What is the "Homepage" for an International Website With Multiple Languages?
-
BACKGROUND:
We are developing a new multi-language website that is going to have:
1. Multiple directories for various languages:
/en-us, /de, etc....
2. Hreflang tags
3. Universal footer links so user can select their preferred language.
and
4. Automatic JS detection of location on homepage only, so that when the user lands on /, it redirect them to the correct location.Currently, the auto JS detection only happens on /, and no other pages of the website. The user can also always choose to override the auto-detection on the homepage anytime, by using the language-selector links on the bottom.
QUESTION: Should we try to place a 301 on / to point to en/us? Someone recommended this to us, but my thinking is "NO" - we do NOT want to 301 /. Instead, I feel like we should allow Google Access to /, because that is also the most authoritative page on the website and where all incoming links are pointing. In most cases, users / journalists / publications IMHO are just going to link to /, not dilly dally around with the language-directory.
My hunch is just to keep / as is, but also work to help Google understand the relationship between all of the different language-specific directories. I know that Google officially doesn't advocate meta refresh redirects, but this only happens on homepage, and we likewise allow user to override this at any time (and again, universal footer links will point both search engines and users to all other locations.)
Thoughts? Thanks for any tips/feedback!
-
Hi Daniel,
Yes, I have read the entire article. Instead continuing to debate how much link equity in particular would pass through a homepage 301, or how reliable Google's "official stance" is, my goal is rather to evaluate the how the homepage holistically relates to the overall international SEO and corporate branding strategy, in tandem with a complex redesign that is already going to require us to switch up a ton of pages.
Thanks!
-
Hello Sarah,
I'm glad you replied. I would argue that the article proves my point more than rejects it. You might be coming from "A redirect from one page to an entirely different page will result in no PageRank being passed and will be considered a soft 404."
In this case "entirely different" refers to a page that has a different topic. Since in this case the page redirected to would be identical or nearly-identical to the original page, then the 301 redirect will transfer 100% of the rank of the original page.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com -
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for the response! While I totally agree that Google's cool with 301s as of 2019, I do have to respectfully disagree that 301s pass 100% of all link equity. See: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/301-redirect-pagerank/275503/#close
And in the middle of a big redesign, I'm especially hesitant to 301 the current homepage. My own personal, anecdotal experiences (including from as recently as this year) likewise indicate that changing URLs leads to fluctuation, even with 301s to help migrate and mitigate.
In the meantime, IMHO, we really also don't want to force all users who land on / to immediately go to the English directory. Hopefully, geotargeting will take them to the best match - but even if it's not, then they can always override that by manually choosing their preferred language.
Personally, I was a bit thrown by the (external) recommendation to 301 / to /en-us. I needed to bounce ideas off other SEOs and unpack all of the pros and cons of doing so. Writing it all out here, and getting some feedback, has absolutely helped me to do that.
-
To put it plain and simple, in 2019 there is no reason to fear 301 redirects.
Back in 2013 and on, whenever you would do a 301 redirect you would lose some page rank along the way, estimated by some professionals at around 15% of the Page Rank. Nowadays, with the development and changes in the Google algorithm, you are assured by google that in doing a 301 redirect you will be able to transfer the rank and authority of the main homepage to the proper country-specific URL. You can support that by the fact that most of the multi-language site WordPress plugins will automatically do that for you as well.
You can consider the redirect to the other page the same as you would redirect Http traffic to Https or how you would redirect traffic from the direct name.com URL to the www sub-domain. My suggestion for you would be to go for the 301 redirect.
Alternatively, if you are still hesitant to use the 301 redirect, you have the option of using the site homepage as the English version of the website and using directories for the other languages, or to keep both the homepage and the en-us page with identical content, and inserting a canonical relationship tag to support one of the pages to grow in rankings without being marked as spam.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com
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
-
Can anyone please explain the real difference between backlinks, 301 links, and redirect links?which one is better to rank a website? i am looking for the help for one of my website
Can anyone please explain the real difference between backlinks, 301 links, and redirect links? which one is better to rank a website? I am looking for help for one of my website vacuum cleaners
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hshajjajsjsj3880 -
Internal search pages (and faceted navigation) solutions for 2018! Canonical or meta robots "noindex,follow"?
