Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. International SEO
Log in to post

Category: International SEO

Discussions around international SEO tactics.

  • Brian_Dowd


    Hi Moz Community, I am wondering if there is any tool and/or any sort of standard increase in search visibility I can assume that we will have with our website if we expand to start targeting Spanish with our site. At the moment we receive about 6000-7000 visits a day with 75% of that coming from the US and UK. I am wondering is there any way to make a rough assumption on visibility that will increase by launching a new Spanish speaking website. It would be a subdirectory, not a subdomain or gTLD. I am struggling to find a concrete answer on this and i'd like to make a semi-accurate forecast of the traffic we can expect based on the increase in search visibility that our Spanish language site will provide us. Thanks

    | Brian_Dowd
    0
  • ALLee


    The title says it all - if i have duplicate content on my US and UK website, will adding the hreflang tag help google figure out that they are duplicate for a reason and avoid any penalties?

    | ALLee
    1
  • theLotter


    My site is available in EN, DE, SW, SP, FR, IT, CH and JP. However, the EN sites ranks much better than the other languages, and even when searching in another language the EN homepage is normally the result that appears. Would it be worthwhile to automatically redirect users to the site in the same language they are searching in or country they are searching from? If so, how do I go about this? Thanks!

    | theLotter
    0
  • eLab_London


    Hey Guys! I have a multi-lingual site in Switzerland serving french and german content. URL structure looks like this: homepage (main) http://www.exmaple.ch/ German http://www.exmaple.ch/de/ French http://www.exmaple.ch/fr/ You can choose a drop down on every page to convert the page into french or german. So there are basically two seperate sites, URL's do not cross over i.e. I have no french pages linking to german pages, it is all pretty good. The default language is german. I have checked in Google.ch/ in both languages french and german for which pages are being served up and they seem all relevant, i.e. on french browser settings when I go to google.ch I see french pages being served and vice versa. My question....Do I need href lang tags? Cheers all!

    | eLab_London
    0
  • vanGoGh-creative


    Hi everybody,one of my clients has a domain (www.sea-aeroportimilano.it)  well ranked on Google.it.
    He has a redirect 302 from www.sea-aeroportimilano.it to www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_it.html. The site has also an english version (www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_en.html).Do you think it's the right setting? What about a 301 from www.sea-aeroportimilano.it to www1.seamilano.eu/landing and after that an authomatic  redirect 302 for the language (to www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_it.html or www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_en.html)?Thanks a lot.Massimiliano

    | vanGoGh-creative
    0
  • Bdig


    I'm trying to advise on the multi country seo for a site in terms of markup. We've already decided on using sub folders rather than separate sites or subdomains due to an established link profile and good rankings in all countries. The question is in relation to the homepage. Obviously this is the page most likely to rank well in any country (the site is a .com). But can multiple hreflang tags be put on the page to say that the page targets many countries? Or would leaving the hreflang tag off allow it to just rank for all countries? Also do Yahoo and Bing follow hreflang tags? I can't find any info on this anywhere! Thanks very much in advance for any help!

    | Bdig
    0
  • robertorg


    Hi, I'm working on the internationalization of a large website; the company wants to reach around 100 countries. I read this Google doc: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en in order to design the strategy. The strategy is the following: For each market, I'll define a domain or subdomain with the next settings: Leave the mysitename.com for the biggest market in which it has been working for years, and define the geographic target in Google search console. Reserve the ccTLD domains for other markets In the markets where I'm not able to reserve the ccTLD domains, I'll use subdomains for the .com site, for example us.mysitename.com, and I'll define in Google search console the geographic target for this domain. Each domain will only be in the preferred language of each country (but the user will be able to change the language via cookies). The content will be similar in all markets of the same language, for example, in the .co.uk and in .us the texts will be the same, but the product selections will be specific for each market. Each URL will link to the same link in other countries via direct link and also via hreflang. The point of this is that all the link relevance that any of them gets, will be transmitted to all other sites. My questions are: Do you think that there are any possible problems with this strategy? Is it possible that I'll have problems with duplicate content? (like I said before, all domains will be assigned to a specific geographic target) Each site will have around 2.000.000 of URLs. Do you think that this could generate problems? It's possible that only primary and other important locations will have URLs with high quality external links and a decent TrustRank. Any other consideration or related experience with a similar process will be very appreciated as well. Sorry for all these questions, but I want to be really sure with this plan, since the company's growth is linked to this internationalization process. Thanks in advance!

