Ranking problems with international website
-
Hey there,
we have some ranking issues with our international website. It would be great if any of you could share their thoughts on that. The website uses subfolders for country and language (i.e. .com/uk/en) for the website of the UK branch in English. As the company has branches all over the world and also offers their content in many languages the url structure is quite complex.
A recent problem we have seen is that in certain markets the website is not ranking with the correct country. Especially in the UK and the US, Google prefers the country subfolder for Ghana (.com/gh/en) over the .com/us/en and .com/uk/en versions. We have hreflang setup and should also have some local backlinks pointing to the correct subfolders as we switched from many ccTLDs to one gTLD.
What confuses me is that when I check for incoming links (Links to your site) with GWT, the subfolder (.com/gh/en) is listed quite high in the column (Your most linked content). However the listed linking domains are not linking at all to this folder as far as I am aware. If I check them with a redirect checker they all link to different subfolders. So I have now idea why Google gives such high authority to this subfolder over the specific country subfolders. The content is pretty much identical at this stage.
Has any of you experienced similar behaviour and could point me in a promising direction?
Thanks a lot.
Regards,
Jochen
-
Jochen, I can't say I've seen this particular issue, but you are right that it is odd. It sounds like you have everything set up technically correct, but Google WMT is crossing some wires.
I wish I could provide you with more, but I wouldn't know any potential issues without being able to look at your whole setup in GoogleWMT. I recommend having a consultant take a look. Typically, I hate recommending that (because I'm a consultant and that looks shady), but there really is no other way to know if everything is set up right and Google is just on crack, but I think that's it.
-
Thanks Patrick. I do use geo-targeting follow the best practices to the best of my knowledge. I am just very confused by those backlinks that show up in GWT for the wrong subfolder.
Thanks Patrick. I do use geo-targeting follow the best practices to the best of my knowledge. I am just very confused by those backlinks that show up in GWT for the wrong subfolder.
-
Hi there
Have you looked into setting up Webmaster Tools accounts for these specific directories and country targeting them?
I would ask look into these two resources from Moz:
International SEO
The International SEO ChecklistSeer Interactive always has some great tips here.
Also, Bing follows language meta tags, not hreflang, so you need to consider that as well.
Lastly, I would just make sure that you have country/location specific information on your site:
- Titles / meta descriptions
- Navigational elements (if different services/products for location)
- Headings
- Main body information
- Reviews
- Contact information
Just a few things to consider. Hope this all helps! Good luck!
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
-
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles1 -
Finding Ranking for search term and increasing ranking
Hi. The company that I'm working with would like to rank highly in google for certain generic search terms (dentist, dentists, etc.). Certain websites the company has used to rank highly in google for generic keywords, but has not for years now since google has revised their algorithm so many times. Moz lists that the company websites are not found in the top 51+ results in google. My first question is: **Is there a way, apart from manually searching the results, to find the ranking position of the website in google? **Ideally, I would like to find a program that will do this. Second, I've been reading a lot of the great articles and comments on Moz, and I've been learning a lot more about SEO. My focus has shifted to spending more attention on User Experience and Social Media instead of placing the exact keywords in the pages / tags of the website. What area(s) should I be focusing on to best increase the ranking of the company website for certain generic terms? Ideally, I'd like to create good quality content, so that users will not instantly click away. I appreciate any thoughts or comments. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | americasmiles0 -
Why isnt this site ranking?
I just took over for a site and noticed they have no presence for any keywords...not even low ranks. Their backlink profile is not the best, but webmaster tools says they have no manual actions. vonderhaar.com Thoughts on the matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Can changing G+ authorship on a well-ranking article drop its search ranking?
We have an article that ranks #1 in Google SERP for the keyword we want it to rank for. We decided to revise the article because although it's performing well, we knew it could be better and more informative for the user. Now that we've revised the content, we're wondering: Should we update the article author (and the G+ authorship markup) to reflect that the revisor authored the content, or keep the original author listed? Can changing G+ authorship on an article impact its search ranking, or is that an issue that's a few Google algorithm updates down the road?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pasware0 -
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Djdealeyo0 -
Help needed for a 53 Page Internal Website Structure & Internal Linking
Hey all... I'm designing the structure for a website that has 53 pages. Can you take a look at the attached diagram and see if the website structure is ok? On the attached diagram I have numbered the pages from 1 to 53, with 1 being the most important home page - 2,3,4,5, being the next 4 important pages - 6,7,8... 15,16,17 being the 3rd set of important pages, and 18,19,20..... 51,52,53 being the last set of pages which are the easiest to rank. I have two questions: Is the website structure for this correct? I have made sure that all pages on the website are reachable. Considering the home page, and page number 2,3,4,5 are the most important pages - I am linking out to these pages from the the last set of pages (18,29,20...51,52,53). There are 36 pages in the last set - and out of this 36, from 24 of them I am linking back to home page and page number 2,3,4,5. The remaining 8 pages of the 36 will link back to pages 6,7,8...15,16,17. In total the most importnat page will have the following number of internal incoming links: Home Page : 25 Pages 2,3,4,5 : 25 Pages 6,7,8...15,16,17 : 4 Pages 18,19,20...51,52,53 : 1 Is this ok considering home page, and pages 2,3,4,5 are the most important? Or do you think I should divide and give more internal links to the other pages also? If you can share any inputs or suggestions to how I can improve this it will greatly help me. Also if you know any references for good guides to internal linking of websites greater that 50 pages please share them in the answers. Thank you all! Regards, P.S - The URL for the image is at http://imgur.com/XqaK4
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arjun.rajkumar810 -
Internal linking between categories
Is it necessary to do internal links between the same categories of a website ( Let's say Ihave a category about shoes and in the category I have a page about boots and one about sandals ( should the page boots be accessible from the page sandals and the other way round or is the back button going back to the section shoes enough ) ? If internal links between the same category ( sandals to boots ) are needed/recommended is it also a good practice to do site wide links between categories ( shoes and and bags for example ) Because by reading google recommendations "Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link" I am not sure if they are talking about breadcrumbs or text links i am kind of lost ... Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Soft 404 problem
I have a soft 404 problem in webmaster tools for http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/feed and I'm not sure why. I read on here that if it is a main content page it should be fixed but I don't know how. I've tried to 301 redirect the page to http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/ but the redirect doesn't appear to be working? how do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0