Will German meta data help an English USA-based site get found in Germany?
-
I think I already know the answer to this, but I'd love a second opinion.
If you add German meta data to some web pages will it help those pages turn up in search results in Germany?I'm assuming not. It's an English, USA based site, doing well here for English searches - and I don't want to mess that up.
A German site is being planned, but this client is hoping the English site could be found in the meantime.
~Caro
-
Thank you Erica, that confirms my suspicions.
-
You'll likely end up confusing Google about which country it should rank the site in, and it could negatively affect your US rankings and still get you no traction in Germany. You really need to build a German site.
-
Thank You Gyorgy,
Our long term plan is to have a complete German Website optimized for german and on a german domain. But my client was hoping that, in the meantime, we could get our english pages found in Germany, and without risking our USA SEO achievements.
-
I assume the US site has a target country specified in its Google Search Console. The answer depends on the competition and the SEO budget, but I suspect that you'd have a hard time making those German language pages ranking in google.de.
If you have an international SEO strategy to use one domain for every country (e.g. /us/ and /de/ folders) then it's a different story.
If you'd have only a few German pages on the US website, then don't bother. Launch the German website on a German domain and start a separate SEO campaign for the German market.
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
-
Does CloudFlare Benefit my site?
I am using the $20 / month CloudFlare service. My site is not running faster, so my question is: is this service adding real value? I do not have a lot of highly sensitive customer data (some email addresses and customer names and nothing more - no credit cards). I am already using Amazon Cloud Server and it appears to work fine. Any thoughts appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | khi50 -
URL Domain Used in Meta Description
Today I was asked if using a domain url in your meta description can have a negative impact on your website. This description includes a list of the homepage url, but directs visitors to a different internal page of the website. My concern fell with directing visitors to a different page of the site, but promoting the homepage in the description/snippet. With Penguin 2.1 release on the 4th, I'm very cautious of my links/urls. What are your thoughts behind this? What are the possible, if any negative impacts this could have on a site? This URL does have a brand name as so the Title.
On-Page Optimization | | flcity150 -
"Turning off" content to a site
One site I manage has a lot of low quality content. We are in the process of improving the overall site content but we have "turned off" a large portion of our content by setting 2/3 of the posts to draft. Has anyone done this before or had experience with doing something similar? This quote from Bruce Clay comes to mind: “Where a lot of people don’t understand content factoring to this is having 100 great pages and 100 terrible pages—they average, when the quality being viewed is your website,” he explained. “So, it isn’t enough to have 100 great pages if you still have 100 terrible ones, and if you add another 100 great pages, you still have the 100 terrible ones dragging down your average. In some cases we have found that it’s much better, to improve your ranking, to actually remove or rewrite the terrible ones than add more good ones.” What are your thoughts? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ThridHour0 -
Meta separators
I've been told that pipes are the best separators for title tags. Can anyone tell me the best ones for H1 and H2 tags? Do I go with pipes, commas, hyphens, underscores...?
On-Page Optimization | | Greatmats0 -
How can I find out which filter my site has fallen under?
How can I find out which filter my site has fallen under? there only 22 pages (out of 380) that are not under Google filters Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | andreysmiling19870 -
Site Cleanup Operation
Hi, I hope you can help, I have been asked to look at a friends site that is simply shocking, but somehow ranks for its main target keywords, mainly because they are easy. But going through the site he has like 350 links on his menus that are all follow so I need to change them to nofollow, but should anything else normally be marked such as no index etc on a menu link. Also upon doing a Moz scan there are something like 250 missing meta descriptions from old blog posts. When I looked closer they had been using the blog section for posting relevant news headlines, but thats it, So he has 250 useless, low quality blog posts. My question is, what should I really do with them, ie delete, redirect, canonical etc. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks Paul
On-Page Optimization | | propertyhunter0 -
URL 404 errors after crawl? HELP!
I am getting Crawl errors. It shows multiple pages as. I know this is more of a technical question however, I cannot find the answer anywhere. I'm using wordpress www.mydomain.com/title-of-page/mydomain.com/contact WHAT IS THIS?!
On-Page Optimization | | ChristineWeinbrecht0 -
Good Internal Site Structure Idea?
Hello SEOMoz, After reading a bunch of your Site Structure articles, I've decided to make ours more flat. There are numerous pages on our site which are linked to directly from our homepage, wasting mysterious amounts of Link Juice every day. I want to remove most of these links so that the Fewer, and now more heavily weighted, Homepage Links will be more powerful... but I am worried that the pages which I am knocking down to the 3rd tier level already have high rank and are distributing this Juice to other pages. The problem is that 3 of these 9 pages are great for assisting our sales team, so I cannot take those 2 links off of the homepage...so I will be forced to Nofollow them instead. I am worried this is cutting down the number of pages on the site, also cutting out content which was previously indexed. Is this whole thing a good idea at all? And should I just leave those 2 pages alone because I can't remove the link? I'm thinking maybe I should rel=canonical it back to the homepage? I am ultimately trying to rank the homepage for the keyword "POS Software" and this is my on-site strategy for it. Maybe adding a link from those 2 pages that say "POS Software" back to the homepage is the best bet in this scenario? I am trying to learn the absolute best thing to do instead of guessing. Thanks! Derek
On-Page Optimization | | DerekM880