    | robertorg
    0
  • mlehr


    Hai all, Question about URL structure of international hotel website in Amsterdam: hotelcitadel.nl. Some information: -          Target group are mainly english speaking guests from UK and US. Besides that guests from the Netherlands and some other countries. -          Website in 6 languages. -          No geo-targetting; just language targetting with hreflang annotations. Current situation: hotelcitadel.nl = dutch language version and hotelcitadel.nl/en = english language version We are thinking about changing this to: hotelcitadel.nl would become english version and hotelcitadel.nl/nl would become the dutch version. Reason: root domain hotelcitadel.nl has by far the most links,and making the root domain the english version could help the rankings in english speaking countries like UK and US. What do you think, would this be a wise idea? Regards, Maurice

    | mlehr
    0
  • alexcbrands


    Hi! My UK based company just recently made the decision to let the US market operate their ecommerce business independently. Initially, both markets were operating off the same domain using sub-directories (i.e: www.brandname.com/en-us/ , www.brandname.com/en-gb/ ) Now that the US team have broken away from the domain - they are now using www.brandnameUSA.com while the UK continues to use www.brandname.com/en-gb/. The content is similar across both domains - however, the new US website has been able to consolidate several product variations onto single product pages where the UK website is using individual product pages for each variation. We have placed a geo-filter on the main domain which is 301 redirecting North American traffic looking for www.brandname.com to www.brandnameUSA.com However, since the domain change has taken place, product pages from the original domain are now indexing alongside the new US websites product pages in US search results. The UK website wants to be the default destination for all international traffic. My question is - how do we correctly setup hrlang tags across two separate TLDs and how do we handle a situation where multiple product pages on the "default" domain have been consolidated into one product page on the new USA domain? This is how we are currently handling it: "en-us" href="https://www.BRANDNAMEUSA.com/All-Variations" /> href="https://www.BRANDNAMEUSA.com/All-Variations" />

    | alexcbrands
    0
  • SO_UK


    Hi All, I have an international SEO question and was wondering if you could help. My client runs a website in the UK (www.example.co.uk). The site is ranked well for it's collection of keywords, my client now wishes to target the US market. He wishes to use the same web structure and design in new site www.example.com as we know this converts well. My questions are: What would be the best practice for setting this up? I know there will be duplicate content issues if a website is duplicated. If we use the same design and website structure but re-word content, would this be acceptable? Thank you for all your help in advance.

    | SO_UK
    0
  • AmitTulsiyani


    Hello, I have Two Domains one is xyz.co.uk and other is xyz.com Now, my main target for .com is United States, and I don't want to open that .com domain in any other country especially India. The same with the .co.uk, I dont want to open .co.uk in other countries. I did it with some developer help but it gave me redirected error in Google Webmaster. Can anyone please guide me how I can do this the proper way ? And Other issues is, how can I implement ,if any user in United States open xyz.co.uk than he should redirect to the .com version. Thank you.

    | AmitTulsiyani
    0
  • lcourse


    Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
    We have another US domain with identical content but USD prices which is indexed fine. When I search in google for site:mydomain I see that most of my pages seem to appear, but then in the rich snippets google shows USD prices instead of the GBP prices which we publish on this page (USD price is not published on the page and I tested with an US proxy and US price is nowhere in the source code). Then I clicked on the result in google to see cached version of page and google shows me as cached version of the UK product page the US product page. I use the following hreflang code: rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.domain.com/product" />
    rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.domain.co.uk/product" /> canonical of UK page is correctly referring to UK page. Any ideas? Do I need to remove the hreflang for en-US to get the UK domain properly indexed in google?

    | lcourse
    0
  • guidoampollini


    Hello, I am working on a project where have some doubts regarding the structure of international sites and multi languages.Website is in the fashion industry. I think is a common problem for this industry. Website is translated in 5 languages and sell in 21 countries. As you can imagine this create a huge number of urls, so much that with ScreamingFrog I cant even complete the crawling. Perhaps the UK site is visible in all those versions http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/GB/ Obviously for SEO only the first version is important One other example, the French site is available in 5 languages and again... http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/en/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/FR/ And so on...this is creating 3 issues mainly: Endless crawling - with crawlers not focusing on most important pages Duplication of content Wrong GEO urls ranking in Google I have already implemented href lang but didn't noticed any improvements. Therefore my question is Should I exclude with "robots.txt" and "no index" the non appropriate targeting? Perhaps for UK leave crawable just English version i.e. http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/, for France just the French version http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ and so on What I would like to get doing this is to have the crawlers more focused on the important SEO pages, avoid content duplication and wrong urls rankings on local Google Please comment

