Canonical's, Social Signals and Multi-Regional website.
-
Hi all,
I have a website that is setup to target different countries by using subfolders. Example /aus/, /us/, /nz/. The homepage itself is just a landing page redirect to whichever country the user belongs to. Example somebody accesses https://domain/ and will be redirected to one of the country specific sub folders. The default subfolder is /us/, so all users will be redirected to it if their country has not been setup on the website. The content is mostly the same on each country site apart from localisation and in some case content specific to that country.
I have set up each country sub folder as a separate site in Search Console and targeted /aus/ to AU users and /nz/ to NZ users. I've also left the /us/ version un-targeted to any specific geographical region.
In addition to this I've also setup hreflang tags for each page on the site which links to the same content on the other country subfolder. I've target /aus/ and /nz/ to en-au and en-nz respectively and targeted /us/ to en-us and x-default as per various articles around the web.
We generally advertise our links without a country code prefix, and the system will automatically redirect the user to the correct country when they hit that url. Example, somebody accesses https://domain/blog/my-post/, a 302 will be issues for https://domain/aus/blog/my-post/ or https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ etc.. The country-less links are advertised on Facebook and in all our marketing campaigns
Overall, I feel our website is ranking quite poorly and I'm wondering if poor social signals are a part of it?
We have a decent social following on Facebook (65k) and post regular blog posts to our Facebook page that tend to peek quite a bit of interest. I would have expected that this would contribute to our ranking at least somewhat?
I am wondering whether the country-less link we advertise on Facebook would be causing Googlebot to ignore it as a social signal for the country specific pages on our website. Example Googlebot indexes https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ and looks for social signals for https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ specifically, however, it doesn't pick up anything because the campaign url we use is https://domain/blog/my-post/.
If that is the case, I am wondering how I would fix that, to receive the appropriate social signals /us/blog/my-post/, /aus/blog/my-post/ & /nz/blog/my-post/. I am wondering if changing the canonical url to the country-less url of each page would improve my social signals and performance in the search engines overall.
I would be interested to hear your feedback.
Thanks
-
Hi Jordan,
I've sent you a private message.
Thanks mate.
-
From my understanding and the research I have done 302's do not pass much if any link juice. Matt cutts has an article here explaining some of the differences and Moz does an excellent job as well explaining the benefits between the two. Since I do not have your url I can not dig into the issue too much. If you would like you can send me your businesses url and I can take a look for you. But I do not think the issue with the site is social signals it could be a technical issue.
-
Hi Jordan,
Thanks for the response. Good to know about social signals.
In terms of the 302, my original understanding (through online research) was that by using a 302, google would report the original URL in search results but grab the display content from the page that it was redirected to. This is due to the fact the the redirected URL is based on the geographical location of the user.
If 302's do not pass any link juice, does that mean that we wouldn't be gaining any benefit from all external websites linked to my root domain /, given that when they hit the root domain, it ends up with a 302 to their geographical region?
Thanks.
-
Generally social signals do not hold much sway in terms of ranking. John Mueller from Google stated that Google does not use social signals in its ranking algorithm. More than likely there is an underlying factor playing a role in why you may be ranking poorly. Go to opensite explorer and paste the url to your site and see if there are any technical errors that may be playing a role in you ranking poorly. I also recommend crawling your site with screaming frog or one of Moz's tools.
Also, you said your system automatically redirects users with a 302 redirect these pass little to no link juice I would try and see how many 302 redirects you have in place and consider changing them to a 301 redirect. Moz has a good page about redirects.
Hope this helps some!
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
-
How to get a large number of urls out of Google's Index when there are no pages to noindex tag?
Hi, I'm working with a site that has created a large group of urls (150,000) that have crept into Google's index. If these urls actually existed as pages, which they don't, I'd just noindex tag them and over time the number would drift down. The thing is, they created them through a complicated internal linking arrangement that adds affiliate code to the links and forwards them to the affiliate. GoogleBot would crawl a link that looks like it's to the client's same domain and wind up on Amazon or somewhere else with some affiiiate code. GoogleBot would then grab the original link on the clients domain and index it... even though the page served is on Amazon or somewhere else. Ergo, I don't have a page to noindex tag. I have to get this 150K block of cruft out of Google's index, but without actual pages to noindex tag, it's a bit of a puzzler. Any ideas? Thanks! Best... Michael P.S., All 150K urls seem to share the same url pattern... exmpledomain.com/item/... so /item/ is common to all of them, if that helps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
What's the best way to A/B test new version of your website having different URL structure?
