TLD Conflicts in WMT
-
Hi
I'm running into some top level domain conflicts in Google's webmaster tools. I hope you can help me out. Thanks in advance.
Website example.com has sub folders for each language. There's no content at the root example.com. The root 301 redirects to English at example.com/en/.
In Google Webmaster Tools the root site is added because the web developer can't find a Joomla plugin to put the sitemap and robots file in each sub folder. It's all mixed in the root. So only 1 sitemap and robots exists for all the sub folder languages in the root of the site.
As a results Google shows the root site in search results where it should show the appropriate sub folder (in this case Dutch). I see these conflicts occur everywhere.
Soon Chinese, Romanian and other languages will be added. I'm afraid this problem will only get worse.
What can I do to make sure Google treats every sub folder as a distinctive site and doesn't treat the root as a site?
-
Google can be very stubborn about wanting to see content at the root level. The other common problem, though, is that the crawler just may not see the other language variants. Are you auto-redirecting by IP (i.e. geo-location)? One major issue is that Google crawls from the US, so you'll need crawl paths to all of the variants.
The first thing to check is that Google is actually reading/honoring the 301. You'll need to see what the crawler is seeing.
Google has added some new tags for sites in multiple languages (especially if the same language is shared across regions/countries). I don't have a lot of good data on them, but Google reps are encouraging their use:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html
You may find life is easier, long-term, if you put the dominant language at the root level, along with navigation options for other languages, and then use geo-location to send visitors to other pages. It also saves you a 301-hop for the primary market and will strengthen your SEO a bit for that language.
-
Hi István
Thanks for the suggestion.
Do you mean by:
_"_I would go for a canonical in the index page"...you would create a webpage in the root of the site with a canonical to the default redirect /en/?
-
Hi Jacob,
I would go for a canonical in the index page. This should remove the .com version from index and tell search engines which is the "main" language.
I hope that solves this issue.
Greetings,
Istvan
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
-
URL Parameters Settings in WMT/Search Console
On an large ecommerce site the main navigation links to URLs that include a legacy parameter. The parameter doesn’t actually seem to do anything to change content - it doesn’t narrow or specify content, nor does it currently track sessions. We’ve set the canonical for these URLs to be without the parameter. (We did this when we started seeing that Google was stripping out the parameter in the majority of SERP results themselves.) We’re trying to best strategize on how to set the parameters in WMT (search console). Our options are to set to: 1. No: Doesn’t affect page content’ - and then the Crawl field in WMT is auto-set to ‘Representative URL’. (Note, that it's unclear what ‘Representative URL’ is defined as. Google’s documentation suggests that a representative URL is a canonical URL, and we've specifically set canonicals to be without the parameter so does this contradict? ) OR 2. ‘Yes: Changes, reorders, or narrows page content’ And then it’s a question of how to instruct Googlebot to crawl these pages: 'Let Googlebot decide' OR 'No URLs'. The fundamental issue is whether the parameter settings are an index signal or crawl signal. Google documents them as crawl signals, but if we instruct Google not to crawl our navigation how will it find and pass equity to the canonical URLs? Thoughts? Posted by Susan Schwartz, Kahena Digital staff member
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AriNahmani0 -
International SEO with 27 TLD`s
Hi Guys! Would like to have your expert opinion on the structure of a big international company. They are active over 27 regions, with all their own local TLD website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sie.SAS
Some of them are translated, but most of them are in English (big duplicated content, you know it). Next to that they have a webshop on 4 subdomains of theses 27 local TLD's. In my opinion it would be best to merge them all back to the .com domain and set-up a 301 redirect for all local TLD`s.
However what is your opinion on these 4 webshops? should I make them in the following structure : .com/region/shop (for example .com/fr/shop) Thanks for the feedback! Kind Regards S.0 -
Should I disallow via robots.txt for my sub folder country TLD's?
