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Hi Thomas,

If a page doesn't have an equivalent on the other country version then you don't need to specify hreflangs really, you can just specify the one of the page that exist if you want, to keep the consistency, although if you see: the goal of the hreflang is to specify Google which is the "best" URL to show in their results when a search is done and there are many that could be relevant as they target the same queries, but should be targeted to different audiences, since in this case there will be only one, then it's not necessary to do it.

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Allie,

Can you please specify for which type of sites you were moving to and to which Web structure you moved? For example, if you moved from ccTLDs to sub-directories on a new domain.

In this case about international migrations is not only that you validate the typical migration best practices of 301-redirects from old to new Web structure, updates of new links and XML sitemap, but also that you make sure that the new web structure where you are migrating is correctly geolocating to the appropriate country markets, geolocating the subdirectories or subdomains in GSC if you're not using a ccTLD, using hreflang annotations, making sure the content is relevant and optimized for the targeted country or language, using the appropriate popular terms and keywords in those markets, etc.

So as you can see, besides the typical best practices of a migration it should be about you verifying if you kept the international targeting and configuration that you might even have had in the past and now you don't ... and how you're keeping the relevance that you used to have too.

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Thomas,

Why do you want to merge them on a single domain? If you want to consolidate everything on a single .com domain -which is recommended in case you don't want complexity and capitalize your authority better, while targeting international markets effectively-, then it would be to:

• Migrate by 301-redirecting your current domains to their relevant country directories that you will enable in your .com, and that should be geolocalized independently each one through the Google Search Console (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en) to their specific countries: .com/gb/ to the UK and .com/us/ to the US, so each one of them can effectively be geo-targeted. Since you have an independent mobile site on an "m" subdomain this case you also have to do the same for them: m.yourbrand.com/gb/ geolocalized to the UK and m.yourbrand.com/us/ geolocalized to the US.

• Use hreflang annotations (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en) to specify for each one of the site pages their language and country alternatives, for example:

• Since you will be moving domains anyway, I'll directly migrate to the new .com site already using SSL, instead of splitting these two migrations by migrating to the .com first and then doing a migration towards the https version of the .com a few months after, the direct migration towards the https version will add maybe a bit more of complexity and additional validations to make, but since you're migrating anyway many of them you'd need to follow and do anyway.

• Finally, be aware that after any change of a Web structure, specially from one domain to another (and if this other doesn't have a highly authoritative link profile yet) will always have a short-term negative effect, so is important that you start an SEO process not only to make sure you follow best practices when migrating but to validate afterwards and grow the new domains results based on what has been found on a technical, content and link profile audit and the desired results: Optimizing the new Web structure, Optimizing or creating content,  optimizing or creating links, etc.

I hope this helps!

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Cosi,

Check also if you have registered the right protocol of your domain http vs. https or if you have register the right subdomain (maybe you're not using www or non-www, but another subdomain?) - definitely looks as the type of situation where you haven't register the property with the "right" name  and the final location of your site where your content and information is (maybe you're redirecting to another place?) if you don't see any data for it, neither indexation, crawling or search visibility.

Another hypothesis would be that you still have very very few pages and that's why you don't obtain any data for the search visibility, however, you should be able to see it on the crawling and indexation reports.

The final one would be that you're blocking all crawling and indexation from happening on your site and therefore you don't have any. Take a look at the robots.txt configuration, also any potential blockage at other levels, such as server level in htaccess or even with the noindex meta robots tags (although that would block the indexation and not the crawling).

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi there Saijo,

The .com.au ccTLD is by default already geolocated to Australia so unfortunately it's not recommended to be used to target other countries. Please see Google's ccTLDs treatment here where it says: "These are tied to a specific country (for example .de for Germany, .cn for China), and therefore are a strong signal to both users and search engines that your site is explicitly intended for a certain country.".

So if you want to use only one property to target many countries then you should use a gTLD with subdirectories for each country and geolocate them with the Google Search Console. You can also use hreflang annotations to avoid international search misalignments issues too but this can't "override" the ccTLD geolocation preference (in fact, if you go to Google Search Console with a ccTLD you'll see is already targeted to its specific country and cannot be changed).

The other option is to set specific ccTLDs for each country, but not using one ccTLD to target other or many countries for which is not targeted by default as you suggest. Sorry it doesn't work that way!

Hi Angelos,

Each one of your ccTLDs require their own unique SEO process, as they target different audiences that will search differently (language, seasonality, product/service preferences) and different competitors in each market, that will need a specific keyword research, optimization & link building actions, based on the characteristics and goals that you identify in each one of them.

