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Bing does not use the rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” markup.

As written by Duane Forrester in this post, Bing relies over a series of signals, the most important being the meta equiv=”content-language” content=”x-X” tag.

And, yes, you can use the meta equiv and hreflang in the same page

Not answering because I am one of the International SEO listed in the Recommended Companies :D, but for giving you few information about what to consider when thinking about going international:

1. As a premise... try to check out if your visibility loss in Google.com was due to Pigeon. That could explain better that your site lost organic traffic in the USA and not in the UK, because Penguin - on the contrary - would have meant a loss in every Google, UK included;
2. On the other hand, there could be the case that it's how Google is interpreting your website that can explain the USA loss. Even if you have a .com generic domain name, it may be that your link profile, your IP (British), your same use of the English language, and other "cultural" factor (currency? NAP?), may be telling Google that your real market is the British one more than the USA or Global one.
3. You have a .com domain name and (not used) a .co.uk one. Sincerely - but that should be confirmed by a deeper analysis - I would not suggest you to move the british site to the .co.uk and, at the same time, converting the .com to "American" or Global. Surely, that could be an option in the future, especially is the two markets have strong distinctive peculiarities, but in the beginning I would suggest you to opt for the subfolder solution (.com for UK and .com/en-us/ for the USA);
4. Remember localization. This can sound obvious, but it is usually overlooked. British English and American English have tiny differences, but Google sees them and looks at them.
5. Another thing... if you have a call center, try to have an American phone number (which you will eventually redirect to your main call center number). That is a classic geo-targeting signal, as well currency and, if exist a local office, the address;
6. Try to design a promotion strategy which target USA websites and influencers, so to start balancing the link profile and avoiding a dominance of backlinks from UK sites.
7. If you do Content Marketing, albeit creating content that is of common interest for both the UK and USA market, try also to create content that can answer to "american" needs. Again, Brits and Americans are different.

Ok... just that.

Ciao!

Actually you may think in building a Global page on Facebook. As you can read in the page I linked, with Global Pages:

Each brand's Global Pages structure will include local Pages for specific markets (single- or multi-country regions) and a default Page for all other markets. More details on this new framework:

• One global brand identity. Users from all countries will see the same Page name (translated into their local language), fan count, and People Talking About This (PTAT).
• One URL. Brands can promote a single URL in all off-Facebook campaigns, and users will be automatically directed to the best version of the Page for them.
• Global insights. Admins of the main Page will see insights for all global users in one easy-to-view dashboard.

The problem is that the requirement really are for strong global brands, as you can see in detail in this post.

Honestly, I looked a lot into the Facebook Business pages and I was not able to see an explicit link for creating a global page. So, I consider right what some experts say that you have to contact Facebook directly via email.

However, if your brand is global, but not with such a big budget so to afford a Global Brand Page, then the only solution is creating as many regional Brand pages as you need.

This is very easy. Just create a page normally, but then indicate in the creation process the region your Page targets for each regional pages.

Hi Harry,

I changed the status to "Discussion", because - as a moderator - I consider that the answers summed up substantially offer you a solution, but - as it is quite common in SEO - there is space for further discussion.

Moreover, the "discussion" status may attract more people into offering valuable opinions.

Apart the two good answers here above, your situation explains why one of the most important (and sadly forgotten) facets of on-site SEO is Internal Linking.

Be always sure to create justified opportunities for internally linking your deepest levels for your strongest upper ones.

For instance, we usually see in the home page that real estates are presented in different ways:

1. New appartments;
2. Most viewed;
3. Most reviewed (if you offer a way to "thumb up"/review/star them
4. etc etc

What we almost never see is using this way of showing "products" on a category and sub-category level. That method, though, would help you giving a strong internal link, which will make stronger the apartments pages that matters the most for your business, because those internal links let the bots to "jump" directly to the apartment's page without the need to pass through too many levels.

That is also one the functions of what I define as topical hub, about what I talked in the WBF linked by Dirk in his comment.

Thanks for citing my WBF Dirk!

About your doubt, Harry, there are few things that are not that clear:

1. Do the migrated domains had a strong home page PA, but a not so strong DA? Or the contrary (stronger DA than home page PA);
2. When the migration had been done, how the backlinks of the migrated domains were treated? Did you ask to update at least the most relevant ones so to point to the new URLs, or you just considered that 301 would have solve this facet of the migration?

I ask this because if the migration was correct in every facet, and the home pages were strong, than the PA  of the new "home pages" on level 1 should be almost the same.

On the other hand, DO NOT confuse PA  with PageRank. They are two very different metrics, as PageRank calculates just the value offered by all the links (internal and external) pointing to a URL, while PA consider also other things (on-page, for instance).

A loss in PR is quite normal, because the new internal linking (links toward deeper levels, but also the link toward the new home page), are redistributing PR (and possibly PA in how PA works) so that a 1:1 coincidence between old situation and new is almost impossible.

In the specific case of a targeting Russia (or China), a .ru is a better solution also because you must consider that Google is not the only über dominant search engine there. All the contrary, the most used is Yandex, and Yandex SEO has many things different from Google SEO, more than, for instance, are the differences between Google and Bing.

That means, that optimizing a web site for Yandex, especially in the link building front, may let you relying on actions that would be not so acceptable for Google.

Identical it's the case of targeting China (Baidu), Korea (Naver) or Japan (Yahoo).

