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
-
Ensuring that Google Display my Meta Descriptions
Hello, I have a few pages that appear in SERPs with the page copy as opposed to the meta descriptions I wrote, is there any way to try & force the meta descriptions to be displayed? Its a WordPress site using Yoast
On-Page Optimization | | jasongmcmahon0 -
Does using Yoast variables for meta content overwrite any pages that already have custom meta content?
The question is about the Yoast plugin for WP sites. Let's say I have a site with 200 pages and custom meta descriptions / title tags already in place for the top 30 pages. If I use the Yoast variable tool to complete meta content for the remaining pages (and make my Moz issue tracker look happier), will that only affect the pages without custom meta descriptions or will it overwrite even the pages with the custom meta content that I want? In this situation, I do want to keep the meta content that is already in place on select pages. Thanks! Zack
On-Page Optimization | | rootandbranch0 -
Translated the site but traffic is not coming
Hi, We've build a lawyer directory website (www.iranianlawyers.com) which already has good Google rankings for related terms (Ex. Iranian lawyers, Iranian lawyers california, etc). About 1.5 months ago we translated the site to Farsi and published it online: www.iranianlawyers.com/farsi However we have yet to see any new traffic generated from those pages. The website has a decent back-link profile and there are no almost no competitors in our space with translated pages. Would someone please take a look at our translated pages and let me know if there are any major on-site issues that you see that we need to address? I've checked for noindex or nofollow tags but they dont seem to be an issue. Not sure if I'm missing something here. Thank you very much
On-Page Optimization | | Heydarian0 -
Structured Data
On our panel for Google webmaster tools we had a problem where there was an error when we did some testing of our products. Missing prices seemed to be the problem. This has now been fixed but on checking when testing it returns the prices in US Dollars. We are a UK company with a number of currency options. Should we be worried about this or should the system return the prices in UK Pounds as this is our main currency? Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
Acquired Old, Bad Content Site That Ranks Great. Redirect to Content on My Site?
Hello. my company acquired another website. This website is very old, the content within is decent at best, but still manages to rank very well for valuable phrases. Currently, we're leaving the entire site active on its own for its brand, but i'd like to at least redirect some of the content back to our main website. I can't justify spending the time to create improved content on that site and not our main site though. What would be the best practice here? 1. Cross-domain canonical - and build the new content on our main website? 2. 301 Redirect Old Article to New Location containing better article 3. Leave the content where it is - you won't be able to transfer the ranking across domain. Thanks for your input.
On-Page Optimization | | Blenny0 -
Overlength Meta description
Hi, Has anyone got an answer to why a meta description would be showing characters well above 160. The current Meta description is only 10 characters in length but I wanted to know why Google would display so many characters. Cheers Phil
On-Page Optimization | | JamesDixon700 -
Meta name and other data on home page
I am in the process of building a new website with wordpress to replace my static HTML site but cannot find out where to place my meta data such as meta name (google verification etc) on the home page. Using Yoast SEO plugin and all I can find is place for title and meta description. Anyone have any experience with this SEO problem? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | casper4340 -
Checking for content duplication against content on your own site.
We are currently trying to rewrite our product descriptions and I'm afraid some of the salespeople that are writing the descriptions are plagiarizing one-another's writing. Is there a content duplication checker that will allow you to check a piece of writing against a specific site rather than all of the web?
On-Page Optimization | | MichealGooden0