So, my suggestions to start doing international SEO are:

1. Do a specific keyword & competition research for each one of them. Support yourself with a native speaker (even if it's in English and you also speak English, if it's a research for the UK, then have a British doing the research, as they might search with specific, different terms). Based on this research you will be able to identify your keywords target.

2. Do a technical, content & link audit of each ccTLD. Beyond the typical optimization related elements you will validate, it's important that you compare each of your ccTLDs link profile vs. the ones of your competitors for each country market: What's the gap? What are the link characteristics and volume? What type of links do you need to close the popularity gap? Where do these links to your competitors for each country come from? Based on these data you will be able to establish the necessity and strategy for a link building campaign.

3. Verify how you're ranking with each ccTLD in Google SERPs for each country and the organic search traffic from each country. You mention that you are redirecting the traffic although don't specify how. In general, I wouldn't recommend redirects only in very specific circumstances. To avoid country visibility and traffic misalignment issues what I would recommend is to use hreflang annotations instead.

4. Start tracking and monitoring your results independently in each country market. Most rank trackers support this. You should monitor each independently in Google Search Console, as well as they should have their own Google Analytics to monitor their traffic & conversion behavior per property and country.

So as you can see: Each property focused on a specific country market will require a specific SEO process, analysis and effort.

Check out this checklist: https://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist as well as post here: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-to-international-seo/ to start.

I hope this helps

Hi Rudd,

You have answered yourself to your questions by giving the background of the issue (thanks for doing it too as this is key to identify these type of issues):

"A week ago we changed our canonical links which were actually randomly referring from .be > .nl and .co.uk to .com."

This was certainly the problem which is still causing this as a consequence today... as you were telling before to Google that the original versions of your Belgian pages were the Dutch ones, and the same with the UK version pointing to the .COM one, so Google did what you were specifying and that's the reason why it was showing these other pages in their cache instead of the Belgian and UK ones, because they were "their originals". This has nothing to do with hreflang... it had to do with the way you were configuring your canonicals and what it meant.

It's great that you already fixed your canonicals though The thing is that Google seems to not having yet updated the information... you will certainly give it a bit of more time if that just happened a week ago. My recommendation is that you should resubmit for recrawling your Belgian and UK versions via Google Search Console so Google recognizes your current configuration and not the old one... once they do it, they will correctly show the right content in the cache, as now you have your canonicals set to inform that they're the original versions of themselves.

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Mark,

The best way to approach if your client wants to target each country with a gTLD is enabling specific subdirectories for them:

yourbrand.com/sa/ for saudi arabia 
yourbrand.com/ae/ for the UAE 
.. etc.

and then register and geolocate each one of them in Google Search Console International Targeting: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

Besides this, you should use hreflang annotations in order to inform Google the relationship of the different pages you will have for each country & language, and make sure that they rank the right version for the right country/language results. You can generate them easily by using: http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/

Like this, with the geolocation in Google Search Console + the hreflang usage it's going to be understood that they're not duplicated pages, but pages targeting to different countries and versions even if the content is pretty similar or the same, although of course, I would also recommend that you really localize the content to make it very specific and as much relevant as possible to every audience -always in their own language, using their own terms-, even if they speak the same language, there are always terms and preferences that will be different, and therefore a need to personalize the content to target them.

I hope this help

Hi there,

You should add in the hreflang annotation the final URL showing the content, not one that is just 301 redirecting to another. Are you seeing errors in the Google Search Console "International Targeting" report? If you see "no return tags" errors there for Japan, then means Google is not being able to identify them.

Thanks!

Hi there,

The hreflang annotation along the canonical tags are correctly implemented on the page, the issue you have is regarding the redirects... and it's a big issue since your UK page is not even indexed because of it.

So, to clarify, this is the logic that you should follow with hreflang annotations across canonicals, your configuration says:

When on www.americanholidays.com:

With rel="canonical" href="http://www.americanholidays.com/" /> that the original version is itself, which is ok. 
With rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ie" href="http://www.americanholidays.com/" /> that this page is targeted to English speakers in the Republic of Ireland. 
With rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/" /> that this is the alternative version of the page targeted to English speakers in the UK.

This is all ok! It should be the other way around for the UK version... when on http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/ it should be:

With <link <span class="html-tag">rel</link <span>="canonical" href="http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/" /> that the original version is itself, which is ok. 
With <link < span="">rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ie" href="http://www.americanholidays.com/" /> that this page is the alternate targeted to English speakers in the Republic of Ireland. 
With <link <span class="html-tag">rel</link <span>="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/" /> that this is the page targeted to English speakers in the UK. </link <>

Unfortunately I cannot check what you have in the UK version of the page because of the mix of 302s and 301s redirects that you have towards the Irish version, which are causing that it doesn't even get indexed on Google:

https://www.google.es/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanholidays.com%2Fgb_en%2F&oq=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanholidays.com%2Fgb_en%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1174j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8

Eliminate the redirects -each page should be accessible on its own... and if you want at some point refer Irish users that might end-up going to the UK version or viceversa, what you should do is IP detection and show a little banner recommending that there's a better option for that country but not automatically redirects anywhere-. If you do this and the proper hreflang annotation configuration in all of the pages along with a geotargeting of the /gb_en/ directory in the Google Search Console to the UK (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en) you should have an ok working international Web configuration.