Hello, My website is in default English and Spanish as a sub folder TLD. Because of my Joomla platform, Google is listing hundreds of soft 404 links of French, Chinese, German etc. sub TLD's. Again, i never created these country sub folder url's, but Google is crawling them. Is it best to just "Disallow" these sub folder TLD's like the example below, then "mark as fixed" in my crawl errors section in Google Webmaster tools?: User-agent: * Disallow: /de/ Disallow: /fr/ Disallow: /cn/ Thank you, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Google WMT Turning 1 Link into 4,000+ Links
We operate 2 ecommerce sites. The About Us page of our main site links to the homepage of our second site. It's been this way since the second site launched about 5 years ago. The sites sell completely different products and aren't related besides both being owned by us. In Webmaster Tools for site 2, it's picking up ~4,100 links coming to the home page from site 1. But we only link to the home page 1 time in the entire site and that's from the About Us page. I've used Screaming Frog, IT has looked at source, JavaScript, etc., and we're stumped. It doesn't look like WMT has a function to show you on what pages of a domain it finds the links and we're not seeing anything by checking the site itself. Does anyone have experience with a situation like this? Anyone know an easy way to find exactly where Google sees these links coming from?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
WMT Showing Duplicate Meta Description Issues Altough Posts Were Redirected
Dear Moz Community, Some time ago we've change the structure of our website and we've redirected the old URL's to the new ones. About 2,000 posts were redirected at that time. While checking Webmaster Tools a few days ago I've discovered that about 500 duplicate meta-description issues appear in the "HTML Improvements" area. To my surprise, altough the old posts were redirected to the new path, WMT sees the description of the old posts similar with the one of the new post. Moreover, after changing the structure all meta-descriptions were modified and they weren't the same used before the restructure. For example I've redirected /blog/taxi-transfer-from-merton-sw19-to-london-city-airport/ to /destinations/greater-london/merton-sw19/taxi-transfer-to-london-city-airport-from-merton/ Now they are shown as having duplicate content. I've checked the redirects and they are working. I get the same error from the redirected pages for about 150 titles. Did anyone else get this errors or can you please offer me some suggestions about how I can fix this? Thank you in advance! Tiberiu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiberiu0 -
HEADS UP - Did Google Grant WMT and GA admin access to your past employees or contractors?
Check your users and permissions in WMT and GA. I noticed that two Gmail accounts from a while back were given admin access to our accounts! That means someone that used to work for you could go in and remove your site from Googles index. Check your accounts folks just a heads up 😉 Here is an article talking about this potentially dangerous issue. http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/11/28/serious-google-security-glitch-gives-webmaster-tools-possibly-analytics-access-to-revoked-accounts
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw1 -
Anyone managed to decrease the "not selected" graph in WMT?
Hi Mozzers. I am working with a very large E-com site that has a big issue with duplicate or near duplicate content. The site actually received a message in WMT listing out pages that Google deemed it should not be crawling. Many of these were the usual pagination / category sorting option URL issues etc. We have since fixed the issue with a combination of site changes, robots.txt, parameter handling and URL removals, however I was expecting the "not selected" graph in WMT to start dropping. The number of roboted pages has increased by around 1 million pages (which was expected) and indexed pages has actually increased despite removing hundreds of thousands of pages. I assume this is due to releasing some crawl bandwidth for more important pages like products. I guess my question is two-fold; 1. Is the "not selected" graph cumulative, as this would explain why it isn't dropping? 2. Has anyone managed to get this figure to significantly drop? Should I even care? I am relating this to Panda by the way. Important to note that the changes were made around 3 weeks ago and I am aware not everything will be re-crawled yet. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Further
Chris notselected.jpg0 -
A bit of a confliction?
After reading this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success I understand that it is best to index the archived categories, now that they are being indexed im getting duplicate errors from SEOmoz reports. Any suggestions? We added the canonical code but the issue still exists in the SEOmoz report.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0