Category: International SEO
Discussions around international SEO tactics.
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Low Index: 72 pages submitted and only 1 Indexed?
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-may0 -
Internationalization and SEO
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?
| Amjath
Will adding "rel=canonical" tag on these pages solve the purpose? Thanks for the help!0 -
Google Webmaster Tools - International SEO Geo-Targeting site with Worldwide rankings
I have a client who already has rankings in the US & internationally. The site is broken down like this: url.com (main site with USA & International Rankings) url.com/de url.com/de-english url.com/ng url.com/au url.com/ch url.com/ch-french url.com/etc Each folder has it's own sitmap & relative content for it's respective country. I am reading in google webmaster tools > site config > settings, the option under 'Learn More': "If you don't want your site associated with any location, select Unlisted." If I want to keep my client's international rankings the way it currently is on url.com, do NOT geo target to United States? So I select unlisted, right? Would I use geo targeting on the url.com/de, url.com/de-english, url.com/ng, url.com/au and so on?
| Francisco_Meza0 -
Duplicate Page Content due to Language and Currency
Hi Folks, hoping someone can help me out please I have a site that I'd like to rank in France and the UK but I'm getting a stack of duplicate content errors due to English and French pages and GBP and EUR prices. Below is an example of how the home page is duplicated: http://www.site.com/?sl=en?sl=fr
| Marketing_Today
http://www.site.com/?sl=fr?sl=fr
http://www.site.com
http://www.site.com/?currency=GBP?sl=fr
http://www.site.com/?currency=GBP?sl=en
http://www.site.com/?sl=fr?sl=en
http://www.site.com/?currency=EUR?sl=fr
http://www.site.com/?currency=EUR?sl=en
http://www.site.com/?currency=EUR
http://www.site.com/?sl=en¤cy=EUR
http://www.site.com/?sl=en¤cy=GBP
http://www.site.com/?sl=en
http://www.site.com/?currency=GBP
http://www.site.com/?sl=en?sl=en Each page has the following code in the that updates according to the page you are on: How do I simplify this and what's the correct approach?0 -
Block access to site from everywhere but north america
I have a site that is being attacked very hard by bots, malware, etc. Most of it seems to be originating from Asia and Eastern Europe so I want to block off access to the site to everybody but people in North America. We do not ship out of the country anyways so it really does not need to be seen by people around the world. How can I set this up?
| Atomicx0 -
How is Google determining location for geotargeting
Hello, I have a question related to Geotargeting.
| Lvet
Let's suppose I have a website: mysite.co.uk
As far as I understand Google will consider this site targeted for the UK and will appear on searches preferentially from the UK. What happen now if I have a person located in Spain (with a Spanish IP) and searching in Google.co.uk. Will mysite.co.uk still appear in searches? What are the factors that Google takes into account for Geotargeting? Thank you0 -
Multi Regional Website Best Practices
Hi there, I have a website that is targeting 3 countries AU/US & NZ. I have set up hreflang tags for each page on each of the site however I am having difficulties getting it work right. I read this article which was a great insight into the hreflang tags. https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights and as a result I have implemented hreflang tags in the following manner: When users access the root domain http://[website] it will redirect the user to their locale with a 302 redirect. I have a few questions:
| nathanfranklin
1. When building my external link profiles, I'm not sure if I should be building link profiles for http://[website]/ or for the geo graphical pages (http://[website]/aus/ etc..). Note that the http://[website]/ is never used, it just issues a 302 to the actual geographical location. 2. It seems that the hreflang tags are not working correctly. Perhaps its the result of the 302 on the root page, but in google.com.au (using the link http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&gl=au&pws=0&q=[branded search]) I would expect that I should see the search results for /aus/ given the fact that the hreflang tags are setup as en-au. Instead I am seeing the root domain page. Is that correct or should it be showing all the pages with /aus/. ALSO If I do a search in google thailand (http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&gl=th&pws=0&q=[branded search]) it returns the /aus/ version where it should be showing the /us/ using the x-default hreflang tag. In google webmaster tools I have setup 4 site profiles:
http://[website]/
http://[website]/us/
http://[website]/aus/ (Targeted to Australia)
http://[website]/nz/ (Targeted to New Zealand) Any help would be appreciated. Thanks Nathan1 -
Google is still indexing with https,i removed ssl for my website
My website is claydip.com. I removed ssl for my website, but when i type claydip in google search it is still displaying with https and saying no description available..i lost visitors from search..kindly help me. I moved from bluehost to deamhost. I had a ssl at bluehost, when i move to dreamhost i am not using it.
