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.
Country specific landing pages
-
I have a client who wants to put a re-direct on his landing pages based on the visitors IP address.
The landing page will be a sub domain relevant to the country their IP is located in.
I am a little concerned this will effect the SEO.
Appreciate any advice.
Dylan
-
The other implication that most international sites have is the way they handle content and different languages. You don't want to also create duplicate content issues of your site by increasing your content exponentially using either machine or user generated translations. We of course, always prefer user generated translations.
Another thing to check out is a post on the SEOMoz blog about handling duplicate content. The area I specifically wanted to point out is the Link rel=alternate section
http://www.example.com/path" />
This can be used to tell search engines that those pieces of content are just translated versions of another piece of content so there is no confusion.
-
Thanks very much Ryan & Ryan... Much appreciated
-
I second this opinion. folders are the best way to go here.
-
Rather then using a sub-domain use folders on the existing domain.
www.mydomain.com/es not es.mydomain.com
This method allows you to keep all of your domain authority in one place and strengthens your site as a whole. There really isn't much difference between using a subdomain versus using completely different domains.
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
-
How to Localise per Region (Europe, America, APAC, EMEI) and not per country as best SEO practise?
Hi SEO expertises! I am currently working with a client that initially have an English website targeting UK users but want to expand their market into four new regions (Europe, America, APAC and EMEI) keeping English as a main language. I would like to request your help here as I told the client ISO location and hreflang it will be just possible per language and they must need to localise each English region with local keywords, however I would like to double check if it will be any way (Sitemap, Hreflang) we can tell Google we are targeting per region and not per country? Thanks a lot!
International SEO | | Atalig20 -
Country subfolders showing as sitelinks in Google, country targeting for home page no longer working
Hi There, Just wondering if you can help. Our site has 3 region versions (General .com, /ie/ for Ireland and /gb/ for UK), each submitted to Google Webmaster Tools as seperate sites with hreflang tags in the head section of all pages. Google was showing the correct results for a few weeks, but I resubmitted the home pages with slight text changes last week and something strange happened, though it may have been coincidental timing. When we search for the brand name in google.ie or google.co.uk, the .com now shows as the main site, where the sitelinks still show the correct country versions. However, the country subdirectories are now appearing as sitelinks, which is likely causing the problem. I have demoted these on GWT, but unsure as to whether that will work and it seems to take a while for sitelink demotion to work. Has anyone had anything similar happen? I thought perhaps it was a markup issue breaking the head section so that Google can no longer see the hreflangs pointing to each other as alternates. I checked the source code in w3 validator and it doesn't show any errors. Anyway, any help would be much appreciated - and thanks to anyone who gets back, it's a tricky type of issue to troubleshoot. Thanks, Ro
International SEO | | romh0 -
Is there any reason to get a massive decrease on indexed pages?
Hi, I'm helping on SEO for a big e-commerce in LatAm and one thing we've experienced during the last months is that our search traffic had reduced and the indexed pages had decreased in a terrible way. The site had over 2 Million indexed pages (which was way too much, since we believe that around 10k would be more than enough to hold the over 6K SKUs) but now this number has decreased to less than 3K in less than 2 months. I've also noticed that most of the results in which the site is still appearing are .pdf or .doc files but not actual content on the website. I've checked the following: Robots (there is no block, you can see that on the image as well) Webmaster Tools Penalties Duplicated content I don't know where else to look for. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance! cpLwX1X
International SEO | | mat-relevance0 -
Redirect the main site to keyword-rich subfolder / specific page for SEO
Hi, I have two questions. Question 1: is it worthwhile to redirect the main site to keyword-rich subfolder / specific page for SEO? For example, my company's webpage is www.example.com. Would it make sense to redirect (301) the main site to address www.example.com/service-one-in-certain-city ? I am asking this as I have learned that it is important for SEO to have keywords in the URL, and I was thinking that we could do this and include the most important keywords to the subfolder / specific URL. What are the pros and cons of this? Should I create folders or pages just the sake of keywords? Question 2: Most companies have their main URL shown as www.example.com when you access their domain. However, some multi-language sites show e.g. www.example.com/en or www.example.com/en/main when you type the domain to your web browser to access the site. I understand that this is a common practice to use subdomains or folders to separate different language versions. My question is regarding subfolders. Is it better to have only the subfolder shown (www.example.com/en) or should I also include the specific page's URL after the subfolder with keywords (www.example.com/en/main or www.example.com/en/service-one-in-certain-city)? I don't really understand why some companies show only the subfolder of a specific language page and some the page's URL after the subfolder. Thanks in advance, Sam
International SEO | | Awaraman1 -
Massive jump in pages indexed (and I do mean massive)
Hello mozzers, I have been working in SEO for a number of years but never seen anything like a jump in pages indexed of this proportion (image is from the Index Status report in Google Webmaster Tools: http://i.imgur.com/79mW6Jl.png Has anyone has ever seen anything like this?
