What HREF should be used to target the market of the foreigners?
-
Usually, foreigners use a local computer (system language), on a local google but are searching in their native language for topics related with their native language. It's a mess for us and google it seems.
In example, if a venezuelan person living in France (Paris), on a french AZERTY computer (not literally...
there is no such thing as a french computer), on Google.fr, search for a venezuelan arepa recipe using the keyword "receta arepa" in spanish of course, he is expecting the result to be in spanish.
How could we optimize our pages with HREF or other tricks to rank as high as possible with that configuration? This is obviously just an example, but it represents the problem I am facing.
-
Thanks a lot Gianluca, I thought we were limited to languages existing inside the targeted country.
I'll try it and check if there is any kind of ranking boost. For now, I have nothing set in "webmaster tools" or on the code.
-
I your specific case - targeting spanish speaking people residing in another country than (in your case) Venezuela - then you should have this kind of hreflang:
<rel="alternate" hreflang="es-FR" href="the content in spanish url"></rel="alternate">
This way you're telling google to show the URL in Spanish to people searching in Spanish but living in France.
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
-
Law Firm Website Completely Switching Marketing Focus - How to Best Handle
Hi Moz Community, Thanks in advance for the help! We have a law firm client interested in fully switching their SEO marketing from Criminal Defense to Personal Injury. Our client no longer wants any business for Criminal Defense cases. Background Info: The website for the last 10 years has focused on Criminal Defense (and ranks well). Over the last couple of years we have introduced Personal Injury content on the website and achieved some decent rankings as well. In order to make the website less relevant for Criminal Defense, it had crossed our minds to de-index these specific Criminal Defense pages but still leave them present on the website. Question: Would you recommend de-indexing all of the pages at once or done in a gradual manner? Our concern it that doing it all at once could affect the overall domain's authority more sharply and harm rankings for any other keywords not involving Criminal Defense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd1 -
Should I use NoIndex on short-lived pages?
Hello, I have a large number of product pages on my site that are relatively short-lived: probably in the region of a million+ pages that are created and then removed within a 24 hour period. Previously these pages were being indexed by Google and did receive landings, but in recent times I've been applying a NoIndex tag to them. I've been doing that as a way of managing our crawl budget but also because the 410 pages that we serve when one of these product pages is gone are quite weak and deliver a relatively poor user experience. We're working to address the quality of those 410 pages but my question is should I be no-indexing these product pages in the first place? Any thoughts or comments would be welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PhilipHGray0 -
Use of "/" and using fractions in titles
We are a company that sells pipe and fittings. An example of a part that someone will search for is : 3/4" PVC Socket I am not sure how best to represent the fraction in the title of the page that has such a product. I am concerned that if I use the forward slash it will be misinterpreted by search engines (although it will be interpreted properly by users). A lot of folk search for the product by the fraction size and so it would be good to be able to represent it in the title, but I don't want to get "punished" by confusing search engines. I could replace the forward slash with a hyphen or pipe symbol, but then may look a bit weird to our users... Any recommendations? Bob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobBawden11 -
One page ranking for all key words, when other targeted pages not ranking
Hi everyone I am fairly new to SEO but have a basic understanding. I have a page that has a lot of content on it (including brand names and product types and relevant info) ranking for a quite a few key words. This is cool, except that I have pages dedicated to each specific key word that are not ranking. The more specific page still has a lot of relevant text on it too. eg. TYRES page - Ranks first for "Tyres". Ranks okay for many tyre key words, including "truck tyres"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDadd
TRUCK TYRES page - not ranking for "truck tyres" Further on, I then have pages not ranking all that well for more specific key words when they should. eg HONDA TRUCK TYRES - Then has a page full of product listings - no actual text. Not Ranking for "honda truck tyres". ABC HONDA TRUCK TYRE - not ranking for "abc honda truck tyre" key word
These pages don't have a lot of content on them, as essentially every single tyre is the same except for the name. But they do have text. So sometimes, these terms don't rank at all. And sometimes, the first TYRES page ranks for it. I have done the basic on page seo for all these pages (hopefully properly) including meta desc, meta titles, H1, H2, using key words in text, alt texting images where possible etc. According to MOZ they are optimised in the 90%. Link building is difficult as they are product listings, so other sites don't really link to these pages. Has anyone got ideas on why the top TYRES page might be so successful and out ranking more specific pages? Any ideas on how I can get the other pages ranking higher as they are more relevant to the search term? We are looking in to a website redesign/overhaul so any advice on how I can prevent this from happening on essentially a new site would be great too. Thanks!0 -
Block in robots.txt instead of using canonical?
When I use a canonical tag for pages that are variations of the same page, it basically means that I don't want Google to index this page. But at the same time, spiders will go ahead and crawl the page. Isn't this a waste of my crawl budget? Wouldn't it be better to just disallow the page in robots.txt and let Google focus on crawling the pages that I do want indexed? In other words, why should I ever use rel=canonical as opposed to simply disallowing in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Paging. is it better to use noindex, follow
Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category or just let Google index these pages Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-)) My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site. Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donthe0 -
Use of the Canonical Tag, Both Internally and Cross Domain
I've seen the cross domain canonical not work at all in my test cases. And an interesting point was brought to my attention today. That point was that in order for the canonical tag to work, the page that you are referencing needs to have the exact same content. And that this was the whole point of the canonical tag, not for it to be used as a 301 but for it to consolidate pages with the same content. I want to know if this is true. Does the page you reference with a canonical tag have to have the same exact content? And what have been your experiences with using the canonical tag referencing another page on a different domain that has the same exact subject matter but not the exact duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GearyLSF372 -
Use of Apache mod_rewrite module for SEO?
I'm curious if anyone here running a large, complex, dynamic site has used the Apache server mod_rewrite module to simplify their site's URLs by rewriting them in a standard format. The chief use of this module for SEO purposes would be to aid in canonicalization and reduce duplicate content. For example, you could easily convert all of you ALL CAPS or MixedCase URLs to lower case, change all "/index.html" URLs to just point to "/", change all word seperators to hyphens, and so on. Any server-side ninjas out there with stories to tell? 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcolman0