English directories for foreign blogs ?
-
Hello guys,
I'm Brazilian and I'm still learning SEO stuff and Im learning a lot around your tool, blogs and texts.
All my websites are from Brazil, they are in PT-BR and I see a BIG market over here around SEO since comparing to EUA, we dont have so many customization services and our market is still growing.
I have been looking for a great SEO strategy and I'm seeing that blog comments (real and quality ones, even nofollow links) and great directories submissions are still good for positioning at th big G.
Unfortunatelly, my country don't have so many great directories where I can get great indexed high PR links, so I would like to ask you guys if anyone knows if I send my blog to international directories I would penalize my blog.
Every time I think on this subject, I think that maybe google can see this submission as a spam or a blast, even if it was sent manually. Since I read everywhere that its good to find niches related to make up great blog comments, a foreing web directory submission maybe can hurt my rank.
Sorry for my bad english.
-
Hi Daniel,
I agree with Emanuele, you can invest your time and resources in much more valuable, long-term link building strategies, that will be much more beneficial for your clients without risks that links from directories that are not necessarily that relevant or an authority towards your industry.
Instead of thinking where to create links with high PageRank you should instead identify along with your clients how you can create and promote valuable and attractive assets (from content, guides, tools, giveaways, contests, etc.) with them in order to not only improve their Website popularity (with natural links, shares, references, +1's, citations, etc.) but that are also aligned with their business goals and allow you to improve your branding, loyalty, conversions, etc.
If you have a bit of time you should watch the #RCS presentation of Wil Reynolds at Mozcon last year where he covered this topic.
You can see what I talk about and get inspired by taking a look at this summary with the slides of the latest LinkLove presentations.
By switching your focus on building links like this you can really create a competitive advantage over your local competitors that from what you shared might still be building links in a more "artificial" way.
I hope this helps!
-
Hey Daniel, I'm glad you're achieveing good results with your strategy. However since you can read and write in proper english I recommend you to try to tweak your site not only to what is working now but focusing on what will work tomorrow.
focus on long term strategy, try to not spam a good technique because it may return back to you as a negative impact. Try to dilute your links and build high quality ones, I'll really focus more on brazilian sites than building links in foreigners sites.
You still want to reach your audience and you're audience is not so much in english websites. Try to stay focused and build value where you need. PR is not the most important thing try to focus on themed sites, related to your business and with an high autorithy,(normally old and frequently updated sites)
Good luck!
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
-
Targeting/Optimising for US English in addition to British English (hreflang tags)
Hi, I wonder if anyone can help? We have an e-commerce website based in the UK. We sell to customers worldwide. After the UK, the US is our second biggest market. We are English language only (written in British English), we do not have any geo-targeted language versions of our website. However, we are successful in selling to customers around the world on a regular basis. We have developers working on a new site due to launch in Winter 2021. This will include a properly managed site migration from our .net to a .com domain and associated redirects etc. Management are keen to increase sales / conversions to the US before the new site launches. They have requested that we create a US optimised version of the site. Maintaining broadly the same content, but dynamically replacing keywords: Example (clothing is not really what we sell): Replacing references to “trainers” with “sneakers”
International SEO | | IronBeetle
Replacing references ‘jumpers with “sweaters”
Replacing UK phone number with a US phone number It seems the wrong time to implement a major overhaul of URL structure, considering the planned migration from .net to .com in the not too distant future. For example I’m not keen to move British English content on to https://www.example.com/en-gb Would this be a viable solution: 1. hreflang non-us visitors directed to the existing URL structure (including en-gb customers): https://www.example.com/
2. hreflang US Language version of the site: https://www.example.com/en-us/ As the UK is our biggest market It is really important that we don’t negatively affect sales. We have extremely good visibility in SERPS for a wide range of high value/well converting keywords. In terms of hreflang tags would something like this work? Do we need need to make reference to en-gb being on https://www.example.com/ ? This seems a bit of a ‘half-way-house’. I recognise that there are also issues around the URL structure, which is optimised for British English/international English keywords rather than US English e.g. https://www.example.com/clothing/trainers Vs. https://example.com/clothing/sneakers Any advice / insight / guidance would be welcome. Thanks.0 -
Redirect to 'default' or English (/en) version of site?
