Change of language
-
Hi everyone,
We bought a domain which had content in German for over 8 years. So the rankings it had were in another search engine aswell.
So i've changed the language of the content + targetting in webmaster tools to Dutch. (i've created unique content, in case your wondering)
Now we don't rank in the targetted search engine, nor in the search engine the website was previously ranked.My question is how can we fix this so we are going to get indexed and ranked for the targetted search engine.
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Gianluca,
Thanks for your answer. And sorry for the delayed response.
I'll ask John Mueller for an answer.Thanks again.
-
If the links where totally unrelated to the actual site, what I would probably do should be to check in webmaster help forum a direct answer from John Mueller (or, better, asking him directly on Google+).
In fact, once there was an option for "disavowing" the links a domain just bought had, but since almost one year the link to that option has disappeared from GWT.
The use of the disavow tool usually is for site that have been penalized.
-
Hi Gianluca,
Thanks for yet another answer.
I did consider it, however i taught it wouldn't influence the rankings.
Which leads me to a follow up question, if you dont mind?
Should i disavow those old links to help rank for the correct Google.Thanks again for taking the time to answer the question.
-
HI and sorry for the delay...
haven't you considered that that domain is still ranking in Google.de because of its old link profile?
In fact, it can be possible that links it earned in its past existence as a German website may be the cause of its still good rankings in .de.
On the contrary, the percentage of links from dutch sites may be too small to allow the site to rank properly in google.nl.
That's all I can tell you, without knowing the site name.
-
Hi Gianluca,
Thank you for your response!
It is ranking but in the German index. That could be because it is an old domain?
-
Hi Stefan,
what I don't understand is if your site, now in dutch and targeting Netherlands, is actually indexed but not ranking, or if it also not indexed at all.
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
-
Homepage with and without language subfolder
Hi all, We are checking to optimize a website that has four language versions in subfolders. When setting the self referencing canonicals and the hreflang tags, we came across a particular problem. Both the URL's example.com and example.com/nl are being indexed and have the same content in the same language. For the other language versions, it is quite straightforward, but what to do with these two URL's? Currently, there is a canonical tag from example.com to example.com/nl. Is a simple 301 redirect to the URL with the language subfolder the best solution? Something to consider: if a backlink points to example.com (without specifying the language subfolder), all the link juice will go to the /nl version and not to other versions (with a canonical as well as with a 301 of course). Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Recent changes to Google organic search?
We have a client's website that was on page 1 for 2 years, and then in September fell off while a new website with virtually no visitors and never showing in organic search before shot to #1. Never seen anything like it. Today, my client is back where they were two weeks ago and the #1 listing I mentioned is not even on page 1 at all. In fact it's at the bottom of page 2! It seems to us, having read about Google organic changes made around July 3rd, 2018, that even more emphasis is now on the domain name (all the results on page 1 have my client's keyword in their domain name) and the importance of H1 tags and Title tags has risen to trump many other factors. Can anyone shed some light on changes you may have seen in the past few months? Along with huge changes to Adwords and AdGrants, Google seems all over the place (at least to us) and it is more challenging then ever. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Teamzig0 -
Changing sitemaps in console
Hi there, Does anyone have any experience submitting a completely new sitemap structure - including URLs - to google console? We've changed our sitemap plug in, so rather than /sitemap-index.xml, our main sitemap home is /sitemap.xml (as an example). Is it better to 410 the old ones or 301 redirect them to the new sitemaps? If 301, what do we do about sitemaps that don't completely correlate - what was divided into item1.xml, item2.xml is now by date so items-from-2015.xml, items-from-2016.xml and so on. On a related note, am I right in thinking that there's no longer a "delete/ remove sitemap" option on console? In which case, what happens to the old ones which will now 404? Thanks anyone for any insight you may have 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Changing URLs from sentence case to lower case
Hi Guys, We are contemplating of changing our site URL structure from sentence case to all lowercase. www.example.com/All-Products/Bedroom-Furniture/ www.example.com/all-products/bedroom-furniture/ We will use 301 redirect for old to new. Its a 3 year old ecommerce site and currently rank very decent on serps. The agency that does our seo is recommending this change and reckons that all lowecase URLs as preferred over our current URL structure. My worry is we will lose our current ranking but agency advises that rankings will probably go lower or fluctuate for some time and get back to its original position or may even rank better in due course as we are doing a 301 redirect and once the site is crawled Google will know the change. We are approaching Christmas and thenext 2 months are most busiest period of the year, we don't want to risk on traffic. I would really appreciate if the community experts can advise, Is it really that lowercase URLs are better than our current url structure? By doing 301 will our rankings come back to same in "due course" ? How much of a risk is it to do these changes at this time of the year? Thanking you in advance, Sohail
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tigersohelll1 -
Changing website framework: Any negative SEO ramifications?
Hello! We have a website that is built using Asp.net. My colleague and I are wondering whether or not changing the framework from Asp.net to php or html would have any negative impact on current rankings. My colleague was told by an SEO company that doing this would have a big negative effect, but we just can't see why that would be. The URLs of the site do not have an .asp extension, so we don't feel there would be any issues with 404s after the migration. The content, meta data and URL structure would remain the same. We posted this question in the Webmaster Central Forum and were told by a top contributor that it wouldn't have any negative impact, but we wanted a second opinion here. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBEXNinja0 -
Is a rebranding that calls for a domain change a good time to sneak in a change to HTTPS?
Assumed: The material around good migration/redesign practices recommend, logically enough, to change as few things as possible in any given step, thus giving search engines as little trouble as possible identifying and reindexing changes. So if someone is doing significant changes to content, including uri changes, and a rebranding that requires a domain migration, they are generally better off doing one, than the other. 1) Beyond immediate testing and checking for correct crawl health being reestablished after one change, any thoughts on rules of thumb for when to do the second change? Do you do it as soon as you see your rankings/traffic turn the corner and confirm an upward trend after the drop, or wait till you have it all back (or at least hit a plateau)? In the absence of data or best practice I'm thinking of just letting 1/3rd to 2/3rds come back. Is a change to HTTPS small enough/similar enough from the search engine's perspective that it makes more sense to do that at the same time as the rebrand driven domain change? Does this create any special risks or considerations beyond those that arise from the individual components of the change?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JFA0 -
Changeing Hyperlinks from Do Follow to Do Not Follow
I Have a blog on my website and we do guest post from time to time. I was contacted by a blogger to change the Back links on his Article from Do Follow to Do not Follow. His Article has been live for 5 Months. When I asked him of the reason for that his Answer was that he needs to comply with Google's New Alogarithm ! Has Anyone Had Similar situation or can shed more light on that issue ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sherohass0 -
Changing website providers
After increasing suffering down time from my current website provider, I am seriously considering finding a new one. My only concern is the effect on SERP. Does anyone have any experience with this and what to do and avoid?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340