebot, as it is a user at the end).

What you can do is working on the basket process, and there using the IP recognition for allowing or not a bought depending from the country someone is trying to buy a product or not.

Doing so, you will also avoid the frequent dumping issue (e.g.: European buying in the USA because it is cheaper).

In cases like yours, using the hreflang is the correct way to handle the duplicate content issue, because of the characteristics you yourself cite: currency and localization, which may be tiny differences in terms of "content" but huge in terms of usability and making completely different a product page from another.

Remember that if you canonicalize all the "duplicate" toward the canonical, the canonicalized URLs won't be shown in the countries you're targeting with those URLs... so screwing up the international SEO strategy 100%, so each URL must have as canonical its own URL (self referential), apart the obvious canonicalization rules being applied (e.g.: url with parameter canonicalized to url without parameter).

In case the URL is canonicalized for whatever reason, remember to indicate the canonical URLs in the href of the hreflang annotations. On the contrary Google will start alerting of no-return URLs errors.

Regarding the Moz Pro crawler... don't pay attention to it, because it doesn't consider the hreflang annotation,therefore it will continue saying that those pages are duplicate.

I give you a first very fast answer (I'm on mobile and cannot check tools properly), however at least for this URL http://bifold-hardware.com/ the error is real.

in fact, if the http://bifold-hardware.com/us/hardware suggests http://bifold-hardware.com/ as alternate for australia, then this last URL doesn't indicate the first as alternate, but http://bifold-hardware.com/us.

that means that the no-return error is real.

If you use the hreflang, Google won't consider the alternate URLs as duplicate ever ;-).

However, working on localization is needed in order to have more chances to rank better, and offer better UX.

Refreshing content on the same URL based on the users IP is a very bad decision in terms of international SEO, because Google will see only one of the two versions.

What you have to do is, eventually:

1. or change the visible prices and currencies depending on IP of the users (but letting them still being able to change the currency for UX) but not changing the content.

2. or creating a second version (in subfolder for instance) targeting the other market you desire to target.

The second one is the best solution

Yours is not.

Check out my answer to Nima, because in the beginning I also refute one thing you say about translations and duplicate content.

Farsi is Persian

Then, and this is for CleverPHD, the hreflang, albeit suggested, is not strictly needed because Google is quite good in understanding that they are two different languages. Moreover: Google stated tons of times that translated content is not duplicate content.

I agree on geotargeting, if you mean to target a specific geo-located audience.

You can do that also for subfolder creating a Google Search Console property for the /farsi subfolder and geo-targeting it in the "Internationalization" section. However, I don't think you are desiring to geo-target to USA, because your lawyers are from all the globe. Am I right thinking, then, that your main country target for the farsi version could be Iran itself, so to offer iranian lawyers abroad for Iranian countries, which want to open its business also thanks to the quite recent end of the blockage?

Finally, I tend to agree with Dimitri...

if the target are the farsi speaking people resident in the USA, probably there is not that much search volume in farsi for your niche, even though and accordingly to the 2,011 census about 400,000 people speak it.

On the other hand, if you're targeting Iran, I would also consider the possibility that the Iranian Internet Laws are somehow limiting the visibility of your /farsi subfolder in Google.

Finally, I didn't check out the technical SEO and On Page SEO state of your site, but I would also check them in order to see or discard any other potential issue.

Doing a domain migration without doing a 301 is totally useless.

The rel="canonical" solution is too risky IMHO, because - albeit effective in most of the cases - the rel="canonical" still is only a strong suggestion we give to Google and not a directive. So, personally I consider your idea quite risky.

I don't know the specifications of your site (how big is it? what kind of site is it?...), so do not take my answer for granted.

Personally, I would consider the idea of creating the USA site in a subfolder /en-us/, which you can easily geo-target to USA.

This way you would not have to fear any possible risk related to a migration, even though you should preview a dilution of PageRank because of the internal linking toward the new USA version.

Then, using the hreflang (that you should have to use anyway also if you choose to go forward with your plan), you will avoid the "duplicate content" issue.

On the other hand, what you're describing is a migration, so (honestly) you should work it as a normal domain to domain migration and schedule it so to have concluded before the first half of December.

I understand that all the complicated solution you presented to us is due to the fact that the soon to come USA site will be substantially a duplicate of the UK one, so the problem is:

I've the 301 set -up and running, but I've to quit the 301 if I want the USA site to be visible.

The simplest solution is to create the USA site in a subfolder www.domain.com/us/ and use the homepage www.domain.com as country selector, which can useful in the beginning also to comply all the things you are telling about informing the UK users of the new .co.uk domain.

Just adding the /us/ subfolders all the URL of the new site will be different, hence you can maintain the 301 on place.

Apart what Dr Pete already said in his answer - I suspect that you are talking about the Knowledge Graph box of the Swansea University Medical School (https://www.google.es/search?num=100&q=Swansea+Medicine&spell=1&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwibqcuu7vjPAhWRSxoKHfScCOkQBQgbKAA&biw=1397&bih=911).

If this is the case, then the correct schema.org type should be "Organization" and not "Person".

A good guide can be found here: https://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/#organization.

On the other hand, if you are talking of a personal knowledge graph box, it would be useful for us to know your name and have a snapshot of the KGraph Box, so to investigate better your case

I don't know of any "guide" by Google about how better design an international seo architecture.

However, of the two options you presented, the most common, correct and logic is the second one (domain.com/pt-br/), because the first is substantially burying the Brazilian Portuguese version of your site in the architecture.

Secondly, using the ISO schema "language-country" is also a good way to maintain the consistency in the site, also because those same pairs you will be using when implementing the hreflang annotations (and it is also a way to make understand what iso pairs your developers must use).

Thirdly, internet users recognize very well already what pt-br stands for

Finally, a note. If the brazilian portuguese is the main version of your site, why don't you create it directly in the root of your domain (domain.com directly in brazilian portuguese), when all the other versions will be in their dedicated subdirectories? This is the most common thing to do.

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 answer given by Marcus is 100% perfect.

I'm answering to your doubt about "the compatibility with Moz Analytics", and the answer is that you have not to worry about that, because does not exist anything like a compatibility issue for tools like Moz, Raven or others suites.

On the other hand, remember that the Moz crawler still doesn't consider mark-ups like the hreflang, so it doesn't report advices or mistake related to their implementation.

If you want to verify if the hreflang has been correctly implemented, look to these tools:

• Google Search Console;
• Flang by DejanSEO
• Any advanced crawler like DeepCrawler, Botify or OnPage.org.
• Screaming Frog (but you'll need to create custom filters).