| knextweb8190 -
Moving my site to one domain name .com from 3
Hi Guys, I'm ranking really well for my domains in my local geo - im wondering if it will be more effective if i moved the co.nz and com.au over to the .com - the only thing is will i still see my com.au and co.nz results on the .com?
| edward-may0 -
Google Webmaster showing error for [hreflang='x-default']
Hi There! Using [hreflang='x-default'] tag to target language specific countries on our site but Google Webmaster showing errors even implementation made as per Google guideline but one thing is not clear and we are not sure, this is the reason behind it. Error is showing up only on those pages where 'Google Parameters' are used. For example : https://www.sitegeek.com/a2hosting?grank=open 'grank=' is defined as a 'Google Parameters' and on the above page 'hreflang' tags are : Also, on page https://www.sitegeek.com/a2hosting [without Google Parameters] same above 'hreflang' tags are taken. But, There is no error on second page URL where no 'Google Parameters' in URL. Therefore, error showing on first URL where 'Google Parameters' are taken. Is this the issue or not? suggest how to remove? -- Rajiv S9vhl3T
| gamesecure0 -
Is it OK to change language by user IP?
Hello, I just read https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#1 about multilingual website. Google says "Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language". so Is it ok to redirect url by user IP instead of user language?
| visaasancard0 -
Are my hreflang and canonical link tags set correctly?
Currently we have a website in english but over time we will roll out parts of the whole site in different languages for different countries which will also result in country specific English versions of the website. The goal is that Google shows the country specific version of a page in a native language or English if available or falls back to the default English version of the same page otherwise. I listed below how we plan to use hreflang and canonical link tags to achieve this and was hoping to get some feedback from the Moz community if this will work as expected. (1) A page (www.mysite.com/page1) exists only in English as default. Users should be able to find it in every country unless there is an English version specifically for this country. We would use the following tags: (2) A page exists in English (www.mysite.com/id/en/page2) and Bahasa (www.mysite.com/id/id/page2) for a specific country (Indonesia in this case). Users in Indonesia searching in English should find the country specific English page. Indonesians searching in Bahasa should find the Bahasa version of that page. We would use the following tags on the English version: and therefor the following tags on the Bahasa version: In this case there wouldn't be a default English version available for the page. (3) If a page exists in English global, English for Indonesians and Bahasa for Indonesians we would use: on www.mysite.com/id/en/page3 on www.mysite.com/id/id/page3 on www.mysite.com/page3 If www.mysite.com/id/en/page3 and www.mysite.com/page3 are very similar we would risk google picking the page they want to rank for an english keyword searched in Indonesia, correct? (4) If a page in (1) and (2) can be reached with a different URL, we would only use a canonical and don't specify any hreflang tags e.g.: www.mysite.com/en/other-url-to-page1 or
| ddspg
www.mysite.com/id/en/other-url-to-page2-english-indonesia (5) If a page that exists as global English page becomes available in English for a specific country as e.g. www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 we would use the following tags: and also add one more hreflang to www.mysite.com/page1: The assumption here is that Google would rank the localized page instead of the global page after crawling our site again. But since this will be a new page, are we going to lose traffic because www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 won't rank as well in the beginning (e.g. no offsite optimization)?0 -
Deleting Blog posts
Hi Guys, I'm doing some content auditing myself - and making sure that the content I'm writing is more in-depth. So bascially I found a few blog posts that were not actually blogs and actually could be moved to my main site content. So I went ahead and cleaned up the blog post article - I deleted it and reposted it with the new fresh content to my main site. My question is - after I deleted the post - how do I remove the blog post for the Index? Or does this just remove itself after i have deleted the post. Another question I had - after I removed the post - I was then thinking, should I have redirected traffic to the new page?
| edward-may0 -
How to handle different content on same domain internationally?
