Which will rank higher: Non-mobile friendly site in native language vs. mobile friendly global site in English?
-
Hi, we are currently implementing a mobile site, e.g. m.company.com. The global mobile site will only be available in English.
We have local subsites of the desktop site, e.g. company.com/fr. The local subsites are not mobile friendly.
If a user does a search for a brand term in France, **which site will rank higher in SERPs? **If it will be the global site, is there anything we can do (other than making them mobile friendly) to make the local sites rank higher?
Would it be the mobile-friendly site, even though it is only in English, because the local site would be penalized for not being mobile friendly? Or would it be the local site, because Google will give priority to the fact that it's in French, which matches the language of the person searching?
-
No, it doesn't change my answer, but it's a good distinction to make. It sounds like the international expansion is in process. If the client needs geo-targeted content (sounds like they might), the countries need to be treated differently. Each subfolder as it's own site really. But it sounds like the translation is a good place to start for the time being.
For the mobile, my answer remains the same. There isn't anything other than making the translated content mobile or responsive that will help the traffic.
-
Thanks Kate. The content is very similar between countries, to the degree where I thought it was translated verbatim at first. Looking deeper, I see that there is some slight variation between offerings.
The client is only using language codes: en, it, fr - except in China, where they have two versions of the site (zh-hans and zh-en. The second code, zh-en, is incorrect).
All the content is set up under subdirectories, e.g. site.com/en rather than microsites en.site.com.
Does this change your judgment?
-
Lots going on here. First, let me clarify, your client's desktop content is only translated? They don't change the content and the offerings don't change by country? There is a very important distinction here. Language and country are two different things.
Regardless, if the mobile site is only in English, because of mobilegeddon, if they think they are penalized, it's because they lost mobile traffic or are seeing declines. This is only because there is not good mobile content in the users language. Once that is available, I expect the traffic will rise. It's not a penalty like duplicate content isn't a penalty, it is just not optimal.
For anyone doing brand searches, I think the answer is it depends. If Google thinks the user is okay with the English mobile site, they will show that. If the user has only ever searched in their particular language, and that's not available on mobile, they might show the desktop local site (better but not perfect) or they might test showing the English mobile site. I think you'll see both over time until the mobile issue is fixed.
-
In the Abercrombie case, the site that comes up in the search results is the EU mobile site, with German language. When I click on it, it seems that they are automatically redirecting me to abercrombie.com; not the English version of m.eu.abercrombie.com. I find automatic redirects annoying - in this case, I'm intentionally trying to hit the German site and I can't.
We are in development of the new global mobile site. The existing desktop site is being "punished" for not being mobile-friendly. Hence why we are creating a mobile site in the age of responsive design
-
Hi Jennifer,
How can you still be in development and in the same time be "punished" for not having a mobile version?
To answer your question - Abercrombie is doing something similar as your client is doing. On the desktop version they have 5 languages - the mobile version is only English. If you search on Google.de (desktop) - you get the German version. If you search Google.de on mobile - the titles in the search results are German - however the site which is displayed when you click on the links is the one that is optimised for mobile (= English version)
I guess this will be similar in your case - desktop searches will go to the translated version - the mobile searches will go to the mobile version (even if it's not in the language of the searcher).
Dirk
-
According to the client, the site is being penalized for not being mobile friendly; but there could be other reasons. The desktop site has 10-12 versions, set up as subdirectories.
If the native language site will come up first, the client is fine with doing nothing. If not, they want us to redirect the users as you described. But since we're still in development, we're not sure what the answer is.
Do you think it's most likely that the native language site would come up first?
The long-term plan is to create responsive sites, for better SEO and UX, so this is just a temporary interim solution.
-
Your site will in no way become penalized for not being mobile friendly. "mobilgeddon" was an effort to get more people to switch to mobile friendly designs and is still only a factor within Google's algorithm. You should be thinking about switching to mobile (responsive ideally) for a better user experience - not because of Google.
You mentioned that the global mobile version will only be available in English. Does this mean you have other languages on the desktop site? If so I would rely exclusively on the non-mobile pages utilizing the hreflang tag (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en) and then when you eventually make the other language pages mobile friendly switch the hreflang to point to those page.
Pointing your users in a different company expecting their native language to the mobile english only version I suspect would create extremely high bounce rates. You would be best off (IMO) just sending them to the non-mobile but correct language desktop page regardless of search being desktop vs mobile.
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
-
US site vs New Canadian site for Brand
Hi Everyone, My company decided to create a Canadian site for Canadian customers. How do I slowly transition the US site for ranking in Google.ca? I was thinking of using robots.txt to block Google.Ca from crawling the US site? Can anyone provide some advice oh how this should be managed? Thank you!
International SEO | | JMSCC0 -
How To Proceed With Int'l Language Targeting if Subfolders Not An Option?
I’m currently working with my team to sort out the best way to build out the international versions of our website. Any advice on how to move forward is greatly appreciated! Current Setup: Subdirectories to target languages - i.e. domain.com/es/. We chose this because… We are targeting languages not countries Our product offering does not change from country to country Translated site content is almost identical to the english version Current Problem: Our site is built on WordPress and our database can’t handle the build out of 4 more international versions of the site. The database is slowing down and our site speed is being affected for multiple reasons (WordPress multilingual plugin being one of them). **What to do next? **My developers have said that we cannot continue with our current subdirectory structure due to the technical infrastructure issues I’ve mentioned above (as well as others I’m yet to get full details on). Now I’m left with a decision: Change to a subdomain structure Change to a ccTLD structure Is there an option 3? From what I’ve read it does not make sense to build out language targeted sites on a ccTLD structure because that limits the ability for people outside of the targeted country to find the content organically. I.e. a website at www.domain.es is targeted to searchers in Spain so someone in Columbia is less likely to find that content through the engines. Is this correct? If so, how much can it hurt organic discovery? What’s the optimal setup to move forward with in this case? Thanks!
International SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
SEO in foreign languages
Hi everyone, I currently run a website called Barquitos www.barquitos.com The site is an extension of a shop that is based here in Spain. Though because the town is particularly touristy we built the website to offer English and Spanish as language options on the site. English on Barquitos.com and Spanish through a sub domain es.barquitos.com. In an ideal world I want to rank the English version for English phrases on Google.co.uk, and the Spanish sub domain on es.barquitos.com. However, my Spanish is only at a reasonable standard, probably not good enough to look at writing quality content in Spanish. Is building up the Page Authority and Domain authority for the English main domain enough to rank the Spanish sub domain or do we need a focussed approach for both languages? Any tips or advice for helping to rank sub domains in foreign languages would be greatly appreciated. Thanks everyone Stu
International SEO | | Barquitos0 -
Same language manage many country
Hello, I would like to hear how you would handle the following situation. I make website for people with a .be domain that also want to score in .nl . Both countries speak dutch. There are however slight variations between the two countries. For some it does not matter for others it can be handy. Ex. A specific product might be called diffrent in one country then the other. The main problem is for those that have a .be domain will not score on a .nl domain and visa versa. This due geo targeting. What would you do? Imagine we already have a .be domain (.be == belgium, .nl==Netherland both speak dutch) A: Buy a .nl and copy and show the same content on .nl as .be
International SEO | | nono_1974
B: Buy a .nl and make new content (lots of work)
😄 Buy a .EU, .com adres and Geotarget nl.somedomain.eu , be.somedomain.eu . But what about the content The main problem is double content and targeting the two countries.0 -
Multi Language / target market site
What is the best way to deal with multiple languages and multiple target markets? Is it better to use directories or sub-domains: English.domain.com Portuguese.domain.com Or Domain.com Domain.com/Portuguese Also should I use language meta tags to help the different language versions rank in different geographic areas e.g. Are there any examples of where this has been done well?
International SEO | | RodneyRiley0 -
What’s the best way to convert ccTLD to global TLD?
We started out as a Canadian site targeting Canadian users. Now our site http://iCraft.ca has a lot of international buyers and sellers and .ca TLD doesn’t make sense anymore, as we are not performing well on Google.com We are doing a complete site redesign right now, which will address a lot of coding and content specific issues, but we suspect .ca domain will always hold us back in achieving good positions on Google.com. Since Google doesn’t allow ccTLDs to set geo-targeting, what are our options? a) Migrating to a brand new .com site and setting up 301 redirects for all links from iCraft.ca. Would we lose all rankings in this example and pretty much start building them from scratch? Or would PR be transferred page by page from one domain to another through 301 redirects? b) Setup a separate .com site with mirrored content to target global audience and keep .ca site to target Canada. Not sure if splitting PR for the same pages between 2 sites is a good idea. Also, how would you address duplicate content properly in our situation?
International SEO | | MarinaUX
In this video that I found here on forum http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo Matt Cutts says that it’s ok to have duplicate content on different ccTLDs, but he says - make sure you localize your content on those domains. What if you can’t? Most of the content on our site is meant for anyone, not just Canadian users. So, for the most part, we’d have exactly same content on .com site, as we have on .ca site. We could display prices in different currencies on product pages, but the rest of the content – blogs, forum etc. are not country-specific and can’t be localized easily. Also, it’s not clear from the video if all mirrored sites should sit on the same domain name for each country, like example.com and example.ca or is it ok to have example.com and icraft.ca? c) Is there a better option? Thanks for your help!0 -
Ranking local content against English content
Hi SEOMoz, If I have a site that has multiple language selection, how would it be possible for my site with localized content to rank higher than the default/English content? For example, in Google.co.th, my site with English content (http://www.xyz.com/en-us/) ranks higher than the localized content (http://www.xyz.com/th-th/). How is it possible for me to turn things around and ensure that for local markets like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China etc the localized content organically ranks higher than the default-English page? Thanks! Steve
International SEO | | sjcbayona-412180 -
Site structure for multi-lingual hotel website (subfolder names)
Hi there superMozers! I´ve read a quite a few questions about multi-lingual sites but none answered my doubt / idea, so here it is: I´m re-designing an old website for a hotel in 4 different languages which are all** hosted on the same .com domain** as follows: example.com/english/ for english example.com/espanol/ for **spanish ** example.com/francais/ for french example.com/portugues/ for portuguese While doing keyword search, I have noticed that many travel agencies separate geographical areas by folders, therefor an **agency pomoting beach hotels in South America **will have a structure as follows: travelagency.com/argentina-beach-hotels/ travelagency.com/peru-beach-hotels/ and they list hotels in each folder, therefor benefiting from those keywords to rank ahead of many independent hotels sites from those areas. What **I would like to **do -rather than just naming those folders with the traditional /en/ for english or /fr/ for french etc- is take advantage of this extra language subfolder to_´include´_ important keywords in the name of the subfolders in the following way (supposing the we have a beach hotel in Argentina): example.com/argentina-beach-hotel/ for english example.com/hotel-playa-argentina/ for **spanish ** example.com/hotel-plage-argentine/ for french example.com/hotel-praia-argentina/ for portuguese Note that the same keywords are used in the name of the folder, but translated into the language the subfolders are. In order to make things clear for the search engines I would specify the language in the html for each page. My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´ although most travel agencies do it in their site structure. Any Mozers have experience with this, any idea on how search engines may react, or if they could penalise the site? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | underground0