Is there a Risk Around Creating a Website for Each Country in The World?
-
Is there a risk around creating a website for each country in the world with similar to identical content depending on the language? We need to serve prices and the local currencies and be compliant with regulations. We're planning to use rel=canonical and HREFLANG tags to help with consolidation and GEO-targeting.
-
Unfortunately yes. We have a number of clients who went 'geo-mad' and in almost all situations, it has caused problems for them. Sometimes it has created colossal site footprints which Google doesn't care to index (unless you're a household name, don't expect Google to care about your hundreds of thousands of URLs). Sometimes that has also caused server-load issues for them too, irrespective of Google
Other issues include Google ignoring their canonical tags and setting one language URL as the 'canonical' result (and thus de-indexing the other language URLs). This can happen due to link signals and similar content, stuff like that
Many clients in such a position have **seen their pages devalued as a result of them going against Google's content guidelines **(and simplicity guidelines). If you're not super important, Google don't want to waste 4x, 6x or 20x crawl budget in your site just because you decide to serve in more combinations of language and geo-location. Even with perfect Hreflang deployments, a lot can go wrong if you go nutty so cherry-pick your language/geo combinations and don't be greedy with it
If your brand is powerful online and you have loads of SEO authority / ranking power, then you can deploy hreflangs extensively and usually you can make real gains. Not everyone is in that position, most aren't
Having unique content (not powered by some crappy auto-translate plugin) per deployment is strongly, strongly recommended. By the way if you have less ranking power than most sites which have 'successful' broad-reaching hreflang deployments, you need to adhere to Google's guidelines more strictly than those sites do. You need to make up for you lack of trust and authority, by doing things by the book
Too many people look at big international sites and say: "well Google lets them use relatively thin content so I should be alright too". Nope, you are likely standing upon a platform of radically different stature to those guys, so don't over-reach too quickly or you'll stumble and fall
Also if you are planning to use canonical tags to 'canonical' from one language to another, don't do that. If a page points to another, separate URL with its canonical tag - then it tells Google that it (the active page) is the non-canonical version and usually de-indexes itself
Be very careful how you proceed. If you increase your footprint too far, all the great authority you have built up may bleed out over a sprawling site and you could end up with nothing
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
-
Hreflang on non 1:1 websites
Hi. I have a client with international websites targeting several different countries. Currently, the US (.com) website outranks the country-specific domain when conducting a search within that country (i.e. US outranks the UK website in the UK). This sounds like a classic case for hrelang. However, the websites are largely not 1:1. They offer different content with a different design and a different URL structure. Each country is on a country-specific domain (.com, .co.uk, .com.au, etc.). As well, the country-specific domains have lower domain authority than the US/.com website - fewer links, lower quality content, poorer UX, etc. Would hreflang still help in this scenario if we were to map it the closest possible matching page? Do the websites not sharing content 1:1 add any risks? The client is worried the US/.com website will lose ranking in the country but the country-specific domain won't gain that ranking. Thanks for any help or examples you can offer!
International SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0 -
Best way to interlink 25 different language versions of a website?
I have a website which has 25 different language versions on 16 different domains. Hreflan are setup to point to different language versions. In the footer we have deeplinks to the 25 language versions. Site is not spammy but in small niche and many language versions have very few other external links. For some time this site had lost rankings for reasons that are unclear till now. I see that large international sites such as booking.com, tripadvisor, apple all use different approaches to interlink their language versions. Interestingly Tripadvisor is nowadays loading the links to their other language versions dynamically only upon click so that these links do not show up in source code, deviating from their former implementation of static deeplinks to all language versions. Matt Cutts mentioned back in 2013 “If you have 50 different sites, I wouldn’t link to all 50 sites down in the footer of your website, because that can start to look pretty spammy to users. Instead you might just link to no more than three or four or five down in the footer, that sort of thing, or have a link to a global page, and the global page can talk about all the different verions and country versions of your website.” But in their webmaster guidelines google recommends: "Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the German version of your page can get to the right language version with a single click." I assume for SEO anyway these links have no value, but for user experience it would certainly be better to provide somewhere deeplinks to other language versions. Also the fact that language versions are on different domains and have few external backlinks may increase a bit the risk in our case. I guess in doubt I would prefer to be safe and load deeplinks only upon click same as tripadvisor. Any thoughts/suggestions on best interlinking in our specific case?