Hi Moz Community! I'm trying to work through a thorny internationalization issue with the 'default' and English versions of our site. We have an international set-up of: www.domain.com (in english) www.domain.com/en www.domain.com/en-gb www.domain.com/fr-fr www.domain.com/de-de and so on... All the canonicals and HREFLANGs are set up, except the English language version is giving me pause. If you visit www.domain.com, all of the internal links on that page (due to the current way our cms works) point to www.domain.com/en/ versions of the pages. Content is identical between the two versions. The canonical on, say, www.domain.com/en/products points to www.domain.com/products. Feels like we're pulling in two different directions with our internationalization signals. Links go one way, canonical goes another. Three options I can see: Remove the /en/ version of the site. 301 all the /en versions of pages to /. Update the hreflangs to point the EN language users to the / version. **Redirect the / version of the site to /en. **The reverse of the above. **Keep both the /en and the / versions, update the links on / version. **Make it so that visitors to the / version of the site follow links that don't take them to the /en site. It feels like the /en version of the site is redundant and potentially sending confusing signals to search engines (it's currently a bit of a toss-up as to which version of a page ranks). I'm leaning toward removing the /en version and redirecting to the / version. It would be a big step as currently - due to the internal linking - about 40% of our traffic goes through the /en path. Anything to be aware of? Any recommendations or advice would be much appreciated.
International SEO | | MaxSydenham0 -
High domain authority for shady link directories
Hi there, First of, I'm new to the moz community and I love it already! So much to learn and to do for getting better and better at SEO. Really helpful! Okay, my question. If I analyze (top 5) sites with the open site explorer some of them have a link profile consisting just of link directories. How come they rank so high with just link directories backing them up? The directories often are just ongoing lists of links without any form of content. But the authorities of the directories (page and domain) are often between 40-60 or even above! How come they get such high authority? And do I have to use them for my linking profile or will it hurt me? On moz I learned not to use those directories because it's quality > quantity these days. But it almost seems as if this is not true because only half of the top positions in my keyword-market actually make use of more then just link directories. I must say that I operate in the Dutch markets so maybe different rules apply in the Netherlands? Thanks in advance and kind regards, Luuk van Dongen
International SEO | | VanDongenOnline1 -
Mixed English and Arabic URLs
I'm currently working with a global brand who need localisation in each of their territories. They're operating on a single .com domain name, with different language versions in separate directories. Example:
International SEO | | Guyboz
domain.com/en/
domain.com/fr/
domain.com/ar/ We're using ahreflang tags to make sure Google shows the correct language version for each region. Now onto my question... As the domain is a .com with an English company name, when it comes to the Arabic version of the website, will having a completely mixed language URL like this be detrimental to the site's performance in searches from the middle east? Currently we're coming up with URLs like the following: domain.com/blog/عنوان بلوق عربية طويلة حقا على شيء مثير جدا للاهتمام Is this a bad thing?0 -
What are the best practices for translation of city/state names for international SEO? (ie. New York in English vs. Nueva York in Spanish)
I'm working on international SEO / translation of a global travel site. While we have a global keyword research and translation strategy in process for each market they serve, I've run into a unique question. Overall, we are translating (and localizing) content for each market but aren't sure what to do with location names. Each country/state has cities and locations that have their own dedicated pages. I see three options for these location names (when titling a page and writing content): keep them in English, translate the names in the market languages, or use a combination of the two. The challenge with altering the location names to the market languages is that they are truly not known by those names. Though there are some instances where it may make sense…for instance **New York **in Spanish would be "Nueva York" with **‘**Nueva' being the Spanish translation of ‘new’. There are other instances, where no translation exists. If you’ve had a similar experience I'd love to hear your approach/recommendation.
International SEO | | JonClark150 -
How well does Google's crawlers understand foreign websites?
I speak 5 languages and therefore have the opportunity to do on-page SEO and content writing for 5 different cultures. This question to me has much to do with the way Google translator works. It doesn't, trust me! Which then makes me wonder how the web crawlers, which are designed with English in mind, can fairly and equally attribute the same ranking points to a foreign website. Since Google seems to use sematic search technology I'm wondering if foreign sites have it easier or not. Any ideas?
International SEO | | MassivePrime0 -
One global blog or a blog for each country?
We have a blog on each of our country sites, but the content on the English speaking sites is shared i.e. locally produced in US is mixed up with stuff produced in UK and vice versa. I'm not concerned about duplicate content because we have taken the necessary measures to let the search engines know that we have a US site for the US and and UK site for the UK. My question to you is whether we should develop the blog independently in each country or develop one blog to satisfy our global sites. I believe a local blog for each country is better because the content would speak to the audience better and any reference points or product and price points would be 100% relevant to the audience.
International SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0 -
Do non-english(localized) URLs help Local SEO and user experience?
Hi Everyone, This question is about URL best practice for multilingual websites. We have www.example.com in English and we are building the exact replica of English site in German www.example.de. On the Geman site, we are considering to translate some portions of the URLs for example last folder and file name as seen below: example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html Is this a good idea? Will this help SEO and user experience both? or the mixed languagues in URL will confuse the users? Google guidelines say that this should be ok. Would love to get feedback from SEOMOZ community! Thanks, Supriya.
International SEO | | Amjath0