International Homepage Advice
-
Hello, colleagues!
We have a conundrum. A client website has a good subdirectory strategy for localized/translated content for its various international markets, but nothing currently "lives" at the root. In my mind, this presents a challenge to search engines (note that we have had some trouble getting proper visibility overall, which is why I'm asking this question).
I'm looking for any links or just plain old good advice on why it's important to have a global homepage. Should that global homepage be in English? Most enterprise sites I've worked with do have a homepage that's in English, with the ability to select a country from a drop down in a nav across the site.
Any advice, best practices, etc. about why a global homepage is important and what language it could/should be in would be really helpful.
Hreflang tags would make sense, I guess, but each country has slightly different offerings so I'm not sure that it makes complete sense. In other words, one country's homepage may have completely different content than another's.
Thank you!
-
@DarinPirkey said in International Homepage Advice:
Have you ever found yourself grappling with a complex idea, struggling to understand its intricacies? Whether you're a student tackling a difficult subject or a professional trying to grasp a new concept, simplifying complex ideas can be a game-changer. Fortunately, there's a systematic approach you can follow to break down even the most intricate concepts into manageable chunks. In this article, we'll explore a four-step guide to simplifying complex concepts effectively.
-
If have an international homepage, do make sure that all the content marketing that you write is white hat. For example, we sell demolition services, and we wanted to start expanding the company, so we rewrote the homepage to make sure that it was written in a white hat way
-
Thanks so much, Darin!
-
Let me first say I have limited experience in the international version but I do have some experience with "regional" versions.
We tend to look at the amount of traffic by language and links by location to see how well we are performing. You can set your root to the language that gets the best metrics. Then offer a language specific landing page for other languages.
We do this for law firms that service English French and Spanish.
Homepage is in English first, then we have "lawfirm.com/es" for spanish, "lawfirm.com/fr/ for French etc. Those act as "homepages" for those languages and have all navigation and text in those languages. Basically another version of the site but in the correct/preferred language.
Also the browser they use can help with this too. You can set a HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE to confirm they language they want to see the content in.
I'm not sure if there is a better way but that's what we do.
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 Google giving more important to internal pages than homepage recently? Especially after the recent Major algo update?
Hi everybody, I can see the change Google brought in the SERP. Previously website homepages will be shown for primary keywords, now it's slowly and almost switched to showing most related internal pages in a website. You can check same for keyword "SEO", Most or all the results are internal pages. I can see this change for our primary keyword from last one month. So basically Google is trying to show a page explaining about the primary keywords rather than website, that's how "what is seo" pages are ranking than homepages. If there is no such pages existed or not well written, Google is just showing the website homepage. But I noticed that websites ranking with homepages are dropped compared to the websites with dedicated page about that primary keyword. Please share your thoughts. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Are we confusing Google with our internal linking?
Hi all, We decided to give importance to one of our top pages as it has "keyword" in it's slug like website.com/keyword. So we internally linked even from different sub-domain pages more than homepage to rank for that "keyword". But this page didn't show up in Google results for that "keyword"; neither homepage, but our login page is ranking. We wonder why login page is ranking. Has our internal linking plan confused Google to ignore homepage to rank for that primary keyword? And generally do we need to internally link homepage more than anyother page? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Rel=Canonical Tag on Homepage
I have a Rel=canonical Tag (link rel="canonical" href="htttps://homepage.com") on the homepage. Could this possibly have a negative effect? is it necessary?
Algorithm Updates | | JMSCC0 -
SEO for International Expansion - Best Strategies
Looking for some Best Strategies in SEO for International Expansion . We were based in a single country till one year back and then decided to expand to other English speaking countries as well. Traffic from SEO for us is around 1.3 million users only from the single country and we rank in top#3 for 90% of our targeted keyword bank of 45000+ keywords. We just launched in some new countries like singapore , philippines and few other English speaking countries with really unique content and I wanted to check whether I can use my mother domain or use any other strategies for growing SEO faster in other countries. Any inputs on scaling up SEO traffic internationally will be appreciated
Algorithm Updates | | ozil1 -
International foreign language SEO questions
I'm looking to add some foreign language pages to a website and have a lot of international SEO questions. I think the overall question is can you do SEO yourself if you are a native English speaker for a language you don't speak (like Chinese)? 1. How do you go about doing keyword research for a foreign language? What tools are available? 2. How do you know what search engines you should optimize for in a different country? And where can you find the technical SEO requirements for each? I'm wondering things like title tag length for Baidu. Or is the Title length different for Yahoo Japan vs. US? Do you write titles and meta tags in Chinese/Japanese for respective countries? Etc.
Algorithm Updates | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Optimized site-wide internal links in footer - a problem?
Hello all - I am looking at a website with 8 heavily keyword optimized site-wide links in the footer. Yes, there are only 8 but it looks a bit spammy and I'm tempted to remove them. I imagine there's some possibility of a Google penalty too? What would your advice be? Thanks, Luke
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate content advice
Im looking for a little advice. My website has always done rather well on the search engines, although it have never ranked well for my top keywords on my main site as they are very competitive, although it does rank for lots of obscure keywords that contain my top keywords or my top keywords + City/Ares. We have over 1,600 pages on the main site most with unique content on, which is what i attribute to why we rank well for the obscure keywords. Content also changes daily on several main pages. Recently we have made some updates to the usability of the site which our users are liking (page views are up by 100%, time on site us up, bounce rate is down by 50%!).
Algorithm Updates | | jonny512379
However it looks like Google did not like the updates....... and has started to send us less visitors (down by around 25%, across several sites. the sites i did not update (kind of like my control) have been unaffected!). We went through the Panda and Penguin updates unaffected (visitors actually went up!). So i have joined SEOmoz (and loving it, just like McDonald's). I am now going trough all my sites and making changes to hopefully improve things above and beyond what we used to do. However out of the 1,600 pages, 386 are being flagged as duplicate content (within my own site), most/half of this is down to; We are a directory type site split into all major cities in the UK.
Cities that don't have listings on, or cities that have the same/similar listing on (as our users provide services to several cities) are been flagged as duplicate content.
Some of the duplicate content is due to dynamic pages that i can correct (i.e out.php?***** i will noindex these pages if thats the best way?) What i would like to know is; Is this duplicate content flags going to be causing me problems, keeping in mind that the Penguin update did not seem to affect us. If so what advise would people here offer?
I can not redirect the pages, as they are for individual cities (and are also dynamic = only one physical page but using URL rewriting). I can however remove links to cities with no listings, although Google already have these pages listed, so i doubt removing the links from my pages and site map will affect this. I am not sure if i can post my URL's here as the sites do have adult content on, although is not porn (we are an Escort Guide/Directory, with some partial nudity). I would love to hear opinions0 -
Advice / Help with simliar post titles
Does anyone know if the new google ove optimisation penalties would be actioned for similar post titles? We have a back catalouge of our magazines online and each title is very simliar ie magazine name - issue number - month. These have been flagged up by the SEO Moz pro service as being duplicate content but although each post is laid out the same each has different content with int it. the titles however are all very simliar - is this a bad idea and also if so what would be a better way of grouping the posts so that the titles are different enough - would the main subject of each magazine included be enough? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | luwhosjack0