    | guidoampollini
    0
  • Arropa


    hi anyine  any issues with using Spanish, and other non English words, as domain names when trying to rank in Google uk. We launched a number of websites a while back but finding it hard to get much traction in Google uk. We are getting a reasonable number of impressions but cannot seem to get very high in the rankings. All the names are foreign words for their service. Our homeware website, for example, uses the basque word for furniture as its name. other than potential branding issues of having domains people might struggle to spell, is there any serp issues we would face with these names. thanks

    | Arropa
    0
  • ennovators


    Hi everyone, got a quick question concerning the hreflang tag. I have a website with 2 different language versions targeting to the same region(Reason: The area is bilingual however not everyone speaks the other language fluently) Question:
    Can I use hreflang in that case like: Many thanks in advance

    | ennovators
    0
  • jimmygs1982


    Hi I have a client who owns two separate TLDs for the same brand (for the sake of this post, we'll call the two sites www.site-a.com and www.site-b.com). For site www.site-a.com the website has been around for a while and is their primary site for their US operations which is their heartland, is well established in the SERPS and is where they make most of their money. As they looked to expand to the UK, they then created www.site-b.com and added the UK as a subfolder (so www.site-b.com/uk) and geo-targeted it towards the UK in Webmaster tools . The site has recently launched but they now find that, when a customer searches for their brand in the UK, they find www.site-a.com in position 1 (which, given it's tailored for a primary US audience, has a significantly lower conversion rate for UK traffic) and www.site-b.com in position 2. However, the client doesn't want to specifically geo target www.site-a.com to the USA as they feel it might affect where they appear for other international markets aside from the UK. So the question is, how can they, with the existing infrastructure, help remove www.site-a.com from the UK SERPs without adversely affecting their rank elsewhere? Hope this makes sense and thanks in advance for your help. James

    | jimmygs1982
    0
  • Veva


    Hello, In January of this year Google introduced "Locale-aware crawling by Googlebot." https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=e Google uses different crawl settings for sites that cannot have separate URLs for each locale. .........   This is basically for sites that dynamically render contend on the same URL depending on the locale and language (IP) of the visitor. If e.g. a visitor was coming from France, the targeted page would load in french. If a visitor was coming from the US the same page would load in English on the same URL. Does anyone have any experience with this setup and how well it works? How well do the different versions of a page get indexed, and how well do those pages rank? In the example above, does the french content get indexed correctly? Many thanks!

    | Veva
    0
  • jennifer.new


    Hi, we are currently implementing a mobile site, e.g. m.company.com. The global mobile site will only be available in English. We have local subsites of the desktop site, e.g. company.com/fr. The local subsites are not mobile friendly. If a user does a search for a brand term in France, **which site will rank higher in SERPs? **If it will be the global site, is there anything we can do (other than making them mobile friendly) to make the local sites rank higher? Would it be the mobile-friendly site, even though it is only in English, because the local site would be penalized for not being mobile friendly? Or would it be the local site, because Google will give priority to the fact that it's in French, which matches the language of the person searching?

    | jennifer.new
    0
  • pompero99


    Hi guys, i have a question about footer indexed pages like about us, frequently questions, press or ads with us, among others. I'd like to put the same page in our website of .com.mx but i don't know how because i think it will be duplicate content. should i create new content for these pages? Thanks, J

    | pompero99
    0
  • lcourse


    I made some speed tests and noticed that our website loads 10 times slower for visitors from China mainland.
    Did anybody have experience with speeding up loading time for visitors from China? We operate the Chinese version of our website in a subdirectory and we have no interest in registering a company in China in order to get the ICP number.
    Currently using cloudflare who should have a node in HK and serving static content via rackspace. Does disabling google analytics and facebook widgets really make a difference? (ideally would like to avoid this)

    | lcourse
    0
  • FranFerrara


    A question regarding International SEO: We are seeing cases for many sites that meet these criteria: -International sites that have www.example.com/ ip redirecting to country site based on ip redirect (ex. www.example.com/ 301 to www.example.com/us -There is a desktop + mobile site (www.example.com + m.example.com) The issue we see is Google shows www.example.com/ in US search results instead of www.example.com/us in search results. Since the .com/ redirects, there is no mobile version, and www.example.com/ also shows up in mobile SERPs instead of m.example.com/us. My questions are: 1. If www.example.com/ is redirecting users and Googlebot, why is Googlebot caching it with the content of www.example.com/us? 2. Why is www.example.com/ showing up in SERPs instead of www.example.com/us? 3. How can we help Google display www.example.com/us and m.example.com/us in SERPs instead of www.example.com/? Thanks!!

