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301 and only 301.

Don't assume that "renowned websites" inevitably do also good SEO

Marie... you're answers are not totally correct.

Please, see my answer below.

Here my answers, that partly correct what others answered already (not that they were wrong, but not totally exact).

• Should the alternate hreflang tags show every existing language versions including the one you're on or only show the alternative versions?

Not really. Let me explain.

• In the case of websites/subfolders/subdomains, which share the same language (eg: USA, UK, AU or ES, MX, AR), using hreflang for every language-country is a must.

• In the case you have also single websites/subfolders/subdomains that use a unique language (eg.: Italian, which is practically used only in Italy), than you can avoid to add its related hreflang annotation in internal URLs. You should still use it for the home page and every page that may target a not-Italian keyword: I say this so to not see the local site outranked by the most powerful version (usually the English-USA one).

• In every case you must always implement the hreflang the self-referral annotation (the one you're on, as you defined it).

1. Do we risk penalty by having identical or almost identical content for same language websites (could be UK and the global .com one) if we use the alternate hreflang tags? I'm aware that we should use the native spellings and sentences in each country.

No! The hreflang annotation is substantially telling Google that the versions are different and target different users/countries. Even though the differences are very tiny, they are very important (eg.: currencies)

• Would the sitemap solution be better in our case?

It depends. Both the sitemaps and code solutions are valid. The problem of the sitemaps solutions is that it may be harder to update the sitemaps.

• We have the same link structure for all websites, but the sub-directories can differ due to their language (like /articles/ is /artikler/ in danish) - is that an issue?

No! On the contrary, that's the correct thing to do. In fact, also the URLs must be localized.

• Will hreflang="en" function as global english? (so searching users that we don't have a local website for will see that).

Yes, but not with the consequences you are thinking. The "en" only hreflang annotation is telling Google to show that URL to all the English speaking users all over the world (this suggestion is override if exists, for instance, another en-US hreflang annotation).

For having also Spanish users seeing the generic English version of the website, then you should use the hreflang x-default annotation (see here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html)

Thanks for the clarification... and sorry for the delay in this answer.

If you're targeting located in Spain only, then you have to geotarget your domain to Spain via search console and then using hreflang for telling google that speaking English users in Spain must see the EN version of it.

So the hreflang annotations should look like this:

<rel="alternate" href="www.domain.com" hreflang="es-ES"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" href="www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-ES"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" href="www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="pt-ES"></rel="alternate">

As you can see quite different from how you wrote the code.

"ES" is Spain (target Spain only), and "es" means "target Spanish speaking people" and "en" "target English speaking people"...

if you use this: , you're telling google to target Spanish speaking people in Mexico, and not "target Mexican Spanish people".

Given all the other geotargeting factors are fine, using a domain name whose IP is from USA would be a good added signal.

Remember, you don't necessarily need to have your site hosted in the USA for having a USA IP.

Hi Pieter,

can you answer to this question?

I checked you .nl website with flang by Dejan SEO, and it is not showing me any hreflang annotation... I check directly looked into the code and confirmed that was not a Flang mistake.

So... are you using hreflang in your sitemaps.xml file?

Hi Geraldine,

unfortunately, even though it is possible to obtain something like local P.O. Boxes and phone numbers, the issue is that Google deprecates their use for MyBusiness (Local Search). In other words, Google wants real offices with real phone numbers et al.

So, I see it hard for you to use Local Search in Google for earning more visibility if you do not have a real office in those countries.

However, you can still consider to buy local phone numbers, which then redirect to your UK customer care/commercial office and show them in your .de, .it and .fr websites, so users can call to those numbers. That would be users friendly and may improve the contacts conversions (something that you'd need to track with analytics).

I see that you already decided to stick with the .com domain.

It's fine, albeit a conservative choice, even though I would have started considering more seriously the idea of migrating to a .com.au domain name if - as you say - you're struggling vs those ccTlds domains, which outrank you even if objective factors (link profile, DA, PA) are better in your case.

I say it because of the lift effect a ccTld may mean: given parity of pondered factor, one ranking signal improved can provide you a big positive change.

However, I agree with you that migrating your domain may be a risk because of all the things that can go wrong during a migration.

Therefore, look at others geotargeting signals. For instance, look at from where your backlinks are coming. You say you have clients from all over the world, therefore I suspect that you target the global market also when creating the link profile of your site, and considered less important earning links from local websites or sites targeting your region.

Maybe you should start targeting more also those sites, so to give a clear geotargeting sitgnal to Google.