There seems to conflicting information on how best to handle internal search results pages. To recap - they are problematic because these pages generally result in lots of query parameters being appended to the URL string for every kind of search - whilst the title, meta-description and general framework of the page remain the same - which is flagged in Moz Pro Site Crawl - as duplicate, meta descriptions/h1s etc. The general advice these days is NOT to disallow these pages in robots.txt anymore - because there is still value in their being crawled for all the links that appear on the page. But in order to handle the duplicate issues - the advice varies into two camps on what to do: 1. Add meta robots tag - with "noindex,follow" to the page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWEMII
This means the page will not be indexed with all it's myriad queries and parameters. And so takes care of any duplicate meta /markup issues - but any other links from the page can still be crawled and indexed = better crawling, indexing of the site, however you lose any value the page itself might bring.
This is the advice Yoast recommends in 2017 : https://yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/ - who are adamant that Google just doesn't like or want to serve this kind of page anyway... 2. Just add a canonical link tag - this will ensure that the search results page is still indexed as well.
All the different query string URLs, and the array of results they serve - are 'canonicalised' as the same.
However - this seems a bit duplicitous as the results in the page body could all be very different. Also - all the paginated results pages - would be 'canonicalised' to the main search page - which we know Google states is not correct implementation of canonical tag
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html this picks up on this older discussion here from 2012
https://moz.com/community/q/internal-search-rel-canonical-vs-noindex-vs-robots-txt
Where the advice was leaning towards using canonicals because the user was seeing a percentage of inbound into these search result pages - but i wonder if it will still be the case ? As the older discussion is now 6 years old - just wondering if there is any new approach or how others have chosen to handle internal search I think a lot of the same issues occur with faceted navigation as discussed here in 2017
https://moz.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation1 -
"Unnatural links to your site" manual action by Google
Hi, My site has been hit by a "Unnatural links to your site" manual action penalty and I've just received a decline on my 2nd reconsideration request, after disavowing even more links than I did in the first request. I went over all the links in WMT to my site with an SEO specialist and we both thought things have been resolved but apparently they weren't. I'd appreciate any help on this so as to lift the penalty and get my site back to its former rankings, it has ranked well before and the timing couldn't have been worse. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ishais
Yael0 -
Google cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
Hi There, When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adzhass0 -
My home page is not found by the "Grade a Page" tool
My home page as well as several important pages are not found by the Grade a Page tool. With our full https address I got this http://screencast.com/t/s1gESMlGwpa With just the www address I got this http://screencast.com/t/BMRHy36Ih https://www.joomlashack.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | etabush
https://www.joomlashack.com/joomla-templates We recently lost a lot of positions for our most important keyword: Joomla Templates Please help us figure this out. Whats screwy with our site?0 -
What counts as a "deeper level" in SEO?
Hi, I am trying to make our site more crawlable and get link juice to the "bottom pages" in an ecommerce site. Currently, our site has a big mega menu - and we have: Home > CAT 1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
SUBCAT 1
SUBSUBCAT 1
PRODUCT Our URL Structure looks:
www.domain.com/cat1/subcat1/subsubcat1/ and here are the links to the products but the URL's look like: www.domain.com/product.html Obviously the ideal thing would be to cut out one of the CATEGORIES. But I may be unable to do that in the short term - so I was wondering if by taking CAT1 out of the equation - e.g., just make it a static item that allows the drop down menu to work, but no page for it - Does that cut out a level? Thanks, Ben0 -
"site" operator and pages
Hi folks, We are having trouble in indexing, We have certain pages which are not coming in results when I am using the site operator in Google. for e.g. : sitename.com/widgets/red They are not showing any link results in Google webmaster tools too. But the pages which only linked through them are displaying in results when I am using site operator. for e.g: sitename.com/widgets/red/large We are redirecting some of the search which are close or exact match to the respective pages for e.g: sitename.com/search/red --> sitename.com/widgets/red We are fluctuating on rankings too in google serps form top ppositions to no where, for sitename.com/widgets/red and most of the times when google shows sitename.com/search/red instead of itename.com/widgets/red. Can you please put a light on this issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | semshah1430 -
Redirecting multiple websites to a single website
I've been trying to run several truck accessory affiliate websites for a quite a while now. I've recently decided to combine all of my affiliate websites into a single community website. This way I'll be able to focus all my energy and link building into a single place and build up a single brand. My question is, how many websites do I try to redirect to the new website at a time? Do I need to spread this out? Or is it ok if I move all of my content and websites at a single time? I have around 30 websites that I could move to this new domain. Thanks! Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daenterpri0