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I built a tool to help people understand how to best go about international expansion. It's here: katemorris.com/issg

You need both parts. The top is a script that belongs in the of the page that has a search box and the other is the actual markup that goes around the search box. There is no time to implementation to live. You can check any errors on your markup within Webmaster Tools though: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2650907?hl=en That should point out if anything is implemented incorrectly.

My thought is that for some reason, with the Canadian and US proximity, the algo could see the US page as stronger. Do you see in Analytics for the few times this happens, the organic traffic to that page, is it border Canadian towns? It's definitely not perfect with bordering countries, but if you are geo-targeted correctly and the content is different, then overall you should not have major issues.

If you'd like, tell me a few terms and your domain and I'll check it out.

How long has the Canada section been up? Is it identical to the US section? What is your main domain? .com?

Nope, not needed, unless you are changing the language.

Now, if you wanted to do one big site and then offer certain pages that are the same except for "translation" - and it's a local dialect translation, then yes, HREFLANG would be used in that situation.

So you could use HREFLANG rather than a canonical between the kinda duplicated pages if they are changed only in dialect translation. But since there is different content per country, you would still need that geo-targeted section for the content that is different.

domain.com/congo/about-congo-office (I don't know the country code for Congo) - No hreflang, will be geo-targeted with the subfolder.

domain.com/congo/similar-product-page - If just translated to the local Congo English dialect, use HREFLANG with all similarly "translated" pages. If not changed at all, use canonical to the original page. If changed overall to target the Congo market, no canonical or HREFLANG needed.

Hmmm, I am thinking there are two possible solutions.

1. Create a "site" per country (subfolders like you have now), but use canonical for the pages that are duplicated, the pages that are the same across all countries.
Also use javascript to detect a new user's location (don't auto redirect though, ask) to get them to the "right" version of the page, if they come into the non-country focused general page.

2. Create a "site" per country (subfolders like you have now), and spend the resources to change the content on each page just enough to target that country. It doesn't have to be much, just enough to target that group.

Option 2 is the most time and resource intensive. Option 1 can be messed up quickly if the technical implementation isn't done right.

I know that's not a clean answer but international never is. There are always so many moving parts.

This is tough. Let me ask you one question: For a potential customer in South Africa, is there any different information they need to see than someone in the Congo, or somewhere else in the world that speaks English? If yes, what kind of different information would they need to see?

This is one of the instances that made me change the way I see the HREFLANG tag. So many people disagree but hear me out.

The HREFLANG tag is only for language differentiation. There are language and country codes because, as you point out, there are many countries that speak the same language and some have some major dialect changes. The biggest example being UK and US English. Therefore, if you have a site developed in US English that you want to "translate" to UK English, but not change the content of the site other than that, you would use HREFLANG tags to note the difference in the pages to Google. Since you changed nothing else (no currency changes, no legal changes, no product set changes), there is no reason for country targeting. You are just translating the same content ... aka changing a few words.

Now, let's say that you are operating a site that has a geo-targeted section to South Africa. Depending on the setup, you might not need HREFLANG tags at all. If you are changing the content other than through translation to target South Africa, that is geo-targeting. Targeting the country.

You can do both geo-target AND change language settings. For instance, if you are a Canadian company that legally has to have all of it's content in Canadian French (fr-ca) and Canadian English (en-ca), you would use HREFLANG between those two. But then you decide to move into the US. You might create a subfolder, subdomain, or ccTLD specific to the US market since you can't offer all of your products or services over there due to regulations. You would geo-target the new section/site to the United States, but not use HREFLANG since the content is targeted at a different country. You would want to make sure the content changed enough and the Canadian English pages might rank for a while but over time the US site/section would get stronger.

I hope that all makes sense.

In your instance where you have geo-targeted, I assume that is for a reason. However, because you have geo-targeted that section to South Africa, you cannot geo-target it to the Congo as well. You would either need to great a section for the Congo and geo-target that, or, if geo-targeting isn't really needed, use one big site and country specific translations. Only do this if your content is the same across the board and you are changing some of the wording to local dialects.

If you want to know more, check out my international search tool that might help you find what structure you should have: http://www.katemorris.com/issg/

There isn't anything different you should be doing for Bing on site. The page you mentioned is indexed in Bing (url:https://www.sitegeek.com/000webhost is indexed in Bing). So it's tough to understand what might be going on.

There are many potential issues here.

1. The language changes causing an issue. Bing's tag is different from Google's.

2. The site quality or content quality is not enough for Bing to want to index. I doubt that, but it's a potential issue.

3. Sitemap issues. Bing is not as good as Google at telling us what the issues are with sitemaps. Without doing a full analysis, there isn't much we can do to tell you the problem.

4. Sometimes it's just Bing. They are always behind ...

With HREFLANG tags, you are sending weird signals. I would recommend ensuring that /ie/ is claimed in Google WMT and targeted to Ireland. The content in the subfolder needs to be specific to your Ireland market, meaning it needs to have different content. It doesn't have to be completely different, but different. Otherwise, it looks like duplicate content and the SEs are going to pick the stronger of the two.

