Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
In the U.S., how can I stop the European version of my site from outranking the U.S. version?
-
I've got a site with two versions – a U.S. version and a European version. Users are directed to the appropriate version through a landing page that asks where they're located; both sites are on the same domain, except one is .com/us and the other is .com/eu.
My issue is that for some keywords, the European version is outranking the U.S. version in Google's U.S. SERPs. Not only that, but when Google displays sitelinks in the U.S. SERPs, it's a combination of pages on the European site and the U.S. site.
Does anyone know how I can stop the European site from outranking the U.S. site in the U.S.? Or how I can get Google to only display sitelinks for pages on the U.S. site in the U.S. SERPs? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this topic!
-
Hi Gianluca.
Thanks so much for the detailed explanation! I appreciate your taking the time to provide all that great info.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure what to do here. I understand the client made a mistake in launching one site for all of Europe, but I know they'll never pay to build out separate sites for each target country (at least not right now).
At the risk of sounding like an annoying client, what if I was to use the "en-us" hreflang tag on the U.S. site and just "en" on the English version of the European site as a temporary fix? (Then once we launch the translated versions of the European site – in Spanish, French, and Italian – we'd tag them as "es," "fr," and "it.")
Would that help at all with my issue of having the European site outrank the U.S. site in the U.S. SERPs?
Thanks again for taking the time to try to steer me in the right direction. From your answers, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on what we should do in an ideal world. Unfortunately, this situation is not ideal, so I'm looking for a relatively quick band-aid fix... but I'm getting the sinking feeling that there's no such thing.
-
Hi Alan!
yes, I was saying exactly that. If you're going for an international multi-country SEO and you have to deal with countries that share language, like in the case of Ireland and Uk, it is better to target them with two different "sites" (being a site in a ccTld or subfolder or sibdomain, depending on business convenience).
if you're doing multi-cointry SEO and one of your targeted counties has 2+ official languages, then the ideal solution is having a ccTld for that country and creating as many subfolder translated versions as are the official languages of that country.
For instance:
www.domain.be, with the French version appended from the root,
www.domain.be/nl/, with the Flemish translated version.
As alternatives be you can redirect 302 via user agent from domain.com to /fr/ or /nl/, while always letting users to eventually choose the alternate version via language selector.
-
Gianluca
Thanks for jumping in on this one. So if I'm reading your answer correctly, the bottom line here that there really should be one site per country, regardless of language spoken, correct?
-
Hi Alan and Matt,
I am sorry to tell you that if you set up the hreflang for "Europe" as hreflang="en-GB", that won't work.
That annotation, in fact, tells Google to show the URLs having it only to users searching in English from Great Britain.
It would be better to use only "en" in European website.
Said that, this is not the best solution either, because it is telling Google: "show this to users searching in English globally (but not if they are in the USA).
If the European web site is meant to reach users who not necessarily are using English as default language (eg: Spanish, French, Italians, Germans et al), than a solution could be tagging the European website with the "x-default" hreflang.
Note, though, that this a quite extreme use of the x-default.
The big mistake, anyway, is creating an European website itself:
- Google does not consider political regions like European Community nor continents and geographical areas like "Asia", "Middle East", "Europe";
- Because of 1, you cannot geotarget a website but for Political States (Spain, UK, Russia...)
- To think that not-English speaking users will use English for searching something it is not realistic, therefore it is correct what Matt says in his answer re: translated versions served in whatever format (ccTld, sudomain, subfolder) better fits your business needs.
Finally, personally I would not suggest to a ccTld for targeting European users, because that ccTld would geotarget the site to its country (eg: .es to Spain). Better a generic domain name (.net or even .eu, which is a generic domain name and does not have any geotargeting power), or even a subfolder/subdomain.
Finally, when creating the different country sites, I remind you that in certain countries is spoken the same language. For instance Ireland and UK share English, but they have different currencies, obviously different postal system and phone numbers and, especially, a different culture, so that you should not think in having an European EN version serving all the English speaking countries, but localizing each one of them.
To not talk, and I really end my answer, countries like Switzerland (French, German, Italian and Romance), Spain (Spanish and Catalan), Belgium (French and Flemish), Ukraine (Russian and Ukranian).
-
Yeah inheriting previous work can be a challenge.
Since you are already planning on rolling out content in different languages, you will have not only the opportunity to set the hreflang tags for each, but also it will be important to ensure all of the content within each section is actually in that section's primary language for consistency. That too will help address the confusion Google has.
-
Thanks, Alan! That's great info. Yes, we do have only one set of content for all of Europe at this point – but we'll be pushing out translated versions in several different languages soon so we will definitely take your advice on the hreflang tags. I wish we had set up separate domains for the U.S. and European sites, but I wasn't involved in that decision unfortunately. Still good to hear your insight on that topic though.
-
Have you set the different hreflang tags appropriately across your content?
You said "US" and "European" - so does that mean you have just one set of content for all of Europe? If so, that can be more difficult to deal with, however if you set all of the US pages with an hreflang of "en-us" and the European pages with an hreflang of en-gb, you can at least help Google understand "this set is for the U.S. and this set is not".