    | FranFerrara
    0
  • DohenyDrones


    Hi, I'm hoping someone can help me out here but this is what I am dealing with: Say John Smith Companies sells Widgets across the United States.  They have also formed a company called "Widgets of Canada" in an effort to sell their Blue Widgets only in Canada and I am in responsible for their website.  Recently, John Smith Companies completely redesigned their website and it now has a really slick look and is loaded with great widgets content. I would like to take their site and re-purpose it for use in Canada.  However, I am concerned about duplicate content.  I would be converting all the widget specifications from imperial to metric units, changing the title and description elements and also using a much different folders/ paths.  Is this enough to avoid any issues with similar page content?  Is there anything I can do with hreflang? Thanks

    | DohenyDrones
    0
  • DocdataCommerce


    Hi everyone, I've been searching about a problem, but haven't been able to find an answer. We would like to generate a XML site map for an international web shop. This shop has one domain for Dutch visitors (.nl) and another domain for visitors of other countries (Germany, France, Belgium etc.) (.com). The website on the 2 domains looks the same, has the same template and same pages, but as it is targeted to other countries, the pages are in different languages and the urls are also in different languages (see example below for a category bags). Example Netherlands:
    Dutch domain: www.client.nl 
    Example Dutch bags category page: www.client.nl/tassen Example France:
    International domain: www.client.com 
    Example French bags category page: www.client.com/sacs When a visitor is on the Dutch domain (.nl) which shows the Dutch content, he can switch country to for example France in the country switch and then gets redirected to the other, international .com domain. Also the other way round. Now we want to generate a XML sitemap for these 2 domains. As it is the same site, but on 2 domains, development wants to make 1 sitemap, where we take the Dutch version with Dutch domain as basis and in the alternates we specify the other language versions on the other domain (see example below). <loc>http://www.client.nl/tassen</loc>
    <xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
    hreflang="fr"
    href="http://www.client.com/sacs"
    /></xhtml:link<br> Is this the best way to do this? Or would we need to make 2 site maps, as it are 2 domains?

    | DocdataCommerce
    0
  • DigitalThirdCoast


    Hello Moz Community, I'm working with a client who has translated their top 50 landing pages into Spanish. It's a large website and we don't have the resources to properly translate all pages at once, so we started with the top 50. We've already translated the content, title tags, URLs, etc. and the content will live in it's own /es-us/ directory. The client's website is set up in a way that all content follows a URL structure such as: https://www.example.com/en-us/. For Page A, it will live in English at: https://www.example.com/en-us/page-a For Page A, it will live in Spanish at https://www.example.com/es-us/page-a ("page-a" may vary since that part of the URL is translated) From my research in the Moz forums and Webmaster Support Console, I've written the following hreflang tags: /> For Page B, it will follow the same structure as Page A, and I wrote the corresponding hreflang tags the same way. My question is, do both of these tags need to be on both the Spanish and English version of the page? Or, would I put the "en-us" hreflang tag on the Spanish page and the "es-us" hreflang tag on the English page? I'm thinking that both hreflang tags should be on both the Spanish and English pages, but would love some clarification/confirmation from someone that has implemented this successfully before.

    | DigitalThirdCoast
    0
  • AndyMitty


    I'm working with a new site that has a few regional sites in subdirectories /en-us/, /en-au/, etc and just noticed that some of our interior pages (ourdomain.com/en-us/interior-page1/ ) are outranking the equivalent ourdomain.com/interior-page1. This only occurs in some SERPS while others correctly display the non-regional result. I was told we have hreflang tags implemented correctly in the meta information of each of our pages but have yet to research deeply. Should we even have a /en-us/ version when our root domain is the default version, in english, and targeted to US primarily? Any help would be appreciated as I am a little lost. Cheers, Andrew

    | AndyMitty
    0
  • Secrets


    I have discovered the most infuriating issue with Google Search for Irish users and it seems to be getting increasingly worse in the last 2 years or so. This is not only frustrating as a business owner (in fact it could bring a business to its knees) but it is rage inducing as a consumer.
    Google knows the location where I am searching from and I'm using google.ie yet I still get just a small number of Irish websites usually followed by eBay and Amazon results then a never ending list of websites that are based in the United Kingdom. Now, I know the one thing that we all have in common is the use of the English language, however what we don't have in common is shipping costs. In order to slightly increase the number of Irish based companies I need to add in the phrase 'Ireland' to my search (on google.ie in Ireland) and this makes only a small difference. In fact, oftentimes Google seems to throw in the odd American or Australian site just to really wind me up.
    It's completely absurd that Google rarely returns results for .ie websites or irish based websites when searching in Ireland. Many UK companies don't ship to Ireland (including many of the eBay and Amazon results). This is killing Irish businesses who have the products and cheaper or free shipping and many how are working damn hard on their SEO are still being passed up for companies that have nothing to do with our economy.... Why oh why is this happening.