Right now, you are telling them that the only difference in the content is that /ie/ is in Irish English, and /gb/ is in British English. It's not different enough to warrant showing the other content over your main homepage as that is stronger.

Does that all make sense? I would remove the HRELFANGs, ensure the right targeting is in place and that the content is different per country to target those countries.

I'm actually going to disagree. HREFLANG is for noting language changes on the same site. A .com site and a .com.au site are totally different sites. The .com.au site is stronger and will rank better for now. HREFLANG won't help much as they are geo-targeted sites, not one site that has translations.

You just need to focus on the promotion (read links and coverage) of the US site. As long as things are geo-targeted correctly, it's a matter of distinguishing the two sites and treating them as separate sites with different marketing plans and promotion plans.

Hi Angelos.

You have a great question and there are a few ways to take this.

What I would recommend is having your www.example.com be a starter page that doesn't have your "homepage" content, but rather, asks people to pick a language. You can detect it from their browser settings or from the IP (whatever you do, do NOT redirect anything based on IP address) and prompt them from there, or just list them all. That page would be your x-default in HREFLANG terms. It's the page that doesn't have a language. Then all of the others would be linked to from there. This would of course have English as /en.

You don't have to do that though. If you prefer, you can totally have www.example.com as all English, and just have the other languages under their subfolders. I would detect if you think the user prefers one of the other languages and use Javascript to popup a prompt to ask if they would prefer that language. If they say yes, then set a cookie and take them there. If not, it keeps them on the English URLs.

Just please don't redirect anyone based on IP address. This can cause problems down the line.

I hope that helps.

These are geo-targeted sections and not translations right?

If so, the HREFLANG tags are not needed. Those are for translations. If you have the subfolders marked in Google WMT as geo-targeted to those countries, you should be okay.

How long have you had this setup?

The best way to go about this is to keep the URLs with the language in the structure. Redirect (301) the ones that don't have it to the ones that do.

However, it sounds like that causes a problem. If the above isn't a possibility, use a canonical from the non-language URL to the one with it. Then do your HREFLANG in sitemaps, and only use the URLs with the language tag in the sitemaps. You can also do the coding on the page, just make sure the HREFLANG tags are not on the non-language pages.

• Example URL: http://www.test.com/boeken would have a canonical tag that points to http://www.test.com/nl/boeken
• Only http://www.test.com/nl/boeken is listed in the sitemaps
• OR Only http://www.test.com/nl/boeken has HREFLANG tags. http://www.test.com/boeken would only have the canonical.

That should solve your problem.

Hey! I am going to try to help. I haven't seen this issue either, but I'll try to work through it with you. First, a few questions.

1. Are you using Universal Analytics? It doesn't seem so based on your answers above, but I wanted to verify.
2. The tag manager change you mean is for the new updated interface mentioned here, right: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2014/10/making-tag-management-more-accessible.html
3. Is your AdWords account still attached to your Analytics account? Stupid question, but have to check to be sure.

Thanks for the shout out Ryan!

Hi Angelos.

1. The short answer is yes, you should do all of those entries. Annoying right?

The best way to go about this is going to be writing a script to do the heavy lifting, but I am not cool enough to tell you how to do that. The idea would be to make one sitemap in one language, and if the URLs are identical except for the language code, then changing up everything for the next language and moving on one at a time.

You should have one main sitemap per language if you can get all of your content into one sitemap. Then have one sitemap index hosted at domain.com/sitemap.xml.

If that's not possible due to the sheer number of pages, do a sitemap index per language that references multiple sitemaps to cover the content in that one language. Then have another sitemap index that references the other indices per language.

2.  See above. The main sitemap index should be at domain.com/sitemap.xml, BUT you can have each language sitemap hosted in each subfolder. Example: English sitemap at domain.com/en/sitemap.xml and Spanish sitemap at domain.com/es/sitemap.xml. This requires listing many sitemaps in the main robots.txt file or having a robots file for each subfolder. It's a lot more work than working with sitemap indices.

3. If you have claimed all language subfolders as independent sites in WMT, you can submit the corresponding sitemap. You don't have to put the sitemaps in the subfolders to do this though, you can still use the indices. You also don't have to submit them all individually, but you can and I would as I would want to see the index information in each corresponding account. That's just me though.

Does that all help?

I have not had to deal with this myself and I see where you are having an issue understanding how much data you'll lose. I'll hunt some more and what I can find. I am hoping some others can jump in here and let us know what they have seen.

Do you want to track the funnel, each variation and which direction people take? Or do you just want to see the leads coming from the landing page?

Not harmful, I just have a theory that they don't count.

Do you only change it depending on the Canadian location? What do you do for US visitors? Googlebot sees what you give to people in the US.

Here is what they see, which is what I see viewing the page from Texas. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nBPI0a8zKqQJ:www.sja.ca/English/Community-Services/Pages/Therapy%2520Dog%2520Services/default.aspx+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

I assume there is content on this page other than what I am seeing. So duplicate content is not your problem, lack of content is. Google operates on a per country basis, but even knowing that I would still suggest different pages for different regions if the content is really different.