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1. Yes, usually the "best" is a matter of preference. You always should start with the country and then language if you go down that route so that the first subfolder is the geotargeted folder. But other than that, there is no real "right" answer.

2. UK vs GB is because GB is a part of the UK. The recognized country is the UK so that is used for geo-location. GB is the region in the UK that speaks a recognized version of English. Make sense?

3. Yes, companies use languages when they are going to geo-target their company or material for specific countries and then offer translations within those countries. If you are only operating in the US in English, then you don't really need all of this. However, it won't hurt to set it up for future structuring.

Sorry Lisa, this got lost in my email box. You are looking for tips for how to set things up for an international site? Can you tell me more about your site and what you are looking to get out of your Moz account when it comes to international search?

1. Good!

2. You are confused for good reason. There has not been clear direction for here for some time. If you used HREFLANG between the two, it seems for the last number of years the content would not be seen as duplicative. You are telling Google that the content is the same but in different languages inherently.

3. There is so much that goes into this, but I can tell you with years of experience under my belt that the numbers don't ever tell the whole story.

This is a tough one because there are reasons on both sides of the street to give reasons why this duplicate content should and should not be allowed. Think about an ERP SAAS company that needs to change their content just a bit between countries. They might build what looks to be duplicate but doesn't have some pages in one country vs another.

In your example, it seems to be not a great experience, but as a logged in user, they might be getting different content depending on their location.

To my second point: Those outside tools are shit. Total shit. Don't trust those numbers. Do your numbers line up to theirs?

Final point: Do not build and maintain duplicate content in hopes of getting links. It won't work over time. Anything can work for a short period of time, but in the end, they will figure it out. Trust me.

That only goes back to 2017, any data before then? Is there any information before the 2017 changes? I doubt they tracked it, but here is to hoping.

I truthfully don't like the average position metric site-wide, at least for my business. It doesn't tell a complete story. What does the average rank look like over time for 1) the homepage and 2) a product page like https://www.castleford.com.au/amplify/social-media/

Also, I tried to find blog/article content and came across a 404. Resources >> Content Marketing Library >> Under Ads "Read 25 tips for better Google Ads campaigns."

https://www.castleford.com.au/whitepaper-adwords-campaign-download - broken

Are there articles still?

Did they ever see good rankings and traffic in Australia? Do you have a date that things went south or has it always been like this?

When did you change the URLs on your site? A crawl is showing some older URLs so I'm curious.

Huh. Okay, we are going to figure this out.

Did you change the domain recently? Within the last year? When was that footer link removed?

Huh. Let me be clear, this seems odd. Here are some questions to see if we can narrow a few things down.

1. What's the demand like for these terms US vs AU vs NZ? Do you have a set list to compare the three countries?

2. What is the competition in each country? About the same or are there new players in each one?

3. What are the local packs in each country for each term? Strong, weak, or non-existent?

I'm trying to get down to if this is a competition and market problem or a technical problem bc it sounds okay technically.

And to be 100% clear, none of your content exists on another domain right?

You don't, it's not the same content. Unless you make a general pebbles page for /be/, the hreflang won't make sense, it's not the same content. Those subfolders should be claimed in GSC and geo-targeted to those countries.

1. Is the latter correct? Am I guessing correctly re "sub-folders" authority (if such thing exists) or am I simply wrong?

Your two points are valid ones. I don't want to say correct as in that is the cause for sure, but the age of content in my experience does play a role in duplicate content picking.

2. Can I solve this using canonical tags?
Canonicals can go wrong with hreflang, but it isn't a bad idea if you get it right. However, you know your content and your users better than us.

Another possible solution to help everything is to detect the user's location and ASK (Don't redirect on IP alone) if they prefer to see that location's content. This will encourage the sharing of all of your content over time.

But if I am completely realistic, nothing is going to show up perfectly if you are trying to geo-target without actual geo-targeted content. Sometimes you just need to tell the business owners who made this decision that opening a shop in another country, trying to act like a local business with zero changes to the content, just isn't going to work out in every business in every country.

Huh. You have a really good head on your shoulders. They are both good options. Unless there is something that makes the .lu/fr imperative to have for the users, I think I prefer option 1. Your logic sounds good there and is customer first.

Good luck!

Very welcome! Let me know what happens!

Who is they? I assume that means you are hearing this from your local distributor in France or customers there?