Obviously, this is a generic suggestion, as I don't know that much about your site and niche, but remember: international SEO is not just about domain terminations and geo-targeting in Search Console, but also many others signals, being the origin of inbound links one of the most relevant ones.

Hola,

from your description yours is a case of multilingual SEO, not multi country.

that means that all your planned strategy is wrong :-).

if you geotarget both domains to Spain, you are telling google to geotarget them only to users searching from Spanish IPs, so you'll struggle targeting English speaking people in other countries.

Moreover, if you target languages only, then you don't have to indicate the country ISO code in the hreflang, but only the language one... and that means you are avoiding to fill your code with 100+ hreflang annotations.

also your idea of having two domains names seems wrong to me in your case. It is better having just a .com domain with English as main language and Spanish in a /ES/ subfolder. This way you can take advantage of content marketing and link earning campaigns for the English version also for providing authority to the Spanish one via internal linking (and vice versa).

if, then, you want the Spanish version to explicitly and only target users residing in Spain, you can create a search console profile for the ES subfolder en geotarget it to Spain (of you decide to do do, the hreflang related to Spanish URLs must have es-ES)

Apart everything the others said in their answers, and taking for granted that you see others "foreign" web sites outranking yours, I would consider others things than just geo-targeting factors.

I looked at your web site (which is http://www.fastlaneus.com/... as I supposed reading your username here and searching for it on Google) and, if we consider the main keywords you are targeting:

"Authorized CISCO Training (non personalized SERP)

• I see Cisco ranking in the first 6 positions with its domain/subdomains... this is quite normal;
• I see newhorizons.com, which is a business company with a global presence and with a great link profile (1000+ unique linking domains and DA 63). It's ranking with an internal page, toward which they were able to build and/or earn some deep backlink from 7 unique domain names. This is a good practice in order to strengthen important internal landing pages. So, at first, it seems correct its presence;
• I see pearsonvue.com.. another huge company with global presence and with giant link profile. It ranks worst than newhorizons.com possibly because its on-site SEO is less than perfect, but it is the clear example of how having a great link profile still matters a lot;
• I see lrseducationservices.com, which is company smaller than the others (its a Pearson Vue Test Center too). It's 100% USA based (Illinois). It is not a web site we would expect to see ranking in page 1: a) Almost non-existent link profile and b) the page ranking is not exactly optimized for "Authorized CISCO Training". I don't have the time to dig deeper into the reason why Google shows this site, but I would not exclude a test Google does sometimes (showing something worth in the 1st page and start seeing user signals);
• Finally, in position 10, I see globalknowledge.com. Again another multinational company with a link profile much stronger than the one your site owns.

Good news... fastlaneus.com is ranking in position 11. This means that the situation is not that bad at all.

Maybe you should start thinking more about creating content marketing campaigns that can bring you:

1. Big links;
2. Great brand visibility;
3. Increase of branded and direct traffic.

Other things:

• Improve, then, the quality of your blog, so to earn more interested readers (I read few posts, and they tend to be a masked infomercial).
• Create content you promised with a link (webinars) and that in reality do not exist (I don't see any link to any webinar in the webinar page);
• The webinar page, as everything related to your "community" is sitting in a different domain name (http://fastlane-community.com/). I don't know the reasons of this decision, but maybe you should start thinking about consolidating the community part into the main web site.
• The infographic of your site are not really my style (too verbose)... and they lack of any opportunity to be share (no single page with social media buttons for social sharing and no text commenting the infographic, no embed code for the infographic... nada de nada)
• Your brochures/PDFs are indexed... why? a PDF like this http://www.fastlaneus.com/medi_a/pdf/Cisco-Training_US_8-pg_web.pdf substantially targets the same main keywords you want your organic html landing pages to rank.

And I could continue, but I stop because this is not the place for an audit :D... and also because imagine your site is not fastlaneus.com despite of your user name!!!! :D.

Everything you think about geotargeting and geo-localization of the SERPs is true in theory. In reality Google tends to show the sites it considers better responding to the search intents. And in this effort Google sometimes gets things wrong, as when it presents sites clearly targeting another country (and regional Google) in Google.com.

This also may happen for another reason that in the USA tends to be forgotten.

Formerly Google.com is not only for targeting the USA, but for targeting the global public. It is only because of recurring habit in the States and the same history of Google that made Google.com the preferred Google for targeting USA, so much that if you type in google.us, you are redirected to google.com (302 redirect).

To conclude this "essay"...

1. If you are targeting the USA public, then geo-target your site in Search Console (see links in the others answers);
2. Start thinking about my suggestions above
3. Implement the hreflang annotations, so to suggest Google what site should be presented to the users depending on their location and language.

