Is it necessary to implement hreflang for translated content on different ccTLDs?
-
Hello there, new MOZ here. I hope someone of the international SEO MOZs can share their opinion on a doubt I have.
I've been reading a lot about hreflang and I understand the importance for subdomains and subfolders not only for targeting the same language in different countries (.com, .co.uk, .ca, etc) but also for websites partially or fully translated in other languages. However for these I've always seen examples where you want to have hreflang with subdomains or folders e.g. ru.example.com ; example.com/ru
What if I have my translated websites on different ccTLDs - i.e. example.com example.ru. example.br example .fr
Do I still need to implement hreflang or in this case is not necessary?
-
Kristina,
Thank you! We ended up implementing trough header. Hopefully we have done it right.
Very interesting material by Kate. But I have to admit that her tool made me wonder if we really need the hreflang. I asked her directly in one of her blogs.Best,
Andrea -
The key here is that you should use hreflang when you have two pages with exactly the same content, but in 2 different languages. If those different languages are on different subdomains or ccTLDs, the rule still stands.
But, if you have different content for different countries, just use the ccTLDs without hreflang.
For future reference, whenever I have questions about international SEO, I turn to Kate Morris, who wrote this helpful post: https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/choose-your-international-strategy-tool/
Thanks for reaching out to our community: it's always great having new Mozzers! Let me know if you have follow up questions.
Best,
Kristina
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
-
Should you set an hreflang if the website is only in one language
We have a website, which is written in British English. There are no other versions of the site in different languages and the website only serves a UK audience. We have not set an hreflang tag up. Is this something we would still need to do and what would the benefits (if any) be?
Local SEO | | HubMDP0 -
Is dynamic keyword insertion a viable local SEO tactic/strategy for your content?
Hi mozzers, I have a meeting tomorrow with the dev team to discuss about dynamic keyword insertion implementation on a new site. This site currently holds 40 geo specific microsites with several service pages each carrying unique content. These pages(about 400 pages) are seen by VP of marketing as hard to maintain and inconvenient when wanting to change content across these pages. The VP is looking to automate content as much as possible without hurting our local SEO efforts. The dev team will be asking me if dynamic keyword insertion could a viable strategy for these 40 locations without harming local SEO. Currently we have a robust local SEO strategy in place and wouldn't want to change it unless dynamic keyword insertion is a viable option and won't hurt all the seo efforts that are in place? If this is not a viable solution, any recommendations on any other solutions we could use to satisfy the VP? If you have used DKI for your local SEO efforts, please share your thoughts and results that you have seen. Any real case scenario data/knowledge would be really helpful. Thank you!
Local SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Best Practice For Multisite Targeting Different States With Same Content
I am auditing a Joomla website that uses the MightySites component to create multiple versions of the same site for different state/province areas. For example, the site structure looks something like: example.com/fl/
Local SEO | | MatShepSEO
example.com/mn/
example.com/ny/
example.com/wa/ etc. Each of the state home pages are largely identical and much of the content within each state sub-folder is a copy of the original content on the main example.com site, with minor changes here and there. The client is a national organization and needs to keep this structure to allow each state to be able to edit and change their own content, though as far as I can see content doesn't actually vary much. What's best practice here in reducing duplicate content issues? We can't use hreflang as it is all within one country (although it does also provide two different language versions of content, for which I will use hreflang.) Should we just canonical everything back to the corresponding pages on the example.com site? Any thoughts or recommendations much appreciated.0 -
How can I personalize content based on a state/region? Is it possible?
I'm getting a lot of traffic from different regions throughout the US. I need to personalize the content in my website or on a certain landing page based on the users state/region. Is it possible? For example, forwarding a user that lands on page "x" to page "y" if he's from California and to page "z" if he's from South Carolina. And of course, can this somehow affect my rankings in Google? Thanks!!
Local SEO | | OrendaLtd0 -
What can I do to rank higher than low-quality low-content sites?
