Rank regional homepages using canonicals and hreflangs

[dmduco]

Here’s a situation I’ve been puzzling with for some time:

The situation
Please consider an international website targeting 3 regions. The real site has more regions, but I simplified the case for this question.

There is no default language. The content for each regional version is meant for that region only.

The website.eu page is dynamic.

• When there is no region cookie, the page is identical to website.eu/nl/ (because Netherlands is the most important region)

• When there is a region cookie (set by a modal), there is a 302 redirect to the corresponding regional homepage

What we want
We want regional Google to index the correct regional homepages (eg. website.eu/nl/ on google.nl), instead of website.eu.
Why? Because visitors surfing to website.eu sometimes tend to ignore the region modal and therefor browse the wrong version.
For this, I set up canonicals and hreflangs as described below:

The problem
It’s 40 days now since the above hreflangs and canonicals have been setup, but Google is still ranking website.eu instead of the regional homepages.
Search console’s report for website.eu:

Any ideas why Google doesn’t respect our canonical?

• Maybe I’m overlooking something in this setup (combination of hreflangs and canonicals might be confusing)? Should I remove the hreflangs on the dynamic page, because there is no self-referencing hreflang?

• Or maybe it’s because website.eu has gathered a lot of backlinks over the years, whereas the regional homepages have much less, which might be why Google chooses to ig nore the canonical signals?

• Or maybe it’s a matter of time and I just need to wait longer?

Note: I’m aware the language subfolders (eg. /be_nl) are not according to Google’s recommendations. But I’ve seen similar setups (like adobe.com and apple.com) where the regional homepage is showing ok.

Any help appreciated!

[dmduco]

@terentyev Great insights!

I believe you might have nailed the issue with interlinking! I missed two home buttons on each page which were still pointing to the non-regional site. I'm getting it fixed right away and keep an eye on it.

Crawl budget shouldn't be a problem, I see a daily refresh in the logs for our homepage.

If interlinking doesn't fix it, I'll get into collecting backlinks to the regional homepages. I'll wait to see the effect of the interlinking fix though, as I'm curious what's the real cause.

Truly appreciate your feedback! Will try to report back if / what of the above helped.

[terentyev]

@dmduco said in Rank regional homepages using canonicals and hreflangs:

re not according to Google’s recommendations. But I’ve seen similar setups (like adobe.com and apple.com) where the regional homepage is showing ok.

What you are describing is quite common among many international sites. Google can choose a different canonical, and you are right, it can happen because of the backlinks or because of some technical issues on your site.

I would suggest to dig into both directions.
first, please make sure that all canonicals are set up properly.
second, try to run an experiment for one of the locales that is causing your problems with adjusting interlinking within your site, to increase the internal pagerank of the pages that are not indexing correctly.
third, it would help to do more detailed backlinks analysis on each of the problematic locales, and maybe even gain a few backlinks within the appropriate locale (eg. from strong websites in the same country) even on a temporary basis, to rule out if the lack of backlinks is an issue.
Regarding the 40 days time period - it really depends on how often Google crawls your site, and your crawl budget / authority. Check googlebot logs, how often each of the problematic pages get crawled. It can also give you some clues to proceed with your investigation.

Hope my suggestions will help. Let me know if you have any follow up questions, and I would appreciate some info sometimes down the road, how this issue will evolve.