Do I need to set the country in Webmaster Tools even if I am set to apply the hreflang tag to our different country pages?
-
We are global brand that will be migrating to a new platform in the next few months. As such, this will allow us to fix our current SEO issues. We are planning on using geo-targeted subfolders instead of country code top level domains primarily because of resource limitations. My question is - do I need to set the country in Webmaster Tools even though I am already going to tell Google that certain pages are targeted towards a specific country?
-
For one, the hreflang markup tells Google which pages are similar to this exact page in your other localizations, which is not specified at all in webmaster tools. From my understanding, the hreflang tags will swap out a page to the correct localized version on search result pages, which is doing a lot more than simply telling Google that the content in a subfolder is localized to a specific location.
-
Yes. Use every signal you can to inform the search engines of the target location.
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
-
Blog article split into a few pages
Hi, I came across multiple websites where blog articles are split into multiple pages and once you reach the end of the page, you need to click 'Next' or '2/3' to continue reading. Is this a good practice? I understand you keep clicking through multiple pages instead of reading an article only on one page, but you also split the strength of the targeted keyword between multiple pages. Can anyone advise? Thanks Katarina
Moz Pro | | Katarina-Borovska0 -
Help needed
I am quite new to Moz and SEO in general. Our company has a website at https://printvent.co.uk We are using woocommerce / wordpress for an ecommerce store selling custom printed products,. Banners, Posters, stickers etc. We have configured Yoast SEo and Moz is now reporting no errors on the site. However Google has not indexed any pages from the site after around 3-4 weeks. I have submitted through Google search console. It is reporting over 900 pages blocked by robots.txt. There is a folder called Printvent designer that we are blocking via a disallow in robots.txt. I thought this was necessary as this creates a URL for every product for every option that the customer uses to design their own product. These all point to the page printvent designer. (example XXL Blue sweatshirt has its own designer page - https://printvent.co.uk/printvent-designer/453 My question really is what are we doing wrong ? All meta titles and descriptions are in place, no errors from Moz, Moz reports most product pages as 90% + Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | Printvent0 -
Unable to get into top 20 even when pages are optimized and most crawl issues resolved
I have a few keyword phrases I've been trying to rank in the top 20 for (starting place). I have optimized for a few different phrases, ranging in keyword difficulty, but no matter what I do I can't seem to get in. In many cases, the exact same results show up for many different variations of the phrases I'd like to rank for. I've read about how google tries to match user intent and so if it decides those results are more relevant then it will always show them, but does that mean that no matter what I do I will always be behind them? The main question I have is: how should I proceed? Should I stop optimizing pages and focus on link acquisition? Or go through and make sure there isn't a single crawl issue? Or focus on optimizing for longer tail keyword phrases? It just feels like I've done so much of what the moz tools have recommended and I'm seeing very little movement over the past couple of months, if anything I see dips in performance after optimization. Thanks in advance!
Moz Pro | | Dynata_panel_marketing1 -
Tools necessary for a Technical Audit of website with penalties and need remediation?
Tools necessary for a Technical Audit of website with penalties and needs remediation? I am being tested for a job interview to prove and/or disprove a website has issues. I am familiar with Moz tools but I'm not sure of the procedure for this request? I am not finding anything online. The client will be giving a website and I will be doing this audit. What tools would you use? What exactly should I be looking for? What are some obvious fixes? WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE?
Moz Pro | | Joseph.Lusso0 -
Why would I be ranking for a term when it's not anywhere in my page or pages linking to it?
Hi, I have a keyword that's not anywhere in my page in page-grade tool nor are any pages linking to it with that term, why would that be ranking. The term is "dynamic card solution" This is a company we used to have 5 years ago and merged with our company. This term is ranking #1 for this page- http://www.datacard.com/instant-issuance-solutions . I can't figure why that would be even as this is a newer page in the past year. Thanks for any insight as I'm newer to moz. Laura
Moz Pro | | lauramrobinson320 -
Duplicate page report
We ran a CSV spreadsheet of our crawl diagnostics related to duplicate URLS' after waiting 5 days with no response to how Rogerbot can be made to filter. My IT lead tells me he thinks the label on the spreadsheet is showing “duplicate URLs”, and that is – literally – what the spreadsheet is showing. It thinks that a database ID number is the only valid part of a URL. To replicate: Just filter the spreadsheet for any number that you see on the page. For example, filtering for 1793 gives us the following result: | URL http://truthbook.com/faq/dsp_viewFAQ.cfm?faqID=1793 http://truthbook.com/index.cfm?linkID=1793 http://truthbook.com/index.cfm?linkID=1793&pf=true http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1793 http://www.truthbook.com/index.cfm?linkID=1793 | There are a couple of problems with the above: 1. It gives the www result, as well as the non-www result. 2. It is seeing the print version as a duplicate (&pf=true) but these are blocked from Google via the noindex header tag. 3. It thinks that different sections of the website with the same ID number the same thing (faq / blogs / pages) In short: this particular report tell us nothing at all. I am trying to get a perspective from someone at SEOMoz to determine if he is reading the result correctly or there is something he is missing? Please help. Jim
Moz Pro | | jimmyzig0 -
Page Rank and offline sites
I have a domain with PR6 according to the Historical Pagerank Checker. But that last PR was calculated 2 years ago. I brought the site back online a few days ago and have checked that many/most of the backlinks are still valid. It is now in the Google index but the Historical Pagerank Checker shows PR0. Will it get back its previous rank or something close to it? How long will it take?
Moz Pro | | DomainOptions0 -
Tool for scanning the content of the canonical tag
Hey All, question for you. What is your favorite tool/method for scanning a website for specific tags? Specifically (as my situation dictates now) for canonical tags? I am looking for a tool that is flexible, hopefully free, and highly customizable (for instance, you can specify the tag to look for). I like the concept of using google docs with the import xml feature but as you can only use 50 of those commands at a time it is very limiting (http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/how-to-build-agile-seo-tools-using-google-docs/). I do have a campaign set up using the tools which is great! but I need something that returns a response faster and can get data from more than 10,000 links. Our cms unfortunately puts out some odd canonical tags depending on how a page is rendered and I am trying to catch them quickly before it gets indexed and causes problems. Eventually I would also like to be able to scan for other specific tags, hence the customizable concern. If we have to write a vb script to get it into excel I suppose we can do that. Cheers, Josh
Moz Pro | | prima-2535090