Hi Mozzers, Hope you're doing good. Well, we have a website, up and running for a decent tenure with millions of pages indexed in search engines. We're planning to go live with a new version of it i.e a new experience for our users, some changes in site architecture which includes change in URL structure for existing URLs and introduction of some new URLs as well. Now, my question is, what's the best way to do a A/B test with the new version? We can't launch it for a part of users (say, we'll make it live for 50% of the users, an remaining 50% of the users will see old/existing site only) because the URL structure is changed now and bots will get confused if they start landing on different versions. Will this work if I reduce crawl rate to ZERO during this A/B tenure? How will this impact us from SEO perspective? How will those old to new 301 URL redirects will affect our users? Have you ever faced/handled this kind of scenario? If yes, please share how you handled this along with the impact. If this is something new to you, would love to know your recommendations before taking the final call on this. Note: We're taking care of all existing URLs, properly 301 redirecting them to their newer versions but there are some new URLs which are supported only on newer version (architectural changes I mentioned above), and these URLs aren't backward compatible, can't redirect them to a valid URL on old version.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
What's the best possible URL structure for a local search engine?
Hi Mozzers, I'm working at AskMe.com which is a local search engine in India i.e if you're standing somewhere & looking for the pizza joints nearby, we pick your current location and share the list of pizza outlets nearby along with ratings, reviews etc. about these outlets. Right now, our URL structure looks like www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets for the city specific category pages (here, "Delhi" is the city name and "Pizza Outlets" is the category) and www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets/in/saket for a category page in a particular area (here "Saket") in a city. The URL looks a little different if you're searching for something which is not a category (or not mapped to a category, in which case we 301 redirect you to the category page), it looks like www.askme.com/delhi/search/pizza-huts/in/saket if you're searching for pizza huts in Saket, Delhi as "pizza huts" is neither a category nor its mapped to any category. We're also dealing in ads & deals along with our very own e-commerce brand AskMeBazaar.com to make the better user experience and one stop shop for our customers. Now, we're working on URL restructure project and my question to you all SEO rockstars is, what can be the best possible URL structure we can have? Assume, we have kick-ass developers who can manage any given URL structure at backend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
My blog's categories are winning over my landing pages, what to do?
Hi My blogs categories for the ecommerce site are by subject and are similar to the product landing pages. Example Domain.com/laptops that sells laptops Domain.com/blog/laptops that shows news and articles on laptops Within the blog posts the links of anchor laptop are to the store. What to do? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1 -
Google's serp
Hello Guys ! I will appreciate if you will share your thoughts re the situation i have. The homepage for one of my sites is one last page of google's serp, although internal pages are displayed in the top 10. 1. Why ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
2. What should I do to correct the situation with the homepage ? regards0 -
If other websites implement our RSS feed sidewide on there website, can that hurt our own website?
Think about the switching anchors from the backlinks and the 100s of sidewide inlinks... I gues Google will understand that it's just a RSS feed right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
What would your Seo tactic's be for this
Hiya guys... Just a quicken, So my forum, talknightlife.co.uk is currently 10th on google for "nightlife forum" I have about 15 back links, 26 page autority. Now what i'm trying to do, which everyone else is doing, is trying to move it up a couple of spots maybe to 5th or something. What would your tactics be, I'm disregarding all the crap I read in the forums etc, you guys on here tend to have the best explanation. Let it rip 🙂 Cheers guys Luke.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lukescotty0 -
To subnav or NOT to subnav... that's my question.... :)
We are working on a new website that is golf related and wondering about whether or not we should set up a subnavigation dropdown menu from the main menu. For example: GOLF PACKAGES
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO
>> 2 Round Packages
>> 3 Round Packages
>> 4 Round Packages
>> 5 Round Packages GOLF COURSES
>> North End Courses
>> Central Courses
>> South End Courses This would actually be very beneficial to our users from a usability standpoint, BUT what about from an SEO standpoint? Is diverting all the link juice to these inner pages from the main site navigation harmful? Should we just create a page for GOLF PACKAGES and break it down on that page?0