An International SEO Conundrum
-
Hello all,
I'm looking for opinions on this.
Imagine there is a website example.com in English and the company 'Example' wanted to translate some of the pages (not not all) in to Russian.
So they set up example.com/ru and translate the key pages into Russian. But half of the pages on.com/ru are left in English and there are no plans to translate them.
How would you handle the pages in Engish on .com/ru?
My thoughts are that they should:
- Canonicalise to the same versions on .com, and...
- Remove RU hreflang tags from the pages on .com/ru which are in English
Otherwise, users searching in English with Russian browser settings could land on a page in English but then navigate to a translated page in Russian (+the menu navigation items will be in Russian) = bad UX. Not to mention they would be telling Google a page is in Russain but Google would be crawling English.
So IMO, the best option is to use canonicals for this so that the .com version of the page is indexed. Then when a user lands after searching in English they will always be served English pages within that session.
If English speakers/searchers land on the .com/ru page that would lead to a website half in one lang and half in another.
I'm aware that Google recommends not using rel="canonical" across country or language versions of your site, but I believe they are making that recommendation based on an assumption that all pages are going to be translated to another language.
In this case, there is no intention to do that, ever.
Thanks for your thoughts and opinions.
Cheers, Gill.
-
Thanks for the advice Gianluca!
That would be ideal (not even create a clone). The problem with that approach is that the UX would break if a user lands on the Russian versions and then tried to navigate to a page which doesn't exist (like a none translated page in the top nav). How would you handle that?
Not too worried about crawl budget as it's a very small site. Would you agree there is no cause for concern for a site which only has around 120 pages?
Good idea re "implementing the hreflang and setting it up to "en-ru" for the English pages targeting Russia and simply "en" in the ones targeting the English speaking users in the rest of the world."
-
I would do exactly the same... but I would do more: if a page in the /ru/ subfolder is not translated to Russian, then I would see if it's possible to not even create a clone that I must, then, canonicalize.
I see "I would see" because I don't the website, hence I don't know if there's a business reason behind this useless duplication.
Said that, my suggestion is the best one, sincerely, also for avoiding crawl budget waste (rel="canonical" doesn't prevent a page from being crawled).
Regarding you worry, you should not worry about it because this is a plausible case for using the rel="canonical".
However, if you're fearing it, you have also this option: implementing the hreflang and setting it up to "en-ru" for the English pages targeting Russia and simply "en" in the ones targeting the English speaking users in the rest of the world.
In that case, you should avoid the cross geo-targeted pages canonical, and implement the rel="canonical" as if you were working on two separate websites.
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
-
International SEO - UK & US
Hi! I'm currently working with a brand that is well established in the UK and is looking to expand it's reach in US. The UK site has a solid link profile and I think that creating a sub-folder for the US site is by far the best solution. My only concern is that the UK site uses a .co.uk domain. Would it therefore be counter-productive to use a subfolder that looks like this: www.example.co.uk/us In an ideal world I would advise the brand to acquire a location neutral domain (e.g. www.example.com) however the [brandname].com isn't available and options are otherwise very limited! Steps would be taken to ensure all other technical bases are covered (hreflang tags etc) but I'm struggling to find any further insight on this issue. Any feedback from the community would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks, Harrison
International SEO | | harrycox0 -
International Sites and Duplicate Content
Hello, I am working on a project where have some doubts regarding the structure of international sites and multi languages.Website is in the fashion industry. I think is a common problem for this industry. Website is translated in 5 languages and sell in 21 countries. As you can imagine this create a huge number of urls, so much that with ScreamingFrog I cant even complete the crawling. Perhaps the UK site is visible in all those versions http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/GB/ Obviously for SEO only the first version is important One other example, the French site is available in 5 languages and again... http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/en/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/FR/ And so on...this is creating 3 issues mainly: Endless crawling - with crawlers not focusing on most important pages Duplication of content Wrong GEO urls ranking in Google I have already implemented href lang but didn't noticed any improvements. Therefore my question is Should I exclude with "robots.txt" and "no index" the non appropriate targeting? Perhaps for UK leave crawable just English version i.e. http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/, for France just the French version http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ and so on What I would like to get doing this is to have the crawlers more focused on the important SEO pages, avoid content duplication and wrong urls rankings on local Google Please comment
International SEO | | guidoampollini0 -
Language Usage for SEO in Hong Kong
Hi guys, I was wondering if you could help me with an SEO query for language usage in Hong Kong? Specifically, I'm aware that in mainland China it's preferred to use simplified Chinese. However, in Hong Kong, if you want to rank well in Google and Yahoo! HK, should you be use traditional or simplified Chinese in your web content? Any guidance would be much appreciated.