Dear community, I have encountered a unique situation and I am unsure as how to proceed, I have a U.S. based website for intentions of this question is www.musicstore.com. The customer has decided to offer their products up for sale internationally, however, has two business requirements, one is that his international presence differs with product offering and content then the domestic version and two, that they both live on the same domain of www.musicstore.com without any reference to offering a differing international presence. Many of his products are offered for purchase directly overseas, while not against his suppliers rules, it is frowned upon. All this said, now to my question. I'm currently running a Magento two website install. With GeoIP setting which version of www.musicstore.com is presented. Do I have to worry about different content being displayed on the same exact url even though the experience is completely location based? If it is a concern, any risks I should be concerned with. I could possibly do something along the lines of www.musicstore.com/in/ while this is not ideal for the customer, if it prevents many larger issues I'd steer the customer this way. I just want my customer to be able to sell his product internationally without upsetting his suppliers or making Google go, what does this site actually have. Hopefully I explained my question well enough for those who can help to understand. Please ask if you need any more information. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.
| swarming0 -
New gTLDs
We have seen that there are a lot of new gTLDs coming available. Does Moz have any insight on how the various search engines are going to treat them. Will they be a backwater of the internet or are some of them likely to become relevant and used by major companies. If we were to simultaneously set up new sites based around a .com domain and say a .shop domain, would they both grow equally?
| LupoNorth0 -
Backlinks issue
Hi guys So I have 3 top level domains - I'm seeing backlinks that point to each other. Is this something that I need to fix? I'm not too sure if this practice is ethical, but I'm not entirely sure how all the links are pointing towards each other and if this is something I will get pulled up for how do i go about fixing it? My 3 domains are as follows: zenory.com, zenory.com.au and zenory.co.nz I would appreciate some advice around this! Cheers
| edward-may0 -
Setting up I.P Filter Google Analytics - I.p ending with 0/24
Hi everyone, Your help would be much appreciated for the following: I am trying to setup I.P filters for our Google Analytic account to exclude internal traffic. We are located in multiple locations and each location have multiple I.p addresses. The I.P addresses we have end either by 0/24 which apparently means they provide a range from 0 to 255 and or 128/25. I have tried to setup the I.P addresses in different formats on the GA filter but they are apparently are not valid: example of one setup I tried: 1**.\2**.\8*.([0-256]) I have gone through the Filter setup guide from Google but I must be doing something wrong- probably to do on how I setup the I.P's ending with 0/24 and 128/25 If anyone could help me on how I can set up the I.P filters Google analytic would be great. The I.P addresses look like the following (changed digits): Location 1: 174.177.179.0/25 174.177.179.128/25 Location 2: 196.222.87.0/24
| AlphaDigital2
194.59.197.0/24 Thanks you so much for your help, L.0 -
Best practice for Spanish version of English website?
I'm doing an audit for a site that has all of its English pages under the same roof with Spanish pages in Wordpress. It is intended for Chicago, not Mexico. I suspect this is not a good thing, but I only have instinct to rely on here. What is the best practice for having the same website in two languages? http://www.enhancedform.com/ and http://www.enhancedform.com/spanish/
| realpatients0 -
Human Translation versus Google Translate for Ecommerce Products
Hi all, We want to put our products on our ecommerce site into another language. I have always been under the impression that running text through Google Translate is a no no, not only for the user experience, but also it is a Google tool and I am assuming that Google would notice that it is not translated by a human. I don't know if it would incur a penalty as such but it most likely would not be favoured as a human translation Can anyone confirm their experience or impression on this? Thanks!