Thanks!

Hi there,

The best way to enable a new country version --in this case for Canada-- is:

• Enabling an international Web structure, ideally with a ccTLD for the country, in this case: yourbrand.ca and if this is not possible due to technical or resources restrictions, then do it through a sub-directory under your current generic domain: yourbrand.com/ca/

• If at some point you need to enable additional language versions for a country, you can extend your structure like this:

• With ccTLDs:

• For English: yourbrand.ca

• For French: yourbrand.ca/fr/

• With sub-directories:

• For English: yourbrand.com/ca-en/

• For French: yourbrand.com/ca-fr/

• When you use sub-directories you can register them independently in Google Webmaster Tools and geotarget them.

• You can always (whether ccTLDs or sub-directories) use the hreflang annotations to inform Google about your different pages language and country targeting.

• Make sure to translate and localize all the information of your pages: From URLs in the appropriate languages, to titles, meta descriptions, headings, text, currency, addresses, etc.

• Always link between the different country versions through a crawlable menu.

• Avoid automatic redirects, is far better to suggest the appropriate version as Amazon does here with their Spanish version.

• Build your new countries versions popularity, targeting locally relevant and authority Websites in your sector there.

Take a look at this International SEO checklist I published some days ago at Moz with the most important steps you need to take for an International SEO process.

I hope this helps!

Hi Robert,

The rewrite rules shared by Patrick should work well for that although you could also use Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin that features options to do that through the control panel.

Nonetheless, in general what can be better in performance and also for tracking purposes with your site URL, leaving tracking parameters while avoiding content duplication content is to use canonical tags. You can also set them easily for Wordpress with Yoast's plugin.

I hope this helps!

Aleyda

Hi there,

I've checked your ranking  with a non-personalized result and I see your website is ranking with this specific page: www.office1web.ie/office-furniture that has in its title both the Office and Desks keywords:

"Office Furniture** | Desks and Desking | Tables at Office1web.ie**"

As you can also see in this screenshot: http://www.screencast.com/t/tuMZvCKku

Additionally, although the page content is targeting the "Office Furniture" keyword is also featuring information about Office Desks which mixed with any potential incoming external or internal links with this anchor text and the overall popularity of this specific page (along with the relatively low competition that you can verify with the domain popularity and page popularity of the other ranking pages) could positively influence its rankings for this query.

I hope this helps!

Aleyda

Hi Spencer,

The rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag inclusion along with the Geotargeting option in Google Webmaster Tools (if the websites are not ccTLDs but generic domains) are solutions for these situations: When you have two websites targeting different countries with the same language and they're competing with each other in SERPs, cannibalizing their opportunities and that might end up also with content duplication issues at some point.

About your concern: "Currently for some of our keywords US is #1, UK is #4. If we implement rel alternate, will it just remove our US page".

Your US website would be removed for the UK search result pages indeed and although in the short term this might seem as counterproductive, the reality is that this result from a relevancy perspective doesn't belong there since you already have your UK website targeting those users especially.

This also means that you can also be losing opportunity by having UK users going to the US version that is not as relevant for them, so their experience can be poorer and the conversions might not be the same. Additionally, as I mentioned before you might end-up suffering from content cannibalization / duplication issues with both websites showing the same or very similar content without giving signals to Google that they're not really duplicates but two versions targeting different audiences.

Because the previous in the long-run the best is that you make the most out of your international Web versions (country versions in this case) and give the necessary signals to Google so these start ranking in these countries search results instead.

In case your US version is a .com domain and it's also attracting rankings, organic traffic and conversions from abroad, excluding the UK (for which you have your own UK website version) then you can leave that website without a specific geolocalization in Google Webmaster Tools and just specifying the language in the hreflang attribute (not the country) but if you have a specific website version for the UK then you should definitely specify that this website (whether it's a .uk ccTLD, subdirectory, subdomain or another generic domain) is geotargeting to this country.

I hope this helps!

Hi there,

Hreflang annotations serve to inform Google to which language (and additionally if you want to geotarget, country) each of your URL versions are targeted.

You can use the hreflang default annotation, as described here, when you want to show a default URL for a language / country that you're not targeting, which sounds like the situation you describe.