International SEO | | ecommercebc0 -
Duplicate Content - International Sites - AirBNB
Good morning Just a quick question. Why does AirBNB not get penalised for duplicate content on its sites. For example, the following two urls (and probably more for other countries), both rank appropriately in the google (UK and COM), https://www.airbnb.co.uk/help/getting-started/how-to-travel
International SEO | | joogla
https://www.airbnb.com/help/getting-started/how-to-travel Their are no canonical tags, no Alternative etc If I look at the following https://www.airbnb.co.uk/s/London--United-Kingdom
https://www.airbnb.com/s/London--United-Kingdom They both have alternative to point to the other language versions which I would expect. However they also both point to them selves as canonical. Would this not be duplicate content ? Thanks for your insights Shane0 -
Queston about subdomains for SEO Gurus
What is the best way to deal with a blog acting as subdomain (blog.domain.com) when you have 3 regional website versions (uk.domain.com, us.domain.com, and fr.domain.com)? I am facing a big problem for proper distribution of link juice to the three main websites. The point is that I have one blog, in which I have general content not targeting any specific market, but the link juice cannot be distributed properly across three websites, because I have a script to determine visitor’s region and serve him the right regional website. It uses a geoip script for Apache to redirect a visitor to their proper subdomain by determining which continent they are connecting from based off their IP address. Apache can use any type of redirect for this purpose, but we're using 302 to maintain user experience without using a 301 which might permanently redirect a crawler to only one version of the website. That cannot be done without 302 redirect, which means sending no link juice from the blog subdomain to the main websites. So, when you click on the logo from blog.domian.com, the script determines visitor region, and then 302 to the proper website. I don’t have main domain like www.domain.com. Instead the script is acting on this domain so that it 302 redirects to regional website according user location. The situation is complicated because you can’t send equal link juice to 3 regional website, having only one general blog. Even worse, none of the regional websites receives link juice from neither individual posts, nor blog.domain.com because of the 302 redirect. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
International SEO | | darmar0 -
The best SEO practice for a .hk domain
We are currently working on a project which involves 3 separate .com domains in relation to a UK company selling/renting residential, commercial and investment properties within the UK. We are now working on producing a .hk site for the overseas customers. Can anyone advise what the best practice is for a .hk domain and where best to start? Should the domain be hosted in that geographical location for example? We are relatively new to this so any advise would be greatly appreciated.
International SEO | | SoundinTheory0 -
Internationally targetted subdomains and Duplicate content
A client has a site they'd like to translated into French, not for the french market but for french speaking countries. My research tells me the best way to implement this for this particular client is to create subfolders for each country. For ease of implementation I’ve decided against ccTLD’s and Sub Domains. So for example… I'll create www.website.com/mr/ for Mauritania and in GWT set this to target Mauritania. Excellent so far. But then I need to build another sub folder for Morocco. I'll then create www.website.com/ma/ for Morocco and in GWT set this to target Morocco. Now the content on these two sub folders will be exactly the same and I’m thinking about doing this for all French speaking African countries. It would be nice to use www.website.com/fr/ but in GWT you can only set one Target country. Duplicate content issues arise and my fear of perturbing the almighty Google becomes a possibility. My research indicates that I should simply canonical back to the page I want indexed. But I want them both to be indexed surely!? I therefore decided to share my situation with my fellow SEO’s to see if I’m being stupid or missing something simple both a distinct possibility!
International SEO | | eazytiger0 -
What's the best strategy for checking international rankings?
Hi There- I am looking to optimize sites serving the UK and Austrailia markets. I feel like I have a good handle on how to go about doing that, but what I am fuzzy on is, what's the best way to monitor the SERPs for the keywords I am targeting. I know based on experience that if I just search google.com.au from here in the states, my results will be 'americanized' and may/probably won't accurately reflect what someone would see if they were search from Austrailia. Are there any good tools or tactics for seeing what searchers in the countries I am focusing on woudl see? Thanks! Jason
International SEO | | phantom0