    | Secrets
    0
  • AdiRste


    Hi guys, I'd love to hear your opinion on how to handle this. We have a www.site.com business site. We expanded our business to Italy a few years ago with an Italian ccTLD with a www.site.it version. A business decision has been made to expand in to several new territories, but we will be going with a subdirectory structure for each country: .com/se, .com/fi etc When we're setting up the hreflang tags for this, the language/region all need to be cross annotated. This is all fine. The only anomaly is the site.it version already existing. This site will continue to exist as it suits its market context so well. In terms of annotation, should the hreflang include the .it site or is the ccTLD the only signal google needs to serve the correct version to Italian searchers.But the hreflang tag needs to declare all available language versions and it is possible to include different domains etc. Please let me know your thoughts on this 🙂 My gut feeling is that it should be included? Thanks!

    | AdiRste
    0
  • Humix


    We have problems with the google cache version of different domains.
    For the “.nl” domain we have an “.be” cache..
    Enter “cache:www.dmlights.nl” in your browser to see this result. Following points are already adapted: Sitemap contains hreflang tag Sitemap is moved to the location www.dmlights.nl/sitemap.xml We checked the DNS configuration Changed the Content language in de response header to : Content-Language: nl-NL Removed the cache with webmastertools Resolved serverrequest errors. Can anyone provide a solution to fix this problem? Thanks, Pieter

    | Humix
    0
  • footd


    Hi all, I've an ecommerce which ships worldwide and we maintain 3 languages, spanish, english and french. My main business is in Spain, so spanish will be shown in the root domain: http://domain.com/. English will have the /en/ subdomain and french the /fr/ subdomain. After some research, I've concluded that the best strategy for my business is the following. 1º- Translate all the URL's to the correct language, since now are in spanish. 2º- Implement Hreflang tag (with self-reference): Note: Due to the "universality" of english, Does it make sense? Or should I use spanish as default since it's the most important one. 3º- Create the 3 sites in Search Console and only geo targetting french sobdomain to France. Since I really want to boost in France rankings. Do you consider this as a contradiction with ? I could also target country in the hreflang. 4º- Add language tag in each language version: <meta name="language" content="spanish">in http://domain.com/</meta name="language"> <code class="broncode"><meta name="language" content="english">in http://domain.com/en/</meta name="language"></code> <code class="broncode"><meta name="language" content="french">in http://domain.com/fr/</meta name="language"></code> <code class="broncode">5º- Use canonical tag together with hreflang.</code> ``` Any opinion will be very appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance! Best regards.

    | footd
    0
  • AbsolutelyN


    Hi We are a UK company looking to expand our sales into the US market. We will be setting up a US office. Our (.com) site has a number of main sections relating to different products and services - but only two of these sections will be selling products to the US. /service1 - UK only
    /products1 - UK and US - different product names/descriptions for different markets
    /service3 - UK and US - not much difference for uk/us pages So the query is do we fully internationalise the site with sub folders /us & /gb and make all content on the site have a different language version. Or do we only give an alternate language version for the two areas that need it? Perhaps /products1/us & /products1/uk We also have top rankings and are concerned about changing the urls. Is one option to keep the existing urls as the 'default' language? The default perhaps being US as it is a .com domain. If not then how do you redirect a url that going forward splits into US or GB sub directories? Another option is to have the current .com become US only and create a .co.uk site. We are in a position to easily do this but research suggests subdirectories is the better way forwards due to aggregated link authority. Many thanks for any thoughts,
    Tristan

    | AbsolutelyN
    0
  • matt-14567


    I've got a site with two versions – a U.S. version and a European version. Users are directed to the appropriate version through a landing page that asks where they're located; both sites are on the same domain, except one is .com/us and the other is .com/eu. My issue is that for some keywords, the European version is outranking the U.S. version in Google's U.S. SERPs. Not only that, but when Google displays sitelinks in the U.S. SERPs, it's a combination of pages on the European site and the U.S. site. Does anyone know how I can stop the European site from outranking the U.S. site in the U.S.? Or how I can get Google to only display sitelinks for pages on the U.S. site in the U.S. SERPs? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this topic!