On the other hand, Bing doesn't support hreflang, but you can use the content language meta tag instead that they do take into consideration:

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Justin,

If you're targeting French as "language" and not as country, and you only have one French site version for all your french speaking users then you don't need to add the specific country, just the language to the hreflang It's much simpler!

------> English to the US. If you don't only target the US with it but any English speakers worldwide, then remove the US to become:

The same with the French one:

Like that you only need to add these two tags in your English and French (language targeted) URLs

The issue is that you were mixing language and country targeting which are two different things.

I hope this helps!

Hi Edward,

It's not recommended to rely on Google capacity "processing" scripts to show any key content on your site, in this case, additional language or country versions. If the information shown in the HTML code and the Google cache version of the pages is not the relevant one -and only one is shown the whole time for example- then it's not being correctly rendered. You can also verify this with the "Fetch as Googlebot" functionality from the Google Search Console.

If you want to make sure that each of your language/country versions are really accessible then the best is to make sure each piece of content is published as text in their own specific HTMLs whether in ccTLDs, subdirectories or subdomains for country versions or also, subdirectories or subdomains for language versions; making sure to use the relevant terms and topics for each language/country audiences (which might not necessarily be the literal translations among them, so a unique keyword research, content writing and optimization process by a native speaker is required)

Thanks!

Hi Benjita,

The best way would be to migrate the content that you still want to keep (the one that is getting visits from your users, getting organic search visibility, rankings and traffic) from the old blog: www.ourcompany.blogspot.co.uk to the new address at: www.ourcompany.co.uk/blog/ (great choice on using a subdirectory for the blog, btw, since it's usually better than subdomains).

In order to do this, the best is to implement 301 redirects from the old blog URLs to their new addresses:

www.ourcompany.blogspot.co.uk/blog-post-here.html 301 redirect to www.ourcompany.co.uk/blog/blog-post-here.html

In order not only to take your users from the old to the new destination, but also pass the link popularity value from the old to the new, and be able to keep the rankings that the old ones were getting.

If at some point you decide that you don't want to take certain content to the new location, then it's recommended that you assess what will be the impact of it: Is content that is getting a lot of traffic and ranking well? Is it because it is duplicated or non-relevant content anymore? If at some point it is getting organic search visibility and traffic then you might want to redirect this content to pages in the new blog location that will address the same information: For example, if you had a post A and post B talking about the same topic and you want to only enable a post A in the new blog, then 301 redirect post B to the post A at the new location, the relevance will be kept and you will be able to consolidate it all in a more relevant, better organized Web architecture. So this can be seen as an opportunity for you to improve your current organization.

Besides implementing 301 redirects from each of the old URLs to their new addresses on the new blog, it's also important that you:

• Update links going to the  URLs in the old blog to the new one
• Generate an XML sitemap for the new blog, create a Google Search Console profile for it and make sure you submit it.

Check out migration best practices at: https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos and https://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

I hope this helps!

Aleyda

Hi there Saijo,

The .com.au ccTLD is by default already geolocated to Australia so unfortunately it's not recommended to be used to target other countries. Please see Google's ccTLDs treatment here where it says: "These are tied to a specific country (for example .de for Germany, .cn for China), and therefore are a strong signal to both users and search engines that your site is explicitly intended for a certain country.".

So if you want to use only one property to target many countries then you should use a gTLD with subdirectories for each country and geolocate them with the Google Search Console. You can also use hreflang annotations to avoid international search misalignments issues too but this can't "override" the ccTLD geolocation preference (in fact, if you go to Google Search Console with a ccTLD you'll see is already targeted to its specific country and cannot be changed).

The other option is to set specific ccTLDs for each country, but not using one ccTLD to target other or many countries for which is not targeted by default as you suggest. Sorry it doesn't work that way!

Hi Daniel,

I agree with Emanuele, you can invest your time and resources in much more valuable, long-term link building strategies, that will be much more beneficial for your clients without risks that links from directories that are not necessarily that relevant or an authority towards your industry.

Instead of thinking where to create links with high PageRank you should instead identify along with your clients how you can create and promote valuable and attractive assets (from content, guides, tools, giveaways, contests, etc.) with them in order to not only improve their Website popularity (with natural links, shares, references, +1's, citations, etc.) but that are also aligned with their business goals and allow you to improve your branding, loyalty, conversions, etc.

If you have a bit of time you should watch the #RCS presentation of Wil Reynolds at Mozcon last year where he covered this topic.

You can see what I talk about and get inspired by taking a look at this summary with the slides of the latest LinkLove presentations.

By switching your focus on building links like this you can really create a competitive advantage over your local competitors that from what you shared might still be building links in a more "artificial" way.

I hope this helps!