Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Mike

Have you considered using a canonical to the unlogged-in homepage?

www.domain.com - canonical is to www.domain.com

www.domain.com/loggedin - canonical is to www.domain.com

As long as the page can be loaded and the canonical in the head seen by bots, that link equity should go to the homepage.

You have the instance that is the reason I took a liking to international SEO. In your instance, because of the annoyances of commonly used languages that are also countries ... I suggest ccTLDs or subdomains.

• Subdomains - You will have to claim each subdomain in Search Console and target them to their specific countries and then use hreflang between the languages within the country subsites.

• www.domain.com (main)

• www.domain.com/fr (french)

• www.domain.com/es (spanish)

• ca.domain.com/en (Canadian, english)

• ca.domain.com/fr (Canadian, french)

• fr.domain.com (France)

• ccTLDs - This does the geo-targeting for you. You will need to put the hreflang between the languages within the country sites.

• www.domain.com (main)

• www.domain.com/fr (french)

• www.domain.com/es (spanish)

• www.domain.ca/en (Canadian, english)

• www.domain.ca/fr  (Canadian, french)

• www.domain.fr (France)

It does not matter which you use. But if you wanted to use the same root domain, the subdomains are a good way to go about that!

You only need the HREFLANG for the pages that you have translations for.

Actually, geo-basedIP redirects are still a very bad idea from a user and bot perspective.

1. While Google has said it is testing crawling from other areas, they still primarilycrawl from the US. If you do Geo-basedredirects, they will only ever see the US content.
2. Users travel. People travel. Assuming a user should only see a certain set of content based on their physical location is assuming too much.

• Use case in the consumer field: While attending a friend's wedding in London, I could not get to the US version of a site where I wanted to buy furniture to be delivered in a few weeks.
• Use case in business: Users travel for business all the time. If they are visiting a headquarters in another country but researching a topic for use in their home country, they might be seeing the "wrong content."

Rather than assuming, use IP detection to ask the user to set their location. "We see you are in the UK, do you want to set that as your preferred location?" Once they choose their location, a cookie is set and that is all that user sees from then on out, until they change that setting in the footer or in their account.

Hi Ruchy,

I am not following as to why you want to add the nodollow. If you are doing business with him and there is no money in exchange, then there is no reason to nofollow.

If there is money changing hands in any way, add a nofollow. If there is not, there is no reason to add one.

Have a great day!

A nofollow is a good idea moving forward. That will stop it from happening again.

If you do the robots.txt, they can still index, just with no information on the page.

If I were you, I'd add the nofollow.

Be aware that a ccTLD is meant for people in that country, it does not mean it is targeting all people who speak a language of the same name. Spanish is spoken in more countries than Spain, so if you wish to reach all Spanish speakers, I would recommend a .com site (which is country agnostic) and having English and Spanish language content there.

If you wish to target Spain citizens, the .es domain is perfect.

The way you have it set up above though, what will most likely happen (but this depends on your industry, competition, etc) is that the English language queries coming from Spain will see the .com version of your site as they should be searching in English. If someone in the US or Mexico is looking in Spainsh, they might not see the .es site as it is targeted to Spain, not Spanish. That doesn't mean they won't see it at all - if there isn't much competition they will see the .es if it is the best result for their search, but .es is meant to Spain based businesses and you can't change the country targeting on a ccTLD like .es

You can try to help Google understand with HREFlang as Joe said, but do understand that you'll be sending mixed signals with a .es domain if you are trying to get Spanish speaking searchers from other countries.

Hope that makes sense!

Sorry to tell you, .ag is not a recognized generic TLD. If you put your site on a ccTLD (country specific TLD), you cannot change the targeting to something outside of that country.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

That link as a list of ccTLDs that they see as generic like .io, but .ag is not one of them. You will need to use a different TLD, a generic one, for your plan to work.

