Multiregional / Multilingual SEO - What do you do when there is no equivalent page?
-
Hello,
We're building out a small number of pages for the US in a sub-folder .com/us. The idea is to show US specific pages to users in that location. However, we also have a number of pages which we will not be creating for the US as they're not relevant.
I am planning on geo-targeting the US folder to instruct the search engines that this subfolder should appear in the US SERPS but since it isn't an exact science, there is a chance that US visitors may land on these non-us pages which could potentially give them a bad user experience.
What should we do in instances where a US user lands on a non-us page with no equivalent page?
Any help would be much appreciated!
-
Let them land there (you don't really have a choice in that from search). But if the page really isn't relevant and there is no equivalent, think about popping a message to them telling them that you think they are in the US and that the area for the US users is here and link them there. Also give them a way to contact some sort of help. Either a Help area or an email address.
-
You make an equivalent page. What you DON'T DO is try and use a b*stardised mixture of incorrect canonical tags and hreflangs to remedy the issue. You assuredly don't hreflang the page to another page in another language, if it's not the exact same page
Hreflangs have to be mutually agreed to work. If both pages don't cite each other as the alternate hreflang URL, then neither hreflang works (at all). If you hreflang the 'one off' page to another page on the site, then you'd have to change the hreflang of that URL to point back - which would disconnect it from its 'proper' heflang partner(s)
In some situations you just have to give up before you make a bad situation worse (creating messed up hreflang triangles when they are binary only, thus breaking the other hreflangs - causing loads more problems)
If you don't have a strong grounding in international SEO deployment you leave well enough alone!
-
First let me say that I'm not an expert on this but I found this article from Google Support that may help.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
Has a lot of good information. Sorry I couldn't be more help.
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
-
Ecommerce Product Page Optimization & International SEO
Hello, I'm working on our website SEO optimization. We have a thousands of products pages with different structures for the languages (arg) and very depth folder path .com/[folder]/[folder]/[folder]/product1.hmtl So now I have the happiness of working on the optimization of the website with themajor risk of impacting all current ranking. But anyway, here are a few questions I have on the way. Part 1 - International URL Our websites target people per country and languages. We do not have shops per countries (not enough resources_) but we try to get at least website per languages. What could be the best option?_ Url Parameters +hreflang So we save one folder less and the proper setup. But I'm just scared it's gonna be too messy for Google URL:.com/product1**?lang=fr** Product page:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href=".com/product1" / Language folder + hreflang one folder more but clearer structure URL:.com**/fr/**product1 **Product **page:****link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href=".com/product1" / Part 2 - Product URL Our website is structure per categories so the product comes after. However, I've seen a lot of websites recently removing the categories to save folders space. What should be the most efficient option? Category folder It's obviously a good practice but this + the language folder makes already 2 folders URL:.com/categoryA/product1-{targetedKW} {targetedKW} = cheap product, best price or else All in url I've never done it but it somehow makes sense URL:.com/categoryA-product1-{targetedKW} Part 3 - Keyword stuffing As I'd like to get most of it automatically done, what could be the best places to add a few KW. **Markups:**All the ones we can **Meta Descriptions:**optimize one for Google + one for twitter + one for facebook Longer to do but then from google shopping and other automatic links, we could have the perfect or, at least, best description possible **All other option:**Reuse our product name + {targetter KW1 KW2 ...} Product description_ex: content_ Buttons (click to buy)ex: button title="Buy product_name cheap" alt="Purchase product_name"Buy Product name/button Images:same than above Meta:Titles and meta description Hn
International SEO | | omnyex0 -
International SEO Query
Hi All, I have an international SEO question and was wondering if you could help. My client runs a website in the UK (www.example.co.uk). The site is ranked well for it's collection of keywords, my client now wishes to target the US market. He wishes to use the same web structure and design in new site www.example.com as we know this converts well. My questions are: What would be the best practice for setting this up? I know there will be duplicate content issues if a website is duplicated. If we use the same design and website structure but re-word content, would this be acceptable? Thank you for all your help in advance.
International SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Multilingual Sitemap with some non-matching URLs
The website has two languages, English (.com/en-int/) and French (.com/fr-fr/). Some pages only exist in French, and some only in English, but there are many that are a 1-to-1 match. So, my questions is, in the multilingual sitemap, should I only include the URLs that are alternates, and then create a 2nd sitemap for all non-matching URLs? Or should I have 3 sitemaps: 1) Multilingual sitemap for all matching URLs (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/26208650 , 2) English sitemap for only URLs not included in multilingual sitemap, 3) French sitemap for only URLs not included in multilingual sitemap. And then create a sitemap index file to link to all 3 sitemaps.
International SEO | | Alex.Weintraub0 -
International SEO: best practices for local variants of the same language?
We are translating our site into 17 different languages, including local variants of the same language (i.e. Mexican Spanish and Spain Spanish, Canadian English and British English, etc). Should we add all of these local variants to our site? We don't have the marketing / link building budget (or business need) to put these all on separate ccTLDs, so we are using country-specific subfolders instead (example.com/es/). The translations will be of exceptional quality. Our main goal is to pull in some additional traffic from these translations. If we add these local variants, do you think we can expect to see traffic from these different countries (additional traffic from Canada, England, etc)? Any advice / input would be appreciated.
International SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Can anyone guide me best ways to generate customer leads through the SEO Process
I want to generate leads for my client through SEO process. I have involved all kind of link baits like articles, blogs, infographics, directory submissions etc.,Basically the client is B2B service provider like payroll services, Labor compliance and Staffing Solutions to various segments
International SEO | | Virrtuo0 -
How can I rank couple of pages to a specific geography ?
Hi guys, I have a pretty good success in many of my keyword on google US. We are a multi-country company and would like to get better ranking on all these countries. I know it's a long run and we need to by patient to get the rank desired. We are getting the slowly, bu surely. In the next couple of months, we will be attending a conference where we will have a booth and we would like to conduct a campaign to invite customers to join us. My question is : Is there an efficient way to have just couple of pages on our web site that could potentially rank fast on a specific geography ? Europe is my target audience ( France an UK ). If you have any advice, I would appreciate. Best regards,
International SEO | | processia1 -
Does IP filtering have a negative impact on SEO?
If a large site has multiple regions (Australia, USA, UK, France), how will IP filtering to a particular area affect SEO. e.g: Ilive in the UK an if I visit the said website I would automatically be redirected to the UK subfolder of the site whereas somebody searching in Australia would be redirected to the AUS folder. Will there be any detrimental affect on SEO and will the search engines still be able to crawl the entire site no matter which data centre is being used?
International SEO | | White.net0 -
Internationalization and SEO
Hi Everyone, This is my first post in this new Q & A section!! This interface looks great!! Now onto the question.... We have www.example.com in English that has 50,000+ URLs. We are in the process of building a new site example.de targeting German users. The German site (www.example.de) will be a mirror of the English site at launch as we want to give a full experience to people visiting the .de domain. However, not all pages will be localized as we can't support that. We are planning on localizing the core sets of pages (~500) and leaving the rest in English. Post launch, we will have additional milestones to localize the remaining pages until the entire site is localized (converted to German). Is this the correct way to go? Will this cause duplicate content issue?
International SEO | | Amjath
Will adding "rel=canonical" tag on these pages solve the purpose? Thanks for the help!0