SEOBandits... one thing is what examples Google presents and another the reality.

The hreflang annotations can be used in every international or multilingual SEO option:

1. ccTlds;
2. Subdomains;
3. Subfolders

Regarding your fear re: Duplicated Content, the hreflang annotations substantially help avoiding this issue, because you are telling Google that those contents may look substantially or entirely identical to it, but they are meant for different users in different geo-location, hence they are not to be considered as duplicates.

Likes are not a ranking factor :D... so thinking they are the reason your UK Facebook page is outranking the German one in google.de is not a correct assumption.

I would look to more classic reason, as the backlinks your UK Facebook page may have and the DE one not.

Try to build links pointing to your German FB page from German webistes. This should be enough for making understand Google to present your DE FB page to German users instead of the UK one.

Finally, the hreflang annotations (presence or not) do not have any influence of how your Facebook pages rank or not.

If they are contextual links, then you should not have any problem and can maintain them as they are.

No need "to hide" them to Google.

First of all, let me see if I understood well the situation...

You are going to have to websites:

1. .co.uk targeting Great Britain
2. .com targeting USA and CA

And then you want to use IP detection for redirecting users to the "correct" website depending on their location...

Honestly, I don't like this tecnique...

1. in the 90% of the cases googlebot comes from an USA IP... if you redirect via IP detection you are always redirecting googlebot to the USA/CA website, substantially not letting it to enter and crawl the UK one.
2. as a user who travels a lot, I hate when a website always redirects me to the version it consider I am interested about just because of the IP address. For instance, if I am in Great Britain for travel and I want to visit the USA version of your site because I most interested in it (eg: because of currencies, or because my account is for the USA site), I would rant like a troll if you were obliging me to use the GB version.

I always consider that the best option is offering the users (and the bots) to visit the website version they want  but using this "tactic": if you detect (from IP or Browser agent) that somehow located in the USA/CA entered in the UK site, you can present an alert saying >>> "We saw you're visiting us from the USA/CA. Maybe you are more interested in visiting our USA website [link to your .com version]"

This is what Amazon does.

As an alternative, use redirection based on user browser detection and not IP. That is safer in regards to googlebot.

Said that, the redirection should be automatic just the first time someone enters in your site, and not always present. With this I mean that if someone from USA enters in your .co.uk site, he will be redirected to the .com, but once landed in the .com site, he will be eventually able to click on the link pointing to the .co.uk  and not being redirected again the to american version.

The use of the hreflang can be useful anyway, especially from Brand searches (aka: "name of the brand" as search term), because in that case you can see your "local country" web site outranked by your most powerful one despite of the geotargeting you have set up in GWT.

Mmm... I wonder if Google decided to do so because of some external factor as, for instance, being the backlinks your website has pointing to www.domain.com and not www.domain.com/nl/, especially if the backlink can be defined as coming from netherland's site or targeting nl audience.

Said that, I still think that maybe your best solution would have been putting all the NL version under the main root and not in a /nl/ subfolder.

Example:

• www.domain.com <<< NL version
• www.domain.com/fr/ <<<< French version
• http://www.vaneyckshutters.com/kwaliteit-shutters/
• http://www.vaneyckshutters.com/fr/applications-de-nos-shutters/

and so on.

Obviously, right now this is not an easy solution, because it implies a sort of migration (tiny and internal, but migration anyway with everything related like 301 from old to new URLs), but possibly is the really valid one.

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

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.

There are two good ways to do interlinking between different country sites:

1. The first one is offering somehow similar to the one you described, but not making it sitewide (as saying, not having the footer links always linking to the home pages), but contextual linking, which means that domain.com/page-a will link in the footer to domain.co.uk/page-a, domain.it/pagina-a, domain.es/pagina-a et al.

2. Doing like Apple does. Having in the footer a link to a country selector page, where you can find all the link to all the different websites. This option is conservative, in the sense that you have just one page linking to all the international sites, hence you don't have to fear Google deciding to penalize sitewide interlinking.

The use of subfolder or ccTlds (or subdomain) should not be decided because of SEO, but because of business reasons.

For instance, if Jeremy does not have already a consistent organic traffic from Denmark, maybe is better starting with a subfolder, which inherits some of the overall domain authority via internal linking, hence can obtain a first boost in organic visibility.

Once the business started having recognition and consistent and continuous traffic, Jeremy will be able to consider to migrate to a ccTld solution (if really needed).

On the contrary, let's say that Jeremy's company has physical offices in Copenhagen and it is an already known brand. Then in that case it would surely better to go for the ccTld way.