| bjs20100 -
2 Top level domains - not ranking?
Hi Guys I'm a bit confused, I have 3 top level domains com, com.au and co.nz I have set up the right CcLTD's and also the correct Hreflang tags - but for some reason, I'm only been found for my co.nz site and not for the com.au and the com My site is zenory com and zenory.co.nz, zenory.com.au the co.nz is doing well in the nz search but how come I can't find anything for the other two? Is there something I'm doing wrong here?
| edward-may0 -
Opening Up Webmaster Tools Geo-Targeting to Everyone Instead of US
Hi Mozzers, I wanted to get everyone's opinion on this. We have an e-commerce site that was targeting 3 different geo-locations. The main one is a .com. The other two were Canada and UK based. We recently turned off our Canada site and 301 to the .com. The .com site had been targeted towards United States in Google Webmaster Tools. Should I remove the Webmaster Tools geo-targeting now that Canada is pointing towards our main site? I don't want to lose rankings for US since that is our main market and the .com site is our main revenue driver and focus. I'm inclined to leave it as is because I still see our .com site ranking when I search in Google CA. From what I've seen is that it can take months for something to change and I definitely don't want anything to go awry. Just wanted to get everyone's thoughts on this. Thanks in advance.
| SylviaH0 -
Can you target the same site with multiple country HREFlang entries?
Hi, I have a question regarding the country targeting aspect of HREFLANG. Can the same site be targeted with multiple country HREFlang entries? Example: A global company has an English South African site (geotargeted in webmaster tools to South Africa), with a hreflang entry targeted to "en-za", to signify English language and South Africa as the country. Could you add entries to the same site to target other English speaking South African countries? Entries would look something like this: (cd = Congo, a completely random example) etc... Since you can only geo-target a site to one country in WMT would this be a viable option? Thanks in advance for any help! Vince
| SimonByrneIFS0 -
Multiple Domains
I have a .com domain which sells digital and physical products. I was thinking about doing a .co.uk domain just for the physical products. So far im just getting very confused with how to do this with google plus. Whats the best way to do this? Have a .com for worldwide and a .co.uk for just UK.
| theindic0 -
Soft Launch App with Country Targeting To Match?
Hi,
| eTinaRose
We're gearing up to do a soft launch of our app in a few countries, such as Australia. Our website says to request early access since the app is not yet publicly available in the apple store. However, it will be in those soft launch countries. This is what I'm considering... Creating a subdomain site such as au.liquidtext.net (liquidtext.au is not available). And setting that site, au.liquidtext.net, to be country targeted to Australia via webmaster tools. Once the app is available internationally, and the main site has been updated to show this, I would then redirect any subdomains to the main site. Thoughts? Are there any negative repercussions to this this approach that I am not considering? Thank you for your help Moz community!! Tina0 -
Country subfolders showing as sitelinks in Google, country targeting for home page no longer working
Hi There, Just wondering if you can help. Our site has 3 region versions (General .com, /ie/ for Ireland and /gb/ for UK), each submitted to Google Webmaster Tools as seperate sites with hreflang tags in the head section of all pages. Google was showing the correct results for a few weeks, but I resubmitted the home pages with slight text changes last week and something strange happened, though it may have been coincidental timing. When we search for the brand name in google.ie or google.co.uk, the .com now shows as the main site, where the sitelinks still show the correct country versions. However, the country subdirectories are now appearing as sitelinks, which is likely causing the problem. I have demoted these on GWT, but unsure as to whether that will work and it seems to take a while for sitelink demotion to work. Has anyone had anything similar happen? I thought perhaps it was a markup issue breaking the head section so that Google can no longer see the hreflangs pointing to each other as alternates. I checked the source code in w3 validator and it doesn't show any errors. Anyway, any help would be much appreciated - and thanks to anyone who gets back, it's a tricky type of issue to troubleshoot. Thanks, Ro
| romh0 -
Link juice on sub domains
We have got all our clients linking to our website blackpen.tv Based on a user's location they will be redirected to a sub domain. So for example someone in France clicking on a link blackpen.tv would be redirected to paris.blackpen.tv or blackpen.tv/paris Would this affect the amount of link juice passed down?
