Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Can you visit this tool and tell me what result you get from your answers? I'll be able to help more once I know what strategy is best for you.

http://www.katemorris.com/issg/

I can't say for certain about the volume increasing overall, but image search has changed tons. What I can do is point you to a GA hack that allows you to see if your traffic is coming from image or not.

http://moz.com/blog/decoding-googles-referral-string-or-how-i-survived-secure-search

Tommy is getting to the point but things are still very confusing when it comes to international.

Can you go check out this flow chart, see what is best for your business, and then let me know? http://www.distilled.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/International-Search-Strategy-Guide.pdf

That should answer most of your implementation questions as well, but I want to make sure it make sense. So check it out first and let me know.

But if what I am assuming is the case that you have geo-targeted sites and there is no translation going on within the geotargeted sites (.com and .co.uk), then HREFLANG is not needed. What I mean by translation isn't happening in the site is that the .com (US) site isn't translated to Spanish or any other language. And the same in the UK. If no translation is happening within a geo-targeted site, HREFLANG is not necessary.

Let me know what you're trying to do with geo-targeting and international strategy and I can help better answer your question.

So you are launching it globally, but might want to have region specific ones in the future? Is this just a blog? So the homepage will be posts?

Yeah, I'd focus in on marketing efforts and local citations. Nothing looks out of place, just seems like a new site with little pointing to it. Good luck!

Go with the subdomain that is just targeted to Portuguese, the language. Use an HREFLANG tag to tell Google which pages are translations of an equivalent English page. This will allow you to get traffic from a number of countries that speak Portuguese. I am of course assuming that your content doesn't change other than the translation.

Don't geo-locate unless you mean to actually target a country. If you want to go after the Brazilian market with different content that is just for Brazilian citizens, then geo-locate. In that case you can use a ccTLD (those are only for geolocation), subdomain, or subfolder. That's up to you, but only when you are ready to actually geo-target your content.

Kelli (sorry, I had the wrong name somehow?)

First let me clarify a few things.

1. Is the content between the US, Canada, and UK the exact same but on different URLs?
2. Is any of the content translated to cater to the different markets (spellings, word usage, etc.)?
3. Does each country have the same product set, etc.?

The HREFLANG is not necessary unless you are changing the language in some way. I am not sure that is what you should be using here. But your answers will help me understand so I can tell you what to do.

Check out my tool here to help: http://www.katemorris.com/issg/

Hi Tammy,

First, a few questions, what terms did you drop for? I see many of your pages indexed and link equity flowing through the site. It's new and only has 8 external links from 2 root domains from what I can tell. The 818 links are mostly internal links. So from my point of view, you added the site, Google indexed and tested it, but after the initial bump, it knocked back down. It's annoying but not unheard of with new sites.

What are your plans for outreach? Did this dentist have a site before that is redirecting at all?

Kate

Are you posting the full text or a link to the content on your site? I would recommend putting the content on your site and sharing the URL on Google+, Linkedin, or Facebook.

Regardless, I have never seen content on Google+ or Facebook impact anything to do with Google in regards to duplicate content.

If you know they are bad, I would recommend diavowing them. You never know when or if you'll get a warning. I would err on the side of caution and go ahead and disavow. There is nothing saying you have to, but it makes the most sense to me.

I am going to agree with everyone here and add that while there are not "limits" on the other H-tags, they don't hold much value anymore. Don't use this as a "tactic" to rank. Spend your time on other things specifically on building relationships in your industry.

I do not recommend redirecting people to different content based on IP. Googlebot may change IP addresses but it's always from the US. This makes it impossible for Googlebot to see any of your international content. You can use the IP address to ask the user if they want to set their settings to a different country and be placed there every time, but do not assume.

The issue is that these are low level links created by duplicate content. There is nothing wrong with it happening, but the links don't count for much. Matt Cutts said just as much a few days ago, syndicated press releases don't mean much and their value is very small. I wouldn't waste time or money on it.

Try what Martjin said, but also, if there is anyway, can you attach a screenshot of your goal setup? I need to see what has been marked as required, what the text is exactly and other things. There are a number of things that might be going wrong. Also, can you attach a screenshot of the report that is wrong you are talking about? Feel free to edit out any sensitive information.

Hi!

With a .co.uk, you cannot geotarget to other countries, but that's not needed in this case. Since you are not actually geo-targeting, you are actually just translating, all you need is to add a few lines of code and you're set.

Visit my guide here and it has instructions on what to do. http://bit.ly/14GdPoh

Kate

You shouldn't be focusing blog posts on specific keywords at all. Blog posts are best for long tail terms, so it doesn't matter how many you write. If you start writing multiple on one topic that is a head term you are shooting for, then you should have a category page for all of those, and that is the page that should rank for the head term.

It can be, but it depends on what your target is. I actually recommend hiring someone, a PR professional with solid journalistic contacts. Software to send out press releases won't get you very far.

When I say just translating, I mean only translating to the main language of the country and not changing the content. Just translating content is not targeting the country. You should be hiring someone native to that country to help rewrite things for the people in that country. Geotargeting means each country has content that is targeted to them. If a company is not going to take the time to target the content to the country in question, then it is just mere translation and that can cause duplicate content issues.

If you are in fact targeting countries and not just translating, I'd use subfolders. It gives your new sub sites a running start by keeping the same domain authority as the bigger site.

I'm going to disagree with TGOOSE. You should try to not have two pages targeted at one keyword. Think about it from the user standpoint. If they are looking for that term, which page is best? What answers their question best? If both are still the answer, then merge the two pages.

1. Combine Page 1 Text  + Page 2 Text in a way that makes sense to the user
2. Place new content on Page 1 URL
3. Redirect Page 2 URL to Page 1 URL

That's how you should handle this situation. The number of keywords on the page and the use of meta tags isn't going to make a large difference.