We lost our site in an actual meltdown at our hosting provider in January, and decided to do a new site instead of bring back a dated backup. So we've only been "active" at our URL since about May. That said, I have not seen any irregular or unexpected penalties. Not showing up is natural if you have literally nothing to show. We have had a site since then, though, and while it isn't going to win any award, we've built it with best practices using sites like this, trying to use natural, helpful, actual language to convey what we do and why we do it (we're web developers for small business making WordPress sites). Paying attention to titles, keyword frequency and variability, alt tags, etc. Always erring on the conservative side. While we build sites for people across the country (and a few in places like the UK), we just moved into an actual office space in our hometown so it's never been more important to push our visibility locally. We've just come back on the scene, in relative terms, so there's no expectation we'll crack the top five or ten; they all have teams of people and bags of capital and have been around many, many years, plus they link to the dozens upon dozens of sites they have done and promote their appearances in press releases and such. Their content is not bad, and most of it is good and not spammy. They are being genuine. That said, we're in the late 40s to late 50s right now. Happy to show up at all, but after that first group of legitimate sites, there are automatically generated webpages (which I thought couldn't even be listed...one is an MP3 download site that mentions one of the top companies in the page title, and just has a random video on the page) local companies touting themselves as SEO "experts" that say things like "Here at Company X, we work hard to bring you the best Rochester, NY web design in the hopes that when you make your Rochester, NY web design decisions, you'll think of us first Rochester, NY web design." I changed the company name and the location, but that's an actual line from their site job listings from places like Craigslist and Indeed hair stylists dentists (?!) Our code validates, we've incorporated Schema for our addresses, our site is usually fast (650ms to 1.3s in Pingdom from Dallas). We don't do any redirecting, our metas likes everyone else's don't count for ranking but are thoughtfully produced, we pay attention to using concise and accurate URLs without stop words, etc. There are also very very few resources loaded on a given page. That said, there's not a lot on the blog that's new and all told we have I think 13 total pages including a few posts. Is it even possible to get close to the actual pack if we, for example, posted more regularly? I was just reading here about how we shouldn't put our links in the site footers of our clients (which we don't always anyway), so I have them only as branded links, only on the homepages, and only on sites that, when crawled, didn't have nonzero spam scores (everyone else has a nofollow link in our portfolio). I realize this is a super generic question but I wasn't quite sure how to search out this particular use case given that our aspirations are so basic...just trying to figure out if there's something obvious we're missing and shooting ourselves in the foot over. A thousand pledges of gratitude! (if this is too common and I just didn't see a duplicate, let me know and I will delete it or ask for it to be deleted....also, I don't want to appear spammy so I am not linking to my site unless it's absolutely necessary...not sure what protocol is...I'm pretty self-aware so I do believe everything I've said above is true).
Local SEO | | eaglenestmedia1 -
Home page with no content
Hi, I just want to know if there are any impact on seo ranking if my home page has no or less content, for example I only have a slider with my logo, slogan, navigation and my company info schema? Advance thanks for the help!
Local SEO | | bchilders220 -
Francise Space: How to handle Duplicate Content?
We have a client - http://www.certapro.com/ with 330+ individual franchises. The individual franchisees all share the same content. If you perform a series of search by zipcode, you'll see the different regions all share the same copy blocks. How would you handle this situation? New content for all 330+? Canonicalize them to a single source? Keep in mind we need to scale and would have to work with the local partners who may not be web savvy. Also thinking about iframing the same content as an alternative.
Local SEO | | Aviatech0 -
Duplicate site content and setting up country specific domains
We look after a website which was originally just hosted on mysite.co.uk. We expanded to the European markets creating mysite.de and mysite.fr getting each product and page translated properly into German and French respectively. We have really good success on google.de and google.fr for these sites. We want to do the same with google.ie and create mysite.ie for the Irish market but as they speak English there will be no translation required. The only thing we will change is the base currency from GBP to EUR. From a duplication point of view will this be bad for both businesses mysite.co.uk and mysite.ie or will the .ie site be seen as the 'copier' and the .co.uk as the authority? Has anyone got any advice over best practice here and what would be the best thing for us to consider? We absolutely cannot risk the .co.uk site ranking wise. It's unrealistic for us to rewrite each product description and page so it means the same thing but is worded differently to avoid the duplication issue.
Local SEO | | gavinhoman0