Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Incorrect homepage country variant appearing in search resutls

International SEO

985

coma99 Subscriber last edited by

Hi,

Background

I have an international site with 32 country homepages within the same domain: eg

www.domain.com/en-gb/
www.domain.com/fr-fr/
www.domain.com/de-de/
www.domain.com/es-es/ and so forth

We use IP redirection on the root www.domain.com (which has no HTML page of its own) to divert the user to their relevant country homepage.

Within each country homepage we include:

(a canonical link to itself)

... (hreflang alternates to all instances of other homepages including itself )

Our Google Crawl bot is located in Germany and so when it crawls our root www.domain.com it takes the title and description from its destination url which in crawlbots case is www.domain.com/de-de/ because of the IP redirect.

What is the problem I am trying to solve?

Every variation of local Google results (eg UK/FR/IT/US) displays at the top the crawled root www.domain.com page with German title/description. How can I stop this happening? Surely adding appropriate hrefs and canonicals to every homepage instance is sufficient for Google to display to you your relevant country homepage variant instead!?

Thanks
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

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_seo

0
Country and Language Specific URL Paths

Wanted to ask everyone a questions: So our company is going to be doing a website that is going to be full of videos. The url path will be country.domain.com/language/slug/content-id. We redirect the user when they go to the different country. So if you're in spain on a train to france your URL will change from es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id. Each country can listen to each video in all languages. My question is with hreflang tags and canonicals. Aside from targeting users in a certain country via Google Search Console, how do I eliminate duplication and tell Google which I'd like to show up via which country. In spain I would like es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to show in Google and would have hreflang tags on each of the es.domain pages but what about fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id since it would show the same content? I can't canonical to one of them since I need them to show in their respective country. How do I show the difference in language and country without showing duplication?
International SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn

0
Wants to Rank Well in Multiple Countries

We have been using moz subscription from last few months & are quite happy so far. We just wanted to explore more out of it & wanted to understand how to approach the optimization for having us rank well in US. At the same time we don't wanted to lose upon what we have achieved till now. I have read through some blog posts & found that changing the international targeting in GWT can also hurt. My vision is to rank well in multiple countries but at the same time do not lose rankings in India. Any help here would be appreciated so whatever we do, we do it right.
International SEO | | fourseven

0
How can I restrict the domains country by country?

Hello, I have Two Domains one is xyz.co.uk and other is xyz.com Now, my main target for .com is United States, and I don't want to open that .com domain in any other country especially India. The same with the .co.uk, I dont want to open .co.uk in other countries. I did it with some developer help but it gave me redirected error in Google Webmaster. Can anyone please guide me how I can do this the proper way ? And Other issues is, how can I implement ,if any user in United States open xyz.co.uk than he should redirect to the .com version. Thank you.
International SEO | | AmitTulsiyani

0
Multi-Country Hosting

Hi all
I have read a few post that are similar to mine on this forum but still wanted to ask my specific question. We have a .com domain hosted on a dedicated server in the UK for our main website which takes online bookings and payments. We have purchased the following TLD's of our domain name:
.it, .es, .ch, .fr, .es, .at We essentially want to create a satellite site on each domain where the idea is that users in those countries will find our satellite sites via organic search engine results when searching for the information we sell. Due to the nature of our infrastructure, each satellite site will connect to the mysql database on the UK site to drawn down its text content. This is where the main CMS is located. I understand the following are important from an SEO point of view for our satellite sites: Hosting in the country we wish to target
Geographical targeting via WMT
Local addresses and telephone numbers on the site
Correct lang=" " tag in the source code
Content presented in the correct language (goes without saying really) Can you advise on any other considerations? Many Thanks Kris
International SEO | | yousayjump

0
CcTLD not ranking in other country.

I'm trying to rank a .im domain in Australia and having a hard time getting any traction at all. GWT won't let me geo-target the domain for Australia. It is currently set for Isle of Man. Thinking of registering a .com.au (same domain isn't available, but I can get something close) and mirror the site completely. I'd canonical all urls on the .com.au to the corresponding .im pages - would this make a difference? Also, since the linkbuilding is being done for the .im domain - I think I'll have to start over on the .com.au domain. Thoughts, tips and insight highly appreciated mozzers!
International SEO | | bobjones

0
Search engine usage stats

Hi I'm looking to find the number of people who use different search engine sin different countries aspart of some research into an International SEO project. I've searched Google all afternoon but can't find what i'm looking for so hopefully someone here can help What i'm looking for is the number of users of different Google versions in UK and Ireland, so: google.com v google.ie in Ireland and google.com v google.co.uk in UK Thanks for your help Jason
International SEO | | robotseo

0
What is the best SEO site structure for multi country targeting?

Hi There, We are an online retailer with four (and soon to be five) distinct geographic target markets (we have physical operations in both the UK and New Zealand). We currently target these markets like this: United Kingdom (www.natureshop.co.uk) New Zealand (www.natureshop.co.nz) Australia (www.natureshop.com/au) - using a google web master tools geo targeted folder United States (www.natureshop.com) - using google web master tools geo targeted domain Germany (www.natureshop.de) - in german and yet to be launched as full site We have various issues we want to address. The key one is this: our www.natureshop.co.uk website was adversely affected by the panda update on April 12. We had some external seo firms work on this site for us and unfortunately the links they gained for us were very low quality, from sometimes spammy sites and also "keyword" packed with very littlle anchor text variation. Our other websites (the .co.nz and .com) moved up after the updates so I can only assume our external seo consultants were responsible for this. I have since managed to get them to remove around 70% of these links and we have bought all seo efforts back in house again. I have also worked to improve the quality of our content on this site and I have 404'ed the six worst affected pages (the ones that had far too many single phrase anchor text links coming into them). We have however not budged much in our rankings (we have made some small gains but not a lot). Our other weakness's are not the fastest page load times and some "thin" content. We are on the cusp (around 4 weeks away) of deploying a brand new platform using asp.net MVP with N2 and this looks like it will address our page load speed issues. We also have been working hard on our content building and I believe we will address that as well with this release. Sorry for the long build up, however I felt some background was needed to get to my questions. My questions are: Do you think we are best to proceed with trying to get our www.natureshop.co.uk website out of the panda trap or should we consider deploying a new version of the site on www.natureshop.com/uk/ (geo targeted to the UK)? If we are to do this should we do the same for New Zealand and Germany and redirect the existing domains to the new geo targeted folders? If we do this should we redirect the natureshop.co.uk pages to the new www.natureshop.com/uk/ pages or will this simply pass on the panda "penalty". Will this model build stronger authority on the .com domain that benefit all of the geo targeted sub folders or does it not work this way? Finally can we deploy the same pages and content on the different geo targeted sub folders (with some subtle regional variations of spelling and language) or will this result in a duplicate content penalty? Thank you very much in advance to all of you and I apologise for the length and complexity of the question. Kind Regards
Conrad Cranfield
Founder: Nature Shop Ltd
International SEO | | ConradC

0