What I always recommend if you're not targeting individual countries with your content (the "Europe" reference you made says you are not for that content), is to at the very least, split out content to two different domains. Have a .com domain for US content, and a separate .eu or .co.uk or .de or whatever other domain for your European content. That, while also setting up hreflang tagging, is really more helpful in communicating what should show up in which search results higher up.
You'll also need to accumulate inbound geo-relevant links to point to the appropriate content set to help reinforce this.
And if you split out domains, you can set country targeting more readily in Google Search Console.
For more info:
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
-
Redirect to 'default' or English (/en) version of site?
Hi Moz Community! I'm trying to work through a thorny internationalization issue with the 'default' and English versions of our site. We have an international set-up of: www.domain.com (in english) www.domain.com/en www.domain.com/en-gb www.domain.com/fr-fr www.domain.com/de-de and so on... All the canonicals and HREFLANGs are set up, except the English language version is giving me pause. If you visit www.domain.com, all of the internal links on that page (due to the current way our cms works) point to www.domain.com/en/ versions of the pages. Content is identical between the two versions. The canonical on, say, www.domain.com/en/products points to www.domain.com/products. Feels like we're pulling in two different directions with our internationalization signals. Links go one way, canonical goes another. Three options I can see: Remove the /en/ version of the site. 301 all the /en versions of pages to /. Update the hreflangs to point the EN language users to the / version. **Redirect the / version of the site to /en. **The reverse of the above. **Keep both the /en and the / versions, update the links on / version. **Make it so that visitors to the / version of the site follow links that don't take them to the /en site. It feels like the /en version of the site is redundant and potentially sending confusing signals to search engines (it's currently a bit of a toss-up as to which version of a page ranks). I'm leaning toward removing the /en version and redirecting to the / version. It would be a big step as currently - due to the internal linking - about 40% of our traffic goes through the /en path. Anything to be aware of? Any recommendations or advice would be much appreciated.
International SEO | | MaxSydenham0 -
How can I restrict the domains country by country?
Hello, I have Two Domains one is xyz.co.uk and other is xyz.com Now, my main target for .com is United States, and I don't want to open that .com domain in any other country especially India. The same with the .co.uk, I dont want to open .co.uk in other countries. I did it with some developer help but it gave me redirected error in Google Webmaster. Can anyone please guide me how I can do this the proper way ? And Other issues is, how can I implement ,if any user in United States open xyz.co.uk than he should redirect to the .com version. Thank you.
International SEO | | AmitTulsiyani0 -
Google does not index UK version of our site, and serves US version instead. Do I need to remove hreflanguage for US?
Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
International SEO | | lcourse
We have another US domain with identical content but USD prices which is indexed fine. When I search in google for site:mydomain I see that most of my pages seem to appear, but then in the rich snippets google shows USD prices instead of the GBP prices which we publish on this page (USD price is not published on the page and I tested with an US proxy and US price is nowhere in the source code). Then I clicked on the result in google to see cached version of page and google shows me as cached version of the UK product page the US product page. I use the following hreflang code: rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.domain.com/product" />
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.domain.co.uk/product" /> canonical of UK page is correctly referring to UK page. Any ideas? Do I need to remove the hreflang for en-US to get the UK domain properly indexed in google?0 -
Problems with the google cache version of different domains.
We have problems with the google cache version of different domains.
International SEO | | Humix
For the “.nl” domain we have an “.be” cache..
Enter “cache:www.dmlights.nl” in your browser to see this result. Following points are already adapted: Sitemap contains hreflang tag Sitemap is moved to the location www.dmlights.nl/sitemap.xml We checked the DNS configuration Changed the Content language in de response header to : Content-Language: nl-NL Removed the cache with webmastertools Resolved serverrequest errors. Can anyone provide a solution to fix this problem? Thanks, Pieter0 -
If I redirect based on IP will Google still crawl my international sites if I implement Hreflang
We are setting up several international sites. Ideally, we wouldn't set up any redirects, but if we have to (for merchandising reasons etc) I'd like to assess what the next best option would be. A secondary option could be that we implement the redirects based on IP. However, Google then wouldn't be able to access the content for all the international sites (we're setting up 6 in total) and would only index the .com site. I'm wondering whether the Hreflang annotations would still allow Google to find the International sites? If not, that's a lot of content we are not fully benefiting from. Another option could be that we treat the Googlebot user agent differently, but this would probably be considered as cloaking by the G-Man. If there are any other options, please let me know.
International SEO | | Ben.JD0 -
Does Google's algorithm work the same in every country?
I can't help but feel this is a silly question! but does Google algorithm work exactly the same throughout all countries? I run a few sites in the UK and a couple in Spain but can't help but feel that my Spanish sites are harder to rank for. The sites that rank the best are business directories in Spain... whereas here in the UK you'd be lucky to find one on page one..
International SEO | | david.smith.segarra0 -
Country specific domains pointing to a .com site
Hello, I am new to seo so please be easy if this happens to be a "silly" question. My company has a .com site. We are expanding into global markets, focusing on specific countries right now. General question: Would I be penalized for duplicate content if I purchased country-specific domains and pointed them to the .com site? Thanks, Jim
International SEO | | jimmer0 -
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?
International SEO | | Francisco_Meza0