| roberthseo0 -
How To Rank A UK Website On Google.com (US)
Hi, I've done some research on this but couldn't find any definitive answer I can trust! We have a client who resides in the UK. They have '.com' domain, hosted on a UK server, using UK spelling. Their business objective for this year is to expand in the USA, including the opening of a warehouse over there. They are wanting us to rank their website on both Google.co.uk and Google.com (North America); besides changing the geolocation settings in GWT's, and building links from .com websites is there anything else we can do to increase their visibility on Google.com? Many thanks in advance, appreciated!
| Webpresence
Lee.0 -
Multilingual website - Url problem (sitemap)
At this moment our website both uses the language in the url like "en" and localizes the url itself ("books" in english and "boeken" in dutch). Because of the history of making our website multilingual we have a system that takes the browser language for the localization if the url doesn't contain a language like "en". This means: www.test.com/books = browser language www.test.com/en/books = english language www.test.com/boeken = browser language www.test.com/nl/boeken = dutch language Now for the sitemap this makes it a little troublesome for me because which hreflang is used for which url? 1) The first thing I thought of was using x-default for all urls that get the language of the browser. <code><url><loc>http://www.test.com/books</loc></url></code> But as you can see we now got 2 times x-default. 2) Another solution I thought of was just use the localization of the url to determine the language like: <code><url><loc>http://www.test.com/books</loc></url></code> But now we got 2 of each language for the same page. 3) The last solution I thought of was removing links without a language in the url (except for the homepage, which will still have an x-default) like: <code><url><loc>http://www.test.comen/books</loc></url></code> But for this solution I need to put 301's at pages that are "deleted" and also need to change the system to 301 to the right page. Although the last point isn't really a problem I'm kind of worried that I will lose some of the "seo points" with a 301. (When we changed our domain in the past we had a bad experience with the 301 of our old domain) What do you think would be the best solution for SEO? Or do you have any other suggestions or solutions I haven't thought of.
| Anycoin0 -
Help! A never before asked query about using a ccTLD but hosting in a different country
Hi Guys, I've a website that has a India specific domain ending with .org.in. The website has ALL the traffic from India (as mentioned earlier, it's a website meant only for audience from India). Currently this _.org.in_domainis hosted on a server located in India. I'm thinking of hosting this website in Singapore. Do you think that will negatively affect the current rankings of the website (i.e. changing the server location of my website from India to Singapore)?
| seotoseo0 -
How to set up international SEO for english speaking countries
Hi, My company have offices around the world. However they also provide different services and products depending on the region. For example our offices in the USA, UK and Australia all provide different services to each other. My question is, how do I set up my WordPress website up to cater for these different countries and services? I think the simple answer would be to build a separate website for each, but this would be too costly and we don't have the resources to maintain all three. Many thanks for your time, Tom
| CoGri0 -
How can I change the currency Google lists my products with in the SERP?
I.e. This product - http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/fgd400-sensaphone400-p/fgd400.htm - shows up as USD in the SERP. (In the US it just won't show a currency, if Canada it will show USD on the SERP). My pricing is all in CAD, how can I tell Google this? (It knows pricing is CAD in my Google Product Listings/Merchant Center). Thanks!
| absoauto0 -
Change Lang. IP base, Browser Base or Manually?
Hello I would like to ask a question about multi lang/international Website. Which one is better for SEO? User in Different Countries automatically see The website in their Language? or User see the English version and can change the language manually?
| Vahid-af0 -
Effects of Anonymizing IP Addresses?
Our company will be expanding into Germany later this year, and we need to modify how we use Google Analytics to comply with Germany's privacy laws. One option is to anonymize the IP addresses of our users. It looks like the only effect is that some of the Geo reports will become less accurate, but would love to hear from those who have done it. I've read through the Google Analytics forums on the topic, and the info there is sparse. I'm curious to know if anyone else has experience with this, and if you did it, what were the effects on your GA reporting or any other tools or technologies used on your site? Is this a non-issue, or are there pitfalls we need to consider? Thanks!
| Allie_Williams1 -
International advice.... can anyone help and check my site?
