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.
HREFLANG setup for Europe (in English) + .eu domain
-
We have been struggling to find answers since we launched our European website.
We have the following structure:
WEBSITE HUB
https://ecosmartfire.comThis works as a hub for our users. We show the url printed in our marketing materials. When someone lands in this URL, we check if we have a local store in the user's location and prompt the user to go to the right destination.
The default hreflang is:
LOCAL VERSIONS
https://ecosmartfire.com/us/en/ (United States)
https://ecosmartfire.com.au (Australia)
https://ecosmartfire.eu (Europe)
https://ecosmartfire.fr (France)We have no problems with United States, Australia and France.
The hreflang tags look like this:
EUROPE
https://ecosmartfire.euWe have two problems in Europe:
1. Language: the European store is available just in English
2. No hreflang: Europe doesn't have a hreflang that covers all the countries so we had to create lots of hrelangs pointing to the same location.The hreflang tags look like this:
... and the list goes on.
Do you think this is the right approach? Or should I just remove these European hreflang tags from the website code?
Thanks,
-
We used this same approach (except we are not using TLD, but instead are using directory paths for the regions). We have storefronts in US, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, and EU. The hreflang tags are working very well for all the storefronts except EU.
In these other regions, for all of our key tracked search terms, our ranking page is one within the right region for, when checked by the Moz Rank Tracker using the corresponding Google search engine. And, none of the pages from these other regions are ranking in a Google US search. So far so good.
But, for Europe, only our US pages are ranking when I check with any of the EU country Google engines. And, The EU home page is ranking for some searches in the US, including right now it is showing as one of our organic sitelinks for our brand name search.
We also geo-targeted all of our properties except for two, on Google Search Console. Originally. That would be EU (because Google doesn't allow to target for EU, only for specific countries) and our US site (because we use our www domain in US with no directory path, and in Google Search Console if we geo-target that, it applies to all of our regional directory paths).
So, we changed our geo targeting recently, and targeted our EU property to Germany. We chose that because Germany is our largest market in EU. But this hasn't helped either.
Basically, all the available tools we know of (hreflang tags, GSC geo-targeting) seem to fail at targeting EU. It is a shame, because many brands have an EU site (rather than individual sites for each country). But we have not yet found an approach which works well.
-
Hi, this is something i'm looking to apply in the near future too - i was wondering whether you'd seen any positive/negative implications from using the above hreflang structure?
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
-
Why is my domain authority still 1?
I changed the domain of my website from www.vanillacrush.co.uk to www.carissamay.co.uk at the end of December and yet my DA for carissamay is still 1. As advised, I set up a 301 redirect from VC to CM which seems to be working fine. However when I check on redirect detective it tells me I also have a 302 set up. Could this be confusing things? http://www.vanillacrush.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carissamayhttp://www.vanillacrush.co.uk/
http://www.carissamay.co.uk
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks
0 -
Ranking 2 pages on the same domain in the same SERP
I thought it was generally said that Google will favour 1 page per domain for a particular SERP, but I have seen examples where that is not the case (i.e. Same domain is ranking 2 different pages on the 1st page of the SERPs...) Are there any "tricks" to taking up 2 first page SERP positions, or am I mistaken that this doesn't always happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
Hreflang in vs. sitemap?
Hi all, I decided to identify alternate language pages of my site via sitemap to save our development team some time. I also like the idea of having leaner markup. However, my site has many alternate language and country page variations, so after creating a sitemap that includes mostly tier 1 and tier 2 level URLs, i now have a sitemap file that's 17mb. I did a couple google searches to see is sitemap file size can ever be an issue and found a discussion or two that suggested keeping the size small and a really old article that recommended keeping it < 10mb. Does the sitemap file size matter? GWT has verified the sitemap and appears to be indexing the URLs fine. Are there any particular benefits to specifying alternate versions of a URL in vs. sitemap? Thanks, -Eugene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_bgb0 -
Different domains for multilingual website
Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruLee0 -
Keep multiple domains or combine them?
I need some help figuring out if I should combine multiple domains or if I should let them be separate? I have domain1.com, domain2.com, and domain3.com. Well, domain1.com owns domain2.com and domain3.com. And currently domain1.com points to domain2.com and domain3.com from the homepage. They are going through some changes at their business, and now the option is on the table to combine the domains or still let them be separate as long as they link to each other. What is the best way to handle this and are there more things I should go through before making a decision? None of them have a ton of links to them, and they aren't super robust, but would just to have some advice. Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rocket.Fuel0 -
SEO value in multiple backlinks from same domain and from various sub-domains.
A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links? Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be? thank yoyu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen1 -
Multiple IPs (load balancing) for same domain
Hello, I'm considering moving our main website to a multiple servers, perhaps in multiple different datacenters and use a DNS round robin load balancing by assigning it 4 different IP addresses (probably from 4 different C classes). example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maddogx
ourdomain.com A 1.1.1.1
ourdomain.com A 2.2.2.2
ourdomain.com A 3.3.3.3
ourdomain.com A 4.4.4.4 Every time you ping the domain you will get a response from another IP of the group. Therefore search engines will see a different IP each time they scan the site. We have used the main IP for our website for past 6 years without changing it. We have a quite good SEO in our niche which I don't want to loose of course. My question is, will adding more IPs to the domain affect any how on the ranking ? What is the suggested way to do it anyway? What is recommended to do before and after? Thanks for you attention and help in advance. Dmitry S.0 -
New Site: Use Aged Domain Name or Buy New Domain Name?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterwhitewebdesign
I have the opportunity to build a new website and use a domain name that is older than 5 years or buy a new domain name. The aged domain name is a .net and includes a keyword.
The new domain would include the same keyword as well as the U.S. state abbreviation. Which one would you use and why? Thanks for your help!0