International SEO | | lcourse0 -
Trying To Use Parent Company's Content In Another Country
Hi, I'm hoping someone can help me out here but this is what I am dealing with: Say John Smith Companies sells Widgets across the United States. They have also formed a company called "Widgets of Canada" in an effort to sell their Blue Widgets only in Canada and I am in responsible for their website. Recently, John Smith Companies completely redesigned their website and it now has a really slick look and is loaded with great widgets content. I would like to take their site and re-purpose it for use in Canada. However, I am concerned about duplicate content. I would be converting all the widget specifications from imperial to metric units, changing the title and description elements and also using a much different folders/ paths. Is this enough to avoid any issues with similar page content? Is there anything I can do with hreflang? Thanks
International SEO | | DohenyDrones0 -
SEO Strategy for international website with similar content
Hello, If a company is in different countries and has same content in most of the countries does it hurt SEO? For Ex. fibaro.com is the website that I am researching and I have seen the indexed pages to be about 40,000 however there is not much content on it. On further inspection I noticed that for every country the sub folder is different. So for us it will be fibaro.com/us/motion-sensor and for Europe fibaro.com/en/motion-sensor. Now both of these pages have same content on it and the company is in 86 countries so imagine the amount of duplicate content it has. Does anybody have any ideas on what should be an ideal way to approach this? Thanks
International SEO | | Harveyspecter0 -
Can you target the same site with multiple country HREFlang entries?
Hi, I have a question regarding the country targeting aspect of HREFLANG. Can the same site be targeted with multiple country HREFlang entries? Example: A global company has an English South African site (geotargeted in webmaster tools to South Africa), with a hreflang entry targeted to "en-za", to signify English language and South Africa as the country. Could you add entries to the same site to target other English speaking South African countries? Entries would look something like this: (cd = Congo, a completely random example) etc... Since you can only geo-target a site to one country in WMT would this be a viable option? Thanks in advance for any help! Vince
International SEO | | SimonByrneIFS0 -
Multi-National Website Demarcation in Organic Search
We launched our business in the UK many years ago using a .com domain and have built up good link equity back to our www site. Last year, we launched the same business in the US and host the US site on a "us." sub domain. We have used Google Webmaster Tools to demarcate the two websites so that the www site is set to target the UK and the "us." sub domain is set to target the US. Our organic search results from Google UK for the UK business are fine but when our US customers Google brand terms the www UK site takes precedence in organic search. To complicate this further, the sitelinks within the search results include a mixture of pages from the www UK site and the "us." US site. Google clearly has some difficulty understanding that the two sites are for two different geographic audiences. We have a good relationship with Google and they have indicated (with appropriate disclaimers) that we might consider aligning the URL structures for both sites to reduce the precedence that the www site currently receives. The www home page will become an International portal and the UK and US URL structures will be aligned. We have two options: Change both sites to subdomains so that we have "uk.xxxxx.com" and "us.xxxxx.com" linked to an International portal at the www subdomain Use sub folders so that we have "www.xxxxx.com/uk/" and "www.xxxxx.com/us/" again linked from the www subdomain We're comfortable with use of 301 redirects and canonicals to change the structure in a search engine friendly way but cannot agree internally whether sub domains or sub folders is the way to go. Unfortunately we're to far down the line to seperate by tld. Anyone have a strong opinion on the best approach? Thanks, Jeremy
International SEO | | www.webuyanycar.com0 -
How to optimise a site for 2 countries
Hi there - Any help with the below much appreciated I am helping an Australian company, producing packaging products for businesses. Their site is hosted in Australia and their offices are in Australia. They have asked me to take care of both on-page and off-page SEO so that they rank for keywords related to their products - e.g. 'cardboard boxes'. This should be fairly straightforward for Australian based (.com.au) searchers, but they also supply their products to South Africa, and so want their results to show up also for South African based (.co.za) searchers. Also consider: it is not typical for searchers for these products to use geomodifiers in their search terms there is no unique content for the South African market versus the Australian... the product information is essentially identical. What should we do to ensure their results show up equally for those in South Africa as well as Australia? I am considering building a completely separate site, hosted in South Africa and specifically for the S.A market, but will the duplicate content effect be an issue? Also, this would essentially mean double the SEO effort, is there no way I could achieve our goals more efficiently? many thanks to any help
International SEO | | dnaynay0 -
What is the best way to make country specific IP redirect for only product pricng pages?
My website has 3 services and its price will be different for US/EU/Developed world and Asian/African countries.Apart from pricing page, all other things remain same. I want to use IP based redirect .I heard this thing is called cloaking and used by black-hat guys. What kind of instructions should I give to my web developer to look best to Google/Search bots and correctly show visitors the intended prices.Is there any caution to be taken care of. Thanks for your time
International SEO | | RyanSat0