Hi ALL, I'm running 3 sites, internationally .com, com.au and co.nz Can anyone please look at my site and give me feedback about the hreflang tags, I ran a W3C and i have errors stating https://validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fzenory.co.nz for www.zenory.com and its relevant domains
| edward-may0 -
International Sites - Sitemaps, Robots & Geolocating in WMT
Hi Guys, I have a site that has now been launched in the US having originally just been UK. In order to accommodate this, the website has been set-up using directories for each country. Example: domain.com/en-gb domain.com/en-us As the site was originally set-up for UK, the sitemap, robots file & Webmaster Tools account were added to the main domain. Example: domain.com/sitemap.xml domain.com/robots.txt The question is does this now need changing to make it specific for each country. Example: The sitemap and robots.txt for the UK would move to: domain.com/en-gb/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-gb/robots.txt and the US would have its own separate sitemap and robots.txt. Example : domain.com/en-us/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-us/robots.txt Also in order to Geolocate this in WMT would this need to be done for each directory version instead of the main domain? Currently the WMT account for the UK site is verified at www.domain.com, would this need reverifying at domain.com/en-gb? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
| CarlWint0 -
License Details across multiple regional brand sites
Hi guys! I have a quick question. Our team are currently having a debate regarding whether we should display our licensing details as text across all our brands in multiple regions (roughly 50 sites). My argument is that if you are required to have a license to be able to operate legally that Google would EXPECT to be able to crawl those details in order to provide their (Google) users with reliable results as opposed to rogue operators. The other side of the argument is that it will tie all the sites together and that would be a huge risk (as Google will perceive it as a network)- also that it would be seen as duplicate content? Would really appreciate any feedback on what is the best to do in this case. Thanks!!
| RedSearch010 -
I have more than 4000 pages but still have a low trafic. Would love to know more to be better ranked ?
My website is a magazine about travel and fashion. But even if i have a lot of pages, I am still low in ranking. Why ? Thanks for any advice !
| ccjourn0 -
Another website clone issue
My site has been cloned by this f........ http://designer.aimeeprom.com/ original site http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com Still has our logo etc... How can we prevent this from happening, What should I do next. I have pinged them via the interactive chat but they do not reply..
| Taiger0 -
Geotargeting in Webmaster Tools - Is there an expected ranking benefit in the geotargeted region ?
Hi Is there an expected ranking benefit from geotargeting regional focused subfolders or domain mapped TLDs' in the target countries ? Or does it just prevent these pages from showing up in other regions search results ? For example i have a client with a main .com site targeting english worldwide generally, then a /tr subfolder in turkish to target Turkey. Then another subfolder /de targeting german in germany (but the de has also been domain mapped to .de top level domain too). Im leaving the main .com site non geotargeted since its job is to achieve english language results wherever possible and wandering whether to geotarget the turkish subfolder & german tld The Turkish regional subfolder & the German tld are achieving some ranking results already in their target countries googles, but also getting traffic from other countries too (which im happy to get, dont really want to stop this traffic unless there really is a local region ranking benefit for the main target country by gwt geotargeting). So should I use GWT international targeting tool or not ? Since the tld site is clearly on a german domain with german language pages and the Turkish subfolder /tr site is in Turkish the i presume Googles got no probs working this out which is demonstrated by the regional & language ranking results So I presume if achieving results in target countries already then no real need to set international taregt in GWT especially if it may stop traffic from other regions too. BUT if its likely to improve those rankings further in the main target countries googles significantly then i would happily cut off or reduce the other region traffic in favour of higher rankings and hence targeted traffic from the main target country .All Best Dan
| Dan-Lawrence0 -
If domain mapping subfolders to TLD's is it perceived as a fully separate entity/site therafter ?
