Non US site pages indexed in US Google search
-
Hi,
We are having a global site wide issue with non US site pages being indexed by Google and served up in US search results. Conversley, we have US en pages showing in the Japan Google search results.
We currently us IP detect to direct users to the correct regional site but it isn't effective if the users are entering through an incorrect regional page. At the top of each or our pages we have a drop down menu to allow users to manually select their preferred region. Is it possible that Google Bot is crawling these links and indexing these other regional pages as US and not detecting it due to our URL structure?
Below are examples of two of our URLs for reference - one from Canada, the other from the US
/ca/en/prod4130078/2500058/catalog50008/
/us/en/prod4130078/2500058/catalog20038/
If that is, in fact, what is happening, would setting the links within the drop down to 'no follow' address the problem?
Thank you.
Angie
-
John,
Thanks for adding all of these great suggestions - I don't do international that often so the full list of methods isn't always in my conscious awareness!
-
Here's all the things you can do to try geotarget your content for the search bots:
- Register each subfolder as a separate site in Google Webmaster Tools (e.g. example.com/ca/, example.com/us/), and geotarget it (see here).
- Set meta tags or http headers on each page to let Bing know the language and country (see here).
- For duplicate or near-duplicate pages across different English speaking localities, you can try out the hreflang tags to clue Google in that they're the same page, but geotargeting users in different locations. I haven't personally implemented this myself, so I can't speak to how well it works, but you can find more info about it hereand here.
Setting nofollows just stops PageRank from flowing, but bots can still follow these links, so I wouldn't do that.
-
Its absolutely possible that's what's happening. You cannot rely on Google's system being barred from crawling anything on your site, no matter how well you code it. Even if you blocked the URL with nofollow, it would not stop the bot.
Another factor is if all your content is in English (as your URL structure suggests it is). Google does a terrible job of discerning separation of international content when all the content is in the same language, on the same root domain.
Proper separation in a way Google can't confuse is vital. Since I expect you do not intend to change the language across sites, your best action would be to migrate international content to a completely different domain. At the very least you can then use GWT to inform Google that "this domain is for this country", however if you want to be even better off, you'd host that other content on a server in that country.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Problem to get multilingual posts indexed on Google
Last year on June I decided to make my site multi-lingual. The domain is: https://www.dailyblogprofits.com/ The main language English and I added Portuguese and a few posts on Spanish. What happened since then? I started losing traffic from Google and posts on Portuguese are not being indexed. I use WPML plugin to make it multi-lingual and I had Yoast installed. This week I uninstalled Yoast and when I type on google "site:site:dailyblogprofits.com/pt-br" I started seeing Google indexing images, but still not the missing posts. I have around 145 posts on Portuguese, but on Search Console it show only 57 hreflang tags. Any idea what is the problem? I'm willing to pay for an SEO Expert to resolve this problem to me.
International SEO | | Cleber0090 -
Google Search Console "International Targeting" is reporting errors that are not present on my site
We are currently handling search for a global brand www.example.com/ which has presence in many countries worldwide. To help Google understand that there is an alternate version of the website available in another language, we have used hreflang tags. These hreflang tags are implemented only via the XML sitemap across all geo-locations. Under the “Search Analytics -> International Targeting” section, in Google Search Console, for the Malaysian website (www.example.com/my/), there are a number of “no-return tags (sitemaps)” errors arising. For example, for India as a geo-location, there is one ‘en-IN’ – no return tags (sitemaps) errors listed. The error is listed below: Originating URL - www.example.com/my/xyz/ Alternate URL - www.example.com/in/xyz/ When the XML sitemap for the URL – www.example.com/in/ was checked for the hreflang tags, it was noticed that the implementation of hreflang tags for the URL – www.example.com/in/xyz/ was perfectly fine and it was providing a return tag to the URL – www.example.com/my/xyz/. After the code level verification, it was identified that the implementation of hreflang tags was perfectly fine via the XML sitemap. Even though at the code level it was verified that the implementation is fine, the error still persists in Google Search Console. Kindly suggest a solution to this situation, and also advise the effects of these errors on search engine performance
International SEO | | Starcom_Search0 -
Will hreflang with a language and region allow Google to show the page to all users of that language regardless of region?
I'm launching translations on a website with the first translation being Brazilian Portuguese. If I use the following hreflang: If a user is outside of Brazil and has their browser language set to just Portuguese (Not Portuguese (Brazil)) will Google still serve them the Portuguese version of my pages in search results?
International SEO | | Brando160 -
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
International SEO | | edward-may0 -
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
International SEO | | LauraHT0 -
Multilingual Site with 2 Separate domains and hand-translated
I have 2 separate domains: .com & .jp
International SEO | | khi5
I am having a professional translator translate the English written material from .com. However, the .jp will have same pictures and videos that I have on the .com which means alt tags are in English and video titles are in English. I have some dynamic pages where I use Google Translate and those pages I place as "no index follow" to avoid duplicate issues and they are not very important pages for me any way. Question: since I am doing a proper translating - no machines involved - can I leave pages as is or should I include any format of these: ISO language codes
2) www.example/com/” /> Even though hand translated, the translation will probably be 85% similar to that if I used Google Translate. Will that potentially be seen as duplicate content or not at all since I have not used the Google Translate tool? I wonder from which angle Google analyses this. Thank you,0 -
How can I see what my web site looks like from a different country?
I've tried a few proxy tools to try to see how my site looks from other global locations, but haven't found one that works very well yet -- or a list of reliable proxies around the world. I need to do this to test various geo-targetted ads and other optimizations. Can anyone make a recommendation? Thanks!
International SEO | | Dennis-529610 -
Targeting Different Countries... One Site or Separate?
I have a client who has 3 ecommerce sites. They are somewhat differentiated but for the most part sell the same stuff. Luckily 2 of them are quite authoritative, old and rank reasonably well. Most of the visitors and sales come from the US. He wants to start targeting Europe, Mexico and Canada. What are your suggestions for doing this? Are we better targeting on the main domains? Not really sure how to do that? Should we use a subdomain and a new store front for each geo? Should we use a .co.uk .co.mx and .co.ca each with a unique storefront? It looks like we are moving to a Magento platform so setting up multiple storefronts on a single database is not a big issue. Anyone have any experience with this?
International SEO | | BlinkWeb0