Hi Eva,

your case is quite similar to the Belgium one described in a answer here above.

Said that I did not see anyone pointing you to some important thing that you're maybe forgetting to do.

Your site is a .com, a generic domain name. Generic domain names target the world by default, and that is why you have a lot of visit from Mexico for your Spanish version of the site.

Therefore, what I'd suggest you to do this check:

1. Go to Google Webmaster Tools;
2. Go to: Search Traffic > International Targeting
3. Click on the "Country" tab
4. Control if the site is targeting the USA. If not, target users in United States.

Doing that, you are telling Google that your site is meant for users in the United States and not in others countries, so it won't have that much visibility in regional Googles like google.com.mx.

Then, as suggested by others here, implement the hreflang annotations (read the resources linked in the other answers).

In the specific case of the home pages (yes, both: English version and Spanish version), the annotation will be these:

These hreflang are telling Google:

1. This URL must be presented to all people using Spanish in the USA;

2. This other URL must be presented to all people using English in the USA.

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

They are two different sites and entities, hence no link to .com will have an influence to the .co.uk domain.

Using canonical IS NOT the solution, because if you use canonical the FAQ pages of the canonicalized websites are going to be deindexed.

So, just do it if you really don't care about the traffic those answers can generate for your sites (as you can imagine, this is an ironic suggestion...).

Just use the hreflang, because Google in the last months has become quite smart in understanding that it means that you consider those pages relevant enough for the geo-targeted audiences to not filter them out even if they are substantially identical between country versions.

Said that, try to differentiate the FAQ pages (better localization of the language. i.e.: English UK is slightly different than American English), or even offering a local number for phone inquiries and localized email address for question via email.

In general, it is not a good idea using the crossdomain canonical in International SEO, and it should be used just in exceptional cases.

In order to make things easier you can implement hreflang via sitemaps.xml using this tool by Mediaflow: http://www.themediaflow.com/tool_hreflang.php.

Hola,

I assume your blog is a wordpress.org and not a wordpress.com one.

If so, install the WPML plugin, which (copying and pasting from its website) l_ets you do SEO for each language separately. You can set SEO attributes for the homepage, internal pages and categories for each language. Translations appear in their unique URLs and you can even put different languages in completely different domains. WPML follows Google Webmasters’ specifications for multilingual sites to the letter, letting your sites rank high on local search results. Of course, WPML is fully compatible with SEO plugins._

It will create a /en/ subfolder for the language you're translating your blog to, which seems to be your preferred solution (in other cases, i.e. a WooCommerce based on WP, it may be better using the domain option WPML offers too).

With WPML you will be able to translate everything, not just your posts (template, plugins et al).

The URL structure will mirror the main language one, but translated to English. So if you have something like www.myblog.com/seo/como-hacer-link-building, the English version will be: www.myblog.com/en/seo/how-to-do-link-building.

It also automatically implement the hreflang annotations (so you don't have to think about them).

It is compatible with WordPress SEO by Yoast, so every translated page/post can be finely optimized.

Honestly, even though the answer here above are correct (apart the "English post" category one, which is not really the ideal solution), I warmly suggest you to use WPML.

Hi Alex!

I was wondering if the answer Andy gave you was helpful or not.

If it was, I kindly ask you to change the status of this question to "answered".

Ciao, and happy searching

G.

Hi... I don't know if you have discovered the reason of the mysterious traffic from Sweden.

I've thought about it, and the only justifications I can think about are these:

1. or your company name corresponds also to a real Swedish brand, so Swedish people are entering in your site for brand name searches;

2. or that your domain name - if it a generic one - once was the domain name of a Swedish website, hence with still enough link popularity from Swedish website, so that i can still rank in google.se

Usually the redirects Roberthseo describes are 302.

For instance, I am redirected with the 302 to http://blackpen.tv/language/en/, because I am in Spain when accessing to blackpen.tv.

That means that if somebody from Paris is linking to blackpen.tv and not to the paris.blackpen.tv subdomain, no link equity is passed because of the 302, even though it is also true that Google (aka: Matt Cutts) told once that in some special occasions (i.e.: when it is clear that a 302 stands for a 301), we can 302 treated as 301 (but, sincerely I don't think this is the case).

So, the best is always to have backlinks pointing to the exact location.

Unfortunately yes, it is needed to be rerun the process with the tool.

Since when Cloud Hosting has become popular, Google downgraded the importance of server location as a factor in International SEO.

So if you want to use a server in another country, and the hosting service is good (for all the things told by others here about latency, especially), than you should not have too many problems.

The best way of using multilingual/multi-country in WordPress is using the WPML plugin.

Can i place my anchor text backlinks on English high pr websites?

Yes, you can... if those websites are really used by your German audience (i.e.: Mashable).

But if you mean "pr websites" something like "press communicates web sites"... than I would say no:

1. Because those are links that usually can generate problems (crappy sites);
2. Because they must be nofollow links (as Google told) because they are not editorial links
3. Because the press communicates will end being published, maybe, in sites your audience is not, hence useless for referral traffic;
4. Because of at least 10 others good reasons I won't list.

Moreover, if you want to rank in Google.de, you need links from German websites for simple better geotargeting and for a simple question of logic:

Google, in fact will consider that your site is not relevant for the German public if it doesn't have links from German sites.