Ranking problems with international website

[Online-Marketing-Guy]

Hey there,

we have some ranking issues with our international website. It would be great if any of you could share their thoughts on that. The website uses subfolders for country and language (i.e. .com/uk/en) for the website of the UK branch in English. As the company has branches all over the world and also offers their content in many languages the url structure is quite complex.

A recent problem we have seen is that in certain markets the website is not ranking with the correct country. Especially in the UK and the US, Google prefers the country subfolder for Ghana (.com/gh/en) over the .com/us/en and .com/uk/en versions. We have hreflang setup and should also have some local backlinks pointing to the correct subfolders as we switched from many ccTLDs to one gTLD.

What confuses me is that when I check for incoming links (Links to your site) with GWT, the subfolder (.com/gh/en) is listed quite high in the column (Your most linked content). However the listed linking domains are not linking at all to this folder as far as I am aware. If I check them with a redirect checker they all link to different subfolders. So I have now idea why Google gives such high authority to this subfolder over the specific country subfolders. The content is pretty much identical at this stage.

Has any of you experienced similar behaviour and could point me in a promising direction?

Thanks a lot.

Regards,

Jochen

[katemorris]

Jochen, I can't say I've seen this particular issue, but you are right that it is odd. It sounds like you have everything set up technically correct, but Google WMT is crossing some wires.

I wish I could provide you with more, but I wouldn't know any potential issues without being able to look at your whole setup in GoogleWMT. I recommend having a consultant take a look. Typically, I hate recommending that (because I'm a consultant and that looks shady), but there really is no other way to know if everything is set up right and Google is just on crack, but I think that's it.

[Online-Marketing-Guy]

Thanks Patrick. I do use geo-targeting follow the best practices to the best of my knowledge. I am just very confused by those backlinks that show up in GWT for the wrong subfolder.

Thanks Patrick. I do use geo-targeting follow the best practices to the best of my knowledge. I am just very confused by those backlinks that show up in GWT for the wrong subfolder.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Have you looked into setting up Webmaster Tools accounts for these specific directories and country targeting them?

I would ask look into these two resources from Moz:
International SEO
The International SEO Checklist

Seer Interactive always has some great tips here.

Also, Bing follows language meta tags, not hreflang, so you need to consider that as well.

Lastly, I would just make sure that you have country/location specific information on your site:

• Titles / meta descriptions
• Navigational elements (if different services/products for location)
• Headings
• Main body information
• Reviews
• Contact information

Just a few things to consider. Hope this all helps! Good luck!