International SEO errors
-
Hello,
In a muddle here. A website has a .co.uk and a .com version. They want to target the UK market and the USA market respectively. The content for the UK version has been localised for the UK audience (e.g. spellings etc) but the content is the same in both sites.
There are errors in .co.uk version in webmaster tools :
International Targeting | Language > 'en' - no return tags__URLs for your site and alternate URLs in 'en' that do not have return tags.**Q 1) What does this mean?**I can see that both the .com and .co.uk version has only this in place:**2) Should they actually have respectively?**3) Do they also need rel=canonical from the .co.uk to the .comAny help would be appreciated.
-
I have had similar issues with a client. Take a look at all the information on this thread https://moz.com/community/q/hreflang-for-multple-countries-but-single-language It might help you to start untangling your particular issue.
-
You can use the country and language in your language preferences. ie. en-gb for the UK version and en-us for the US version.
I always add the code for our german and english version of our blog
Also check out his page on Moz for some additional help
https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag and you can help generate your tags at http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/ (cited in moz article)
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
-
Multilingual webshop SEO
Hi, I have a question concerning multilingual SEO for webshops. This is the case: the root domain is example.be, which has several subdomains. One of these subdomains is shop.example.be which is used for two webshops (Dutch and French), being shop.example.be/nl and shop.example.be/fr .
International SEO | | Mat_C
The other root domain is example.lu (for Luxemburg) which is only used for the subdomain for the Luxemburg webshop in French, being shop.example.lu/fr.
The content on the .lu/fr webshop is a small part of the content on the .be/fr webshop, and the product descriptions are the same and are both of course in French. The webshops will be redesigned and restructured, and the question is what to do with the .lu/fr webshop. There are two possibilities: Integrate this webshop for Luxemburg in the existing .be webshop, since most of the products are the same and the .lu webshop doesn't get a lot of visitors because of Luxemburg being a small country. The only thing to do then would be setting up a 301 from the .lu webshop to the .be/fr version to transfer link value.
People in Luxemburg already sometimes get pages from the .be/fr webshop in the SERP anyway because these already have a bigger authority than the .lu/fr pages. Keep the .lu/fr webshop and use hreflang tags so the correct pages with similar content are shown in the correct country. I know that when using different TLD's this normally isn't an issue anyway, so implementing hreflang tags even isn't really necessary. Please feel free to share your thoughts about what would be the best approach. Thanks!1 -
Country specific SEO
Hi I have a question regarding country specific SEO and what would the best approach be? I have website A which is currently ranking well in Google country A, I would now like to introduce a new website B which is only specific to users in Google country B. The only difference between the 2 websites is that website B will have different prices and products for the users in Google country B. From a development point of view we would like to only have one instance of the website which can be served to users in country A and B all that we would do is change some of the content and prices based on the user IP which means that users in country A see a different version of the website to users in country B. Is this approach fine from and organic point of view? Or would we need to have 2 separate websites and make use of Href Lang?
International SEO | | Iannaude0 -
What strategy is better for a multilingual site for the SEO point of view?
Hi everyone, in a case for a site with two languages like spanish and english, how would do you deal with it? I can see 4 cases, which is better?? 1. With differents domains: mydomain.es (for spanish version) and mydomain.com (for english version). 2. With subfolder mydomain.com/es/ and mydomain.com/en/ 3. With Subdomain: es.mydomain.com and en.mydomain.com 4 With URL translation (any url is translated in ther languages but not use of subdomain or subfolder): mydominain.com/hola and mydomiain.com/hello Thanks very much for your answers (i love this forum). 🙂
International SEO | | webtematica0 -
Different urls for the homepage on an international website
Hi! I was wondering what would be the best strategy to solve duplicated content generated by the homepage and its differents URLS This is an international website. Now it only has one language working: Spanish, but the url structure is already ready to work with the language approach So we have now www.brand.com -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es)
International SEO | | teconsite
www.brand.com/es -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es)
www.brand.com/index.php -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es) I would like to know if this is the correct approach of if we should add 301 redirects instead of canonical. Let's image that they want to active the /en language, so they will have www.brand.com
www.brand.com/index.php
www.brand.com/es
www.brand.com/en now what? I image they have to use hreflang, but I am a little lost with how this should work. 301? canonical? hreflang? Could you help me? Thank you! Victoria0 -
B2B International Subdirectory - How Unique is Unique?
With the power to upload unique xml sitemaps for a subdirectory targeting the UK, geo-target the UK in WebmasterTools, and the ability to adjust content to adhere to en-gb standards, would it still be essential for a site to re-write all of it's content if it wanted to rank well or could we just use the same content as our en-us pages with the dialect changes and other tools mentioned above? Not interested in unique TLDs or subdomains.
International SEO | | SEOPPCDP0 -
SEO and Cloud Hosting
Hello, Cant find any clear answers on my issue and hope someone can help. Rather than being worried about losing local rankings with a move to the cloud, we have the opposite issue. The site is a large, international reference site with millions of visits a month. We have the site on servers hosting in UK, Europe and US. If we move the site to Amazon cloud hosting (obvious benefits aside), is there a danger of losing rankings internationally (depending on where the cloud datacentre is located)? Are their any other possible pitfalls and counters? Would be grateful for some advice on this. Thanks
International SEO | | LoweProfero-AU0 -
International SEO with .com & ccTLD in the same language
I've watched http://www.seomoz.org/blog/intern... and read some other posts here. Most seem to focus on whether to use ccTLD, subdomains or subfolders. I'm already committed to expanding my US-based ecommerce to Canada with a .ca ccTLD. My question is around duplicate content as I take my .com USA ecommerce business to canada with a second site on a .ca URL. With the .com site's preference set to USA, and the .ca site's geo preference (automatically) set to Canada, is it a concern at all? About 80% of the content would be the same. FYI, .com ranks OK in Canada now and I want .ca to outrank it in Canada. I know 'localizing' content within the same language is important (independent of duplicate content), but this might not be viable in the short run given CMS limitations. Any direct experience to help quantify the impact here between US and Canadian ecommerce? Adding: I'm not totally confident here. From this google webmaster central post it seems that canonical tags aren't needed. I tend to think nothing is truly neutral and want to be confident regarding whether to use canonicals or not. Is it helpful, harmful or harmless? My site already has internal canonical tags and having internal and external would be a pain I think. @Eugene Byun used it successfully, but would the results have been the same without? Thanks!
International SEO | | gravityseo0 -
International (greek) characters in the URL
For one of our sites we are considering restructuring the urls. This is about a Greek site and we are toying between the following options: a) English URLS e.g. www.domain.com/cars b) Greek URLs e.g. www.domain.com/αυτοκίνητα c) "Greeklish" URLs (Greek words spelled with latin characters) www.domain.com/aftokinita Normally we would imagine option b is the best since it would reinforce the main and most relevant keyword that is already present within the page content. We see many people search in google using greeklish (e.g. they are lazy to switch the keyboard locale all the time). Since we would also like to capture this part of the SE traffic but cannot obviously write in "greeklish" within our main page content maybe option c is a good compromise?
International SEO | | achatzakis0