I can confirm that you have hreflang set up correctly. I've always personally had an issue with setting up HREFLANG when you mean regional geolocation, but the rest of the international SEO field disagrees with me.

But in the light of geotargeting, to double check, have you claimed domain.com/fr in Search Console and targeted it at France?

The UK website has been assigned to target the United Kingdom in Search Console and the US website has been assigned to target the United States. We also do not have access to robots.txt file, unfortunately.

So you have claimed www.domain.com and targeted it to the UK. And you have claimed us.domain.com and targeted it to the US in Search Console?

And for the two URLs below are these tags all on each page exactly as I have them below?

https://www.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet

• • is the canonical tag
• <link rel="alternate" href="https: www.example.com="" products="" pac-man-arcade-cabinet" hreflang="en-gb">- UK hreflang tag</link rel="alternate" href="https:>
• <link rel="alternate" href="https: us.example.com="" products="" pac-man-arcade-cabinet" hreflang="en-us">- US Hreflang tag</link rel="alternate" href="https:>

https://us.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet

• • is the canonical tag
• <link rel="alternate" href="https: www.example.com="" products="" pac-man-arcade-cabinet" hreflang="en-gb">- UK hreflang tag</link rel="alternate" href="https:>
• <link rel="alternate" href="https: us.example.com="" products="" pac-man-arcade-cabinet" hreflang="en-us">- US Hreflang tag</link rel="alternate" href="https:>

Where are you searching from? What are you searching? And is there anything different between those two pages other than targeting? Do you redirect users based on IP?

What search term are you using when checking what page is showing for France based contact information?

Whew. This one is a tough one. A mobile and multilingual site is hard.

First, keep in mind that br is not a language. Portuguese is the main language in Brazil. They have the hreflang right, but the URL can be confusing. It won't hurt anything, but my guess is the client is confused as to what constitutes a language code vs a country code.

Second, this is a great guide to read: https://www.portent.com/blog/seo/implement-hreflang-canonical-tags-correctly.htm

And here is a good chart from Aleyda Solis. Look at the Mobile first index part

https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.seroundtable.com/hreflang-google-mobile-first-1511959807.png

Few short answers:

1. You should use hreflang on the mobile pages.
2. You should use the canonical to desktop version of the mobile page for the targeted language.

I know we are way too late for this, but why did your company decide to internationalize the site structure if you can't get localization resources. I would have suggested using cookies and JS to set the currency, etc.

Anyway to your questions:

Or am I chasing ghost and this rule won't change much in the eyes of Google and my ranking? You can implement the title rule above, but I don't think it is going to help much.

**I don't care so much if US content shows up in the UK in term of content though are eCommerce experts would be quite pissed off as it would biased reporting. **

I recommend setting up IP location detection. If the user SEEMS to be in a different country, ask them if they are from the other country and if they say yes, then redirect them there. Don't assume they are in a specific country though.

Focus on getting those resources, you won't make a big impact without them in a high competition area.

1. Can I create a rule for page titles to be "Product A - country - company name" or similar? Would that be enough to make the page titles unique? Is there any value doing so?
I think this depends on a few things.

**First, what is the competition like in the SERPs? if you are in a super competitive space in any of those countries, this is probably not going to be enough. But it is possible it would be in some but not others. Competitive markets are game changers. **

**Second, how much do you care if the US content shows up in the UK? I worry about the similarities of the content in your examples. A title tag can get stupid "duplicate title" warnings to disappear, but I can't promise it'll make a difference in the SERPs. **

There is no harm in trying, however.

2. Can I "localize" duplicate MD by simply naming the country? I assume it is not enough in this case as all the rest would be copy/pasted.

**Duplicate MDs are less of a worry from my perspective. What I'd worry about more is the duplication of the actual pages. The content on the page is infinitely more important than what is in the MD. **

Sorry to say that without an in-depth look, there isn't going to be a way to tell. Unless you changed something, it is most likely testing or an update from Google. I've seen rankings go up and down over the years on multiple sites for a variety of reasons and sometimes what seems like no reason.

It can be the negation of the value of backlinks, or an entrant to the market, or Google trying other sites out to see if they perform better in the eyes of the searcher.

In this industry, there is only so much you can control. Focus on creating top quality content, focus on the searcher, and you'll come out on top.