Hi I take it once you have domain mapped a country specific subfolder to a country specific TLD (for better local region targeting reasons) Google perceives it as a completely separate entity and it no longer shares any of the parent sites domain benefits (such as domain authority etc) so from that point on requires its own dedicated link building etc ? All Best Dan
| Dan-Lawrence0 -
Optimizing for 3 international sites, how to avoid getting into trouble
Hi Guys As a newbie, I want to avoid any penalties or mistakes as possible that will be due to unknown and have taken some steps to educate myself around international sites and multiple domains. our aim was to target new zealand first and then branch out. Whilst we are pondering the NZ site and writing fresh unique articles for the site and the blog. And besides making the currency, language more relevant to these domains, is there anything else I could work on? I thought about making the meta tags different for the home page and adding Australia etc If we are going to spend time growing the site organically I thought I would make the most of spending the time growing all three together.... Any recommendations on how to get started and optimize the 3 alot better? Thanks
| edward-may1 -
What is the best way to generate an automatic sitemap for google, bing and yahoo?
Hi guys, I have 3 international sites So far I recieved a Sitemap that was generated by an seo company to use and submit to google, for our co.nz domain, I have been told to submit this also to bing and yahoo. Can anyone tell me if I can submit the same sitemap for the com.au and com or would i need to generate a new sitemap for each domain? I have been told, everytime we change content we have to keep submitting, is there a way to do this autmatically as we will be writting alot of content daily. Any recommendations or suggestions?
| edward-may0 -
Shabaka domain - Impact on SEO
Hi All, I heard about shabaka domain names recently and am not sure if getting a shabaka top-level domain with arabic content help from a SEO stand-point? Currently my Arabic website is on this domain: http://www.tcf-me.ae/ Do you think it is a good idea to get a shabaka domain to target the GCC countries on our Arabic website? Or does it not matter? Thoughts? Thanks in advance for your help.
| LaythDajani1 -
Help: Newbie trying to optimize for several international domains
We have three domain names co.nz, com.au and com. We are very new and have been told to optimize for co.nz first before going into com.au and com. Having said that, we have outsourced an seo company to optimize our co.nz site, however I would like to optimize the com.au and the com based on the information we currently receive for co.nz. Any suggestions on how to go about doing this? I looked at our competition and it seems they have the same content across all 3 domains, but they have changed the meta tags for each domain and that's about it. Any tips or ideas on how we could possibly do better? I know its early stages.... but as a newbie some advice around this would be great! Thanks
| edward-may0 -
Duplicate product description ranking problems (off-site duplicate content)
We do business in niche category and not in English language market. We have 2-3 main competitors who use same product information as us. They all do have same duplicate products descriptions as we. We with one competitors have domains with highest authority in this market. They maybe have 10-20% better link profile (when counting linking domains and total links). Problem is that they rank much better with product names then we do (same duplicate product descriptions as we have and almost same level internal optimisation) and they haven't done any extra link building for products. Manufacturers website aren't problem, because these doesn't rank well with product name keywords. Most of our new and some old product go to the Supplemental Results and are shown in "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ... already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.". Unique text for products isn't a option. When we have writen unique content for product, then these seem to rank way better. So our questions is what can we do externaly to help our duplicate description product rank better compared to our main competitor withour writing unique text? How important is indexation time? Will it give big advantage to get indexed first? We have thought of using more RSS/bing services to get faster indexation (both site will get products information almost at same time). It seems our competitor get quicker in index then we do. Also are farmpages helpful for getting some quick low value links for new products. We have planed to make 2-3 domains that would have few links pointint to these new products to get little advantage right after products are launched and doesn't have extranl links. Sitemap works and our new product are shown on front pages (products that still mostly doesn't rank well and go to Supplemental Results). Some new product have #1 or top3 raking, but these are only maybe 1/3 that should have top3 rankings. Also we have noticed problem that when we index products quickly (for example Fetch as Google) then these will get good top3 results and then some will get out of rankings (to Supplemental Results).
| raido0 -
'Mini' versions of our website for overseas markets. Does it matter?