International SEO | | Lina-iWeb
Anyone have an idea about what happened? One thing that sprung to mind might be that the same pages are now getting indexed in several more google country sites (e.g. google.ca, google.co.uk, google.es, google.com.mx) but I don't know if the Index Status report in WMT works like that. A few notes to explain the context: It's an eCommerce website with service pages and around 9 different pages listing products. The site is small - only around 100 pages across three languages 1.5 months ago we migrated from three language subdomains to a single sub-domain with language directories. Before and after the migration I used hreflang tags across the board. We saw about 50% uplift in traffic from unbranded organic terms after the migration (although on day one it was more like +300%), especially from more language diversity. I had an issue where the 'sort' links on the product tables were giving rise to thousands of pages of duplicate content, although I had used the URL parameter handling to communicate to Google that these were not significantly different and only to index the representative URL. About 2 weeks ago I blocked them using the robots.txt (Disallow: *?sort). I never felt these were doing us too much harm in reality although many of them are indexed and can be found with a site:xxx.com search. At the same time as adding *?sort to the robots.txt, I made an hreflang sitemap for each language, and linked to them from an index sitemap and added these to WMT. I added some country specific alternate URLs as well as language just to see if I started getting more traffic from those countries (e.g. xxx.com/es/ for Spanish, xxx.com/es/ for Spain, xxx.xom/es/ for Mexico etc). I dodn't seem to get any benefit from this. Webmaster tools profile is for a URL that is the root domain xxx.com. We have a lot of other subdomains, including a blog that is far bigger than our main site. But looking at the Search Queries report, all the pages listed are on the core website so I don't think it is the blog pages etc. I have seen a couple of good days in terms of unbranded organic search referrals - no spike or drop off but a couple of good days in keeping with recent improvements in these kinds of referrals. We have some software mirror sub domains that are duplicated across two website: xxx.mirror.xxx.com and xxx.mirror.xxx.ca. Many of these don't even have sections and Google seemed to be handling the duplication, always preferring to show the .com URL despite no cross-site canonicals in place. Very interesting, I'm sure you will agree! THANKS FOR READING! 79mW6Jl.png0 -
Should product-pages with different currencies have different URLs?
Here is a question that should be of interest for small online merchants selling internationally in multiple currencies. When, based on geolocation, a product-page is served with different currencies, should a product-page have a different URL for each currency? Thanks.
International SEO | | AdrienOLeary0 -
Country name displayed after domain name in google SERP
our online shop targets clients in the US and worldwide (same URL - no subdirectories - currency changes based on IP). when searching in google.ie or google.no for our site google displays in the SERPS "US" or "United States" after the URL for our site, but for most other US competitors it does not show the country in the SERPS. I deleted our google places listing 2 weeks ago, since I suspected it may be related, but no change so far. In google webmaster tools we have targeted the shop domain to United States, which may be another factor. Unfortunately we can not undo this setting since without it our google US ranking for the most relevant competitive keyword drops from position 8 to position 100+. Server location is in Germany which despite lots of US links and US contact info and USD currency appparently makes google think that the site is not targeting the US. Does anybody know what triggers the country name in the SERPS (google places or webmaster tools or other) and can give advice if there is any way to get rid of it.
International SEO | | lcourse0 -
Pop-up to select country. Any negative SEO effect?
Hi there! We have similar websites in different countries (it's an ecommerce site). Some times, those websites share the same language and, for example, people from Mexico end up in a page from our website in Argentina. Therefore they see our products in their language buy in a foreign currency. We would like to show them a pop-up (like a shadowbox) depending on their IP to allow them to go to their local website. There wouldn't be any redirect. Would that affect our rankings in any way? Would Googlebots see that as well? Thanks!
International SEO | | jorgediaz0