Migrating to a tag-driven global website - Need opinions!
-
We currently have a global site that is set up this way:
- Subfolders to designate countries.
- Content in same language is re-published on other country websites.
Since we are re-launching at the end of the year, we are doing away with re-publishing content on different country sites and will just maintain a single copy of our content (to be populated on different pages using content tags). We are planning on doing this so that there is no need to apply href-lang tags on our content.
My questions:
- Is maintaining just a single instance of an article good for a global website?
- What are the possible complications that may come up from this approach?
- Since there is only one version of the article that is being indexed, is a rel-canonical tag even needed?
- Should href-lang tag still be applied to high level pages (homepage, etc) to ensure that the correct homepage shows up in the appropriate geography?
This question is quite long, so any feedback will be helpful. Thanks!
-
Hi!
I have similar questions. It sounds like you are posting articles in the main language it was written in and not doing any geo-targeting. Is that right? I'm not sure because you mention "the correct homepage shows up in the appropriate geography."
If an article is written in Portuguese, you aren't translating it?
Let us know some more details and we are happy to help!
-
Hi
Am a little unclear on your query but it seems you are moving to a single page - per article platform and trying to rank internationally. So for one unique page you wish or expect that same page to rank for example in the USA as well as Ukraine.. is that correct? Assume if they find the page from Ukraine they use google translate... etc.
To be clear is that what you are asking?
If that is the case it will not work. Effect digital sums it up pretty well. T
Regards
-
If you are talking about having a single URL which generates differently translated content based upon where the user is from, it's a terrible idea and god-awful for SEO. Have seen so many sites with single-URL multi-content builds perform erratically and terribly. Usually the 'quick and easy way' to 'get out of doing proper SEO' is the path to absolute ruin
Google only crawls from one data centre at once, so if they crawl from Spain and see the Spanish content, they will assume that's all there is there and you have just changed it. So your rankings will fly around like a pinwheel and never really amount to anything
Hreflangs and site build out is the best way, anything quick and dirty is usually destined to kill your multi-regional rankings (dead)
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
-
Got hit by Spammy Structured Markup Penalty. Need Help
I have fixed the issue found in strctured data testing tool. Even I removed entire schema. Till now I have submitted reconsideration request 5 times and it rejected every time. Don't know how to lift this penalty. Any advise?? Need help guys my websites are going through very critical situations in terms of traffic from getting this manual action from Google. This is related to Pharma Industry.
International SEO | | rashmibhardwaj860 -
Is there a Risk Around Creating a Website for Each Country in The World?
Is there a risk around creating a website for each country in the world with similar to identical content depending on the language? We need to serve prices and the local currencies and be compliant with regulations. We're planning to use rel=canonical and HREFLANG tags to help with consolidation and GEO-targeting.
International SEO | | ari_seo0 -
Which Google does a .ie website get shown in?
Hi all, I am working on a .ie website and I was under the understanding that if you have a regional domain, like .ie you will limited to being shown in a search engine like google.ie When I go to International Targeting in Google SEarch Console it says the site is associated with: Ireland Am I limiting my ability to rank well in worldwide Google searches with this domain and if so, how can I counter this? Many thanks.
International SEO | | Bee1590 -
Need advice - International SEO strategy
Hello Moz ! I've been working for some months on a very interesting SEO project. I even opened some discussions on it (Multi Regional website - Folder strategy, Multi Company websites) with amazing feedbacks from the community. INITIAL PROJECT Set up an international website with different subsidiaries name, 1 person to manage the whole web, different locations / regions / languages and same products. INITIAL IDEAS For the beginning of the project we opened a main website in .com with subfolders for the other subsidiaries .com/es ... However our business is mainly in English so we decided to focus harder (closing the .com/uk, using a unic com/blog, opening more pages etc.) on the main domain in .com CURRENT ISSUE How to rank locally our services with: Main domain in .com Last Google updates against link building Most of customers searching in English in different countries Company working in more than 80 countries, through 13 subsidiaries **IDEA ** I was thinking about using our blog to focus 3 months on a thematic around one service (blog post with link to the services article on our website, guest blogging with link to a blog post, discussions on Linkedin around the thematics, etc.) QUESTION What could be the best strategy to rank locally our products in this case ? Hope you can share your best advise. I guess I'm not the unique one to face this issue. So it'll be good to make a good strategy for all our community 🙂 Tks a lot ! Florian
International SEO | | AymanH0 -
Best URL structure for Multinational/Multilingual websites
Hi I am wondering what the best URL format to use is when a website targets several countries, in several languages. (without owning the local domains, only a .com, and ideally to use sub-folders rather than sub-domains.) As an example, to target a hotel in Sweden (Google.se) are there any MUST-HAVE indicators in the URL to target the relevant countries? Such as hotelsite.com**/se/**hotel-name. Would this represent the language? Or is it the location of the product? To clarify a bit, I would like to target around 10 countries, with the product pages each having 2 languages (the local language + english). I'm considering using the following format: hotelsite.com/en/hotel-name (for english) and hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name (for swedish content of that same product) and then using rel=”alternate” hreflang=”se-SV” markup to target the /se/ page for Sweden (Google.se) and rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” for UK? And to also geotarget those in Webmaster tools using those /se/ folders etc. Would this be sufficient? Or does there need to be an indicator of both the location, AND the language in the URLs? I mean would the URL's need to be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name/se-SV (for swedish) or can it just be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name? Any thoughts on best practice would be greatly appreciated.
International SEO | | pikka0 -
Multiple hreflang tags
I'm trying to advise on the multi country seo for a site in terms of markup. We've already decided on using sub folders rather than separate sites or subdomains due to an established link profile and good rankings in all countries. The question is in relation to the homepage. Obviously this is the page most likely to rank well in any country (the site is a .com). But can multiple hreflang tags be put on the page to say that the page targets many countries? Or would leaving the hreflang tag off allow it to just rank for all countries? Also do Yahoo and Bing follow hreflang tags? I can't find any info on this anywhere! Thanks very much in advance for any help!
International SEO | | Bdig0 -
Rel alternate use for multi regional website with english language and same content
I have a website targeting multi language and multi regional users. For example, my main site is www.abcd.com which is in English and targeting US. I have the same content in English which is targeting UK and India with www.uk.abcd.com and www.india.abcd.com. I want to avoid content duplication and help search engines to show the right pages on the country level searches. I have researched a bit and have come to conclusion of using re alternate tag. Can someone help me with how to place the codes for the same. Many thanks Mozers!
International SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
Website optimization - highly competitive keyword in german
Hey guys, this is the website: www.mediavideoconverter.de We need to optimize this website for a bunch of keywords such as: VIDEO CONVERTER in google.de which is highly competitive and some others for ipad, iphone software's. Can someone give me a advise where should I start? I know the design isn't great, unfortunately in this part there is nothing I can do about it. Thanks in advance 😃
International SEO | | augustos0