    | matt-14567
    0
  • footd


    Hi all! I want to start with International SEO process for my ecommerce. We sell worldwide with a .com domain, although the business is mainly focused in Spain. We maintain three languages, spanish, english and french with a non suitable structure. Now, after read a lot about it, I'm considering to use subdirectories for each language, /es/, /en/ and /fr/. And heres it's my first doubt: Could I avoid /es/ from spanish language as it's the default one? I've understood from recents Q&A that it's not needed although more user friendly. I'm trying to avoid tons of 301 from old urls for my main language. Anyway I want to know the best approach regardless complexity. My second doubt is about country targeting. After some research, I consider that it'd be interesting target country for /fr/ subdomain but language for /en/. Do you see any problem mixing both strategies? I know I also need to add the hreflang tag to guide googlebot. But I prefer to clarify these points first. Thanks a lot! Best regards.

    | footd
    1
  • WebGain


    Hello, I am researching a lot on this subject and have read several articles here on Moz and elsewhere about the best practices for multinational websites. But I'm not yet convinced on what would be the best solution in my case. Today we have the following websites (examples):
    website.com which function as a global website.
    website.dk which is for the danish market
    website.no which is for the norwegian market Some of the content on these websites are the same (but different languages; english, danish and norwegian). We want to expand the business to more countries and work with ccTLDs. Both to countries which speaks languages that we don't have content for yet (an example could be Poland), but also more countries that speaks english, like Great Britain (with a .co.uk domain) and Australia (with a .com.au domain). We expect to expand in many countries (as many as it makes sense to do). I have read a lot about the alternative hreflang tag which would look like and that seems like a good solution, but I have a couple of questions that I hope you guys can answer: Should the alternate hreflang tags show every existing language versions including the one you're on or only show the alternative versions? Do we risk penalty by having identical or almost identical content for same language websites (could be UK and the global .com one) if we use the alternate hreflang tags? I'm aware that we should use the native spellings and sentences in each country. Would the sitemap solution be better in our case? We have the same link structure for all websites, but the sub-directories can differ due to their language (like /articles/ is /artikler/ in danish) - is that an issue? Will hreflang="en" function as global english? (so searching users that we don't have a local website for will see that).

    | WebGain
    0
  • Mike.Bean


    Has anyone tried out Sajan Translation Services? What was your experience? Do you have any other translation service companies to recommend? Thanks!

    | Mike.Bean
    0
  • Johnny_AppleSeed


    Our client's business www.shanore.com is based in Ireland but targets international markets, particularly the USA. A few months ago we made the switch to HTTPS and ever since our organic traffic has steadily declined in the USA, UK, Canada etc. by roughly 30 - 40%. In Ireland, over the same period of time it's increased by around 30%. An Irish address features in the Footer and the same address is also given on Google + / Google My Business. Webmaster Tools is set to target the USA & the site is hosted in the USA. Could the presence of the Irish address somehow be overriding the Webmaster Tools geo-targeting? Why would traffic fall everywhere else apart from Ireland? Keyword rankings are also now stronger in Ireland than in other countries.

    | Johnny_AppleSeed
    0
  • Icemax


    Hello everybody, It has been 2 month since I'm trying to figure out the cause of increasing "no return tags" error count in GWT. I have checked the syntax several times and even switched from meta tags method to including language versions in sitemap without any luck. Below is a screen shot of GWT error and a sitemap excerpt that shows original and alternate URL both having return tags pointing to each other. The full sitemap can be found here: http://wordsru.com/sitemap.xml Any help or insight about whats going on here much appreciated. Thanks! RKP6AhZ.jpg KFluNCC.jpg

    | Icemax
    0
  • lcourse


    I remember that Matt Cutts recommended against interlinking many language versions of a site.
    Considering that google now also crawls javascript links, what is best way to implement interlinking? I still see otherwhise extremely well optimized large sites interlinking to more than 10 different language versions e.g. zalando.de, but also booking.com (even though here on same domain). Currently we have an expandable css dropdown in the footer interlinking 16 different language versions with different TLD. Would you be concerned? What would you suggest how to interlink domains (for user link would be useful)?

    | lcourse
    0
  • peeveezee


    My client, a UK company, has a .eu domain and want to rank primarily in the UK but also worldwide, is a .eu domain appropriate?