Hi Guys. I work for an e-commerce site called TOAD Diaries, we make bespoke diaries and journals. In essence we allow people to design their own diary online, then we make it and send it. We have already sold some products to poeple in many European countries, (Malta, France, Germany) but we want to have a better online presence for those overseas markets. So….. We're want to do an overseas ‘test case’, to see if we can sell more products in Europe. Out thinking is this: We’ll buy a subdomain for a specific country. Then we’ll then build a ‘mini’ version of our site in the appropriate language. This be a country specific landing page with links to our ‘design your own diary’ pages, basket and checkout. All in the language we’re targeting. Question: Will having such a small number of pages in the targeted countries language effect out ability to rank well? It will be maybe 10 – 15 pages in size. Or is it much more to do with on page optimization and quality backlinks? i.e) the site's size has no impact. What other factors should we consider when trying to rank well in other European countries? Many thanks in advance.
| isaac6630 -
What is best practice of using google translate
Hi, I'm thinking of adding google translate to our retailing site so that we could reach more international customers. what about the pros&cons? Any experience of success of utilising it and what potential issues should I be looking at? Thanks
| LauraHT0 -
Alternate Hreflang Problem
We have two travel websites.
| Izzet
One in English language for people living in the UK.
One in Turkish language for people living in Turkey. The major difference is:
English (UK) website shows 4+ nights accomodation prices because UK travellers never come for less than 4 nights.
Turkish website shows 1-night, 2-night, 3-night prices because Turkish travellers never stay for more than 3 nights. We are using rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags properly on our two websites. Today, I am disappointed to see Google display the wrong result. When a user in Turkey searches a Turkish keyword on Google.com.tr;
Google is showing the English language website. When I click on Search Settings > Language;
I see that English is selected under this question:
"Which language should Google products use?" This is a big problem for us.
Many rich users in Turkey, who are more willing to buy our services, speak English fluently and they may choose to use Gmail in English. But we are losing business because these Turkish customers don't convert at all on the Enlish (UK) website because of the reason I explained above. 1) What can we do?
2) If we remove the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags now, will it hurt any of the websites?
We have seen an increase in Google rankings for the Turkish language website after using rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags. Izzet0 -
Correct Hreflang & Canonical Implementation for Multilingual Site
OK, 2 primary questions for a multilingual site. This specific site has 2 language so I'll use that for the examples. 1 - Self-Referencing Hreflang Tag Necessary? The first is regarding the correct implementation of hreflang, and whether or not I should have a self-referencing hreflang tag. In other words, if I am looking at the source code for http://www.example.com/es/ (our Spanish subfolder), I am uncertain whether the source code should contain the second line below: Obviously the Spanish version should reference the English version, but does it need to reference itself? I have seen both versions implemented, with seemingly good results, but I want to know the best practice if it exists. 2 - Canonical of Current Language or Default Language? The second questions is regarding which canonical to use on the secondary language pages. I am aware of the update to the Google Webmaster Guidelines recently that state not to use canonical, but they say not to do it because everyone was messing it up, not because it shouldn't be done. So, in other words, if I am looking at the source code for http://www.example.com/es/ (our Spanish subfolder), which of the two following canonicals is correct? OR For this question, you can assume that (A) the English version of the site is our default and (B) the content is identical. Thanks guys, feel free to ask any qualifiers you think are relevant.
| KaneJamison1 -
Impact changing domain from ccTLD to .com
I've got a couple of clients who have an international market for their products or services. Both of these clients have a .co.uk domain. For one site the US market is the major audience, the other it's european countries. At the moment, neither of these clients have translated page or content targeted to a specific country. There are no plans at this stage to create such content. Google considers the .co.uk to be targeted to the United Kingdom. The assumption is that by changing this to .com it will increase their international reach. For both the domains, referral and direct traffic is much more diverse than organic (which as you'd expect is heavily UK weighted - but there is some international organic traffic) Does anyone have any experience making such a change? How did the change affect your international reach/visibility? Does anyone have any metrics that they'd like to share that could be used to make a case to clients? (Note, I'm not interested in how you'd go about handling the domain change - I'm happy/confident about doing this.)
| DougRoberts0
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