Hi! Can you give an example? The URL of the page, the old title tag, the new title tag, and the term in which you see the ranking drop.

If the content is the same, but translated, without the hreflang tag, it is duplicate content. The hreflang tag is there to serve as a signal that you know the content is the same but translated and you want Google to know that as well. This situation is exactly what hreflang is made for.

I'm not sure if this is a time issue, it is sure weird! I do see some of the pages as your competitors. But not all. And a search for your brand name from the US produces the English page. So everything looks okay there.

How is indexation at this point? My apologies for responding so late.

Was your site down for maintenance at all in the last month or so?

If there is something involved with link reclamation, then this is a very involved potential issue. Meaning, I am not sure someone can figure this out on a forum. If you need help, I recommend contacting Alan Bleiweiss, he is an awesome forensic SEO. http://alanbleiweiss.com/

I will leave you with one recommendation. Don't look so much to your competitors as to what is best for your market. I recommend doing your own audience research. While your major competitors might be the same in the US and India, the relevance and needs of your audience are different. This comes out subtly in many instances of SERPs as the results are a blend of over 200 factors and those factors are different in each country version of Google. They do their own testing based on that market not the world wide market.

Stick to your site and what might be causing the ranking changes on a per page/per topic basis in each country. Separate them and work at this problem from a technical and user perspective.

There are a number of reasons this could happen.

• Your content's relevance to the Indian market vs US market. Have you differentiated it? Do you need to?

• The competitive markets are different. Your set of competitors is different in each country.

• Google US and Google IN work separately from each other. Point: Google Germany and France recently updated their image search to match other Google properties, many years after the change in the US.

Ranking the same in the US and India is not an expected thing.

I personally have not seen this before, but that is due to being English speaking only. I don't see much else on the web about it either which lead me to wonder if it was due to account settings for some reason. I'll flag this up as a discussion, see if we can find someone that has dealt with this before.

Quick question: What language preference is your browser set to? What about the settings of the Google account you use?

Is your site performing well otherwise? Meaning is this just an issue with Search Console?

The ccTLDs automatically geo-target, so unless you are changing the language of the content, you don't NEED hreflang tags per se. But they won't hurt either as James mentioned. However, if you do plan on going global at any point, do have a think about your setup. Maintaining a new site for tons of new countries isn't as scalable as Aus to NZ. Just keep that in mind.

For now you should be fine, but if things don't perform as well, think about doing some testing with NZ residents and change up their site slightly for that market. It will perform better the more you customize it to them.

Welcome to International Site Expansion! This is the exact situation I worry about when people set up international structure.

The answer lies in what your users need, not what you want or what marketing wants. Do users in the US need to see different content than a user in the UK or Australia? All of those countries have English as the primary language. I am not talking about dialects (UK spellings/words vs US words), but do the users need to see different content due to product set changes, price changes, different marketing tactics, etc.?

There are a whole list of questions you need to go through. http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/ - Let me know what your end result is and we'll talk from there.

Another resource: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-international-seo (that will explain a lot)

I don't see an ad for "Key Industrial" - I'd look at the settings and budget. Are you targeting a different geography now? Cut the budget at all?

This one is tough.

1. Are there negatives on the brand campaign/ad group?

2. Did you check your brand term in the AdWords Keyword Planner? How does it look in there?

3. Have you checked your brand name in Google Trends?

And if you don't mind sharing, what is the brand name?

What Hurf said is almost perfect. One correction:

"However, If they are targeting French speakers exclusively then I see a case for ruling out on a .fr domain, especially if you have a local presence over in France. " French speakers are in many other countries than France. Keep that in mind. But I don't think that pertains to you.

I think Hurf is right in that you are trying to reach all Europeans or just the UK. You want them to vacation in France in your client's chalets. If that is the case, you are fine. There is no need to include the local information of the chalets across the site to make it look like you are from France.

Are you having issues with terms in particular? Can you share some of those and the domain? We are happy to take a look!