    | peeveezee
    0
  • teconsite


    Hi! I was wondering what would be the best strategy to solve duplicated content generated by the homepage and its differents URLS This is an international website. Now it only has one language working: Spanish, but the url structure is already ready to work with the language approach So we have now www.brand.com -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es)
    www.brand.com/es -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es)
    www.brand.com/index.php -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es) I would like to know if this is the correct approach of if we should add 301 redirects instead of canonical. Let's image that they want to active the /en language, so they will have www.brand.com
    www.brand.com/index.php 
    www.brand.com/es
    www.brand.com/en now what? I image they have to use hreflang, but I am a little lost with how this should work. 301? canonical? hreflang? Could you help me? Thank you! Victoria

    | teconsite
    0
  • Cybertill


    Hi, As an English company we have a co.uk domain with .com domain pointing to this. We are now looking to launch a separate (new) website targeting the American market and I have been asked to do the following: If an American or Canadian IP address visits the .com website it automatically goes to our newly created website i.e. website 2. If a non-American or non-Canadian IP address goes to .com it automatically goes to the original website i.e. website 1. If a user is on website 1 and clicks an American flag it takes the website user to website 2. If a user is on website 2 and clicks on the UK flag it takes the website user to website 1. Can anyone advise the best way to go about doing this as I feel that this could effect our search rankings. I am concerned how the search engines will penalize website 2 (original site) which has good rankings. Thanks in advance.

    | Cybertill
    0
  • jeremycabral


    Hi Mozzers, I am expanding a website internationally. I own the .com for the domain. I need to accommodate multiple countries and I'm not sure if I should build a folder for /us/ for United States or just have the root domain .com OPTION 1:
    domain.com/page-url -- United States
    domain.com/de/page-url -- Denmark
    domain.com/jp/page-url -- Japan OPTION 2:
    domain.com/us/page-url -- United States
    domain.com/de/page-url -- Denmark
    domain.com/jp/page-url -- Japan My concern with option 2 is there will be some dilution and we wouldn't get the full benefit of inbound links compared to Option 1 as we would have geo ip redirection in place to redirect users etc. to the relative sub-folder. Which option is better from an SEO perspective? Cheers, Jeremy

    | jeremycabral
    0
  • edward-may


    Hi Guys, I have 3 top level domains, does anyone know if it is okay to submit all 3 domains? they all cover different countries, NZ, AUS, USA - The NZ one has been submitted, but our main site is the .com (USA) after running a few adwords campaign we decided to work the .com instead! Does anyone know the terms or guidelines around this?

    | edward-may
    0
  • Harveyspecter


    Hello, If a company is in different countries and has same content in most of the countries does it hurt SEO? For Ex. fibaro.com is the website that I am researching and I have seen the indexed pages to be about 40,000 however there is not much content on it. On further inspection I noticed that for every country the sub folder is different. So for us it will be fibaro.com/us/motion-sensor and for Europe fibaro.com/en/motion-sensor. Now both of these pages have same content on it and the company is in 86 countries so imagine the amount of duplicate content it has. Does anybody have any ideas on what should be an ideal way to approach this? Thanks

    | Harveyspecter
    0
  • teconsite


    Hi, 
    a client of mine has a site with a domain name brand.es. They are a furniture manufacturer. They has a well known brand in its sector.
    brand.com is registered by a US company. (Completly different activity) This client registered its domain name 10 years ago, and its audience was in Spain.
    As it is a .es ccTLD it is directly geotargeted to Spain. 5 years ago, they began to export to other countries, and today they have distributors in a lot of countries like Italy, France, England, Portugal, Germany, and many more... As they are manufacturers and they sell their products to multiple locations worldwide, the language aproach seems to be the more efficient way to reach they users. The problem is that they are using a ccTLD domain brand.es, beacuse the .com domain was registered.
    Actually the international organic traffic is very poor, mostly related to queries with the brand name. My question:
    Is it possible to do international seo with a geotargeted domain .es? 
    Should they register a .com that doesn't match exactly their brand name? (it is a little difficult, beacause brandfurniture.com would be good for England, but not for Spain or France. )
    Or should they focus their strategy with some ccTLDs for 3 or 4 of the main countries? (Not sure this would be an alternative... too much cost) I know, that in this situation there is no perfect solution, but I would appreciate your opinions.
    Any Ideas ?????? Thank you!!

    | teconsite
    0
  • themegroup


    Hi fellow Mozzers! We're handling the digital marketing for a UK-based franchise of a Canadian SaaS company, and I've noticed that a large proportion of their traffic has been coming from the US (not the majority, but enough to skew the figures). The Canadian arm of the business deals with the US market, but the majority, if not all, is direct traffic which seems to suggest they've seen the web address somewhere (not sure where though). Is there a search-friendly way to move this traffic back to the Canadian site? I know I can set up a filter for US traffic so it stops distorting the stats we're seeing (which I have now done), but my worry is this is causing a high bounce rate that may be impacting Google's perception of the site quality. The traffic has a 100% bounce rate (not surprisingly), so if we could find a best practice way of sending them to the Canadian site, that would be great. My first thought was a screen that appears for US traffic prompting them to the Canadian site, but presumably this would still count as a bounce as they're only on one page? Any help much appreciated! Cheers guys,
    Nick

    | themegroup
    0
  • Angelos_Savvaidis


    Hey there Mozzers, If I have a site that is translated in 5 languages with main language as English ( most pages are only template translated top menu and footer ) is this correct? Right now the main page which is example.com/en is mentioned 3 times in the href code 1st as a canonical later as alternate and 3rd as x default which seems a bit weird. | |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | |

    | Angelos_Savvaidis
    0
  • Johnny_AppleSeed


    Hi Guys, A sticky one for ye. I have recently updated my site  selling Jewelry in April of this year. Overall, Local Irish organic traffic has been stronger than ever in the first half of 2015. Yet in the USA, since March it's been at it's weakest for years, declining month-on-month. In terms of Organic Traffic for May & June, there's been a 30% increase in visitors from Ireland when compared to last year.  Yet for the USA - the biggest market for us- there has been a 39% decrease this year over the same dates. It's the same for language demographics. Big decrease for en-US, but increases for en-IE and en-GB. It's not just the US. The site has taken a hit in Canada, Australia etc.So domestically the website looks to be performing better than ever before since the HTTPS switch, but it has taken a big hit internationally in our key market.We are targeting USA in search console, not changed any of the content in the site however he have added an SSL cert to make the whole site HTTPS like google said :)Any pointers are welcome

    | Johnny_AppleSeed
    0
  • edward-may


    Hi Guys I'm stuck here! I have update the hreftags, updated the sitemaps. I have 3 top level domains and my zenory.com site is showing for the home page the wrong meta tag description, as you can see in the attachement the meta tag is showing the new zealand site meta tag description which is for zenory.co.nz Anyone know what might be going on here? I have also fetched the home page through WMT as well and its still returning the same results any advice would be much appreciated! Thanks

    | edward-may
    0
  • edward-may


    Hi Mozers, I'm pretty stuck on this and wondering if anybody else can give me some heads up around what might be causing the issues. I have 3 top level domains, NZ, AU, and USA.  For some od reason I seem to be having a real issue with these pages indexing and also the sitemaps and I'm considering hiring someone to get the issue sorted as myself or my developer can''t seem to find the issues. I have attached an example of the sitemap_au.xml file.  As you can see there is only 1 page that has been indexed and 72 were submitted.  Basically because we host all of our domains on the same server, I was told last time our sitemaps were possibly been overwritten hence the reason why we have sitemap_au.xml and its the same for the other sitemap_nz.xml and sitemap_us.xml I also orignially had sitemap.xml for each. Another issue I am having is the meta tag des for each home page in USA and AU are showing the meta tag for New Zealand but when you look into the com and com.au code meta tag description they are all different as you can see here http://bit.ly/1KTbWg0 and here http://bit.ly/1AU0f5k Any advice around this would be so much appreciated! Thanks Justin new

    | edward-may
    0
  • Amjath


    Hi Everyone, This is my first post in this new Q & A section!! This interface looks great!! Now onto the question.... We have www.example.com in English that has 50,000+ URLs. We are in the process of building a new site example.de targeting German users. The German site (www.example.de) will be a mirror of the English site at launch as we want to give a full experience to people visiting the .de domain. However, not all pages will be localized as we can't support that. We are planning on localizing the core sets of pages (~500) and leaving the rest in English. Post launch, we will have additional milestones to localize the remaining pages until the entire site is localized (converted to German). Is this the correct way to go? Will this cause duplicate content issue?
    Will adding "rel=canonical" tag on these pages solve the purpose? Thanks for the help!

    | Amjath
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Explore more categories

  • Moz Tools

    Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

  • SEO Tactics

    Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

  • Community

    Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

  • Support

    Connect on product support and feature requests.

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.