Three version of english pages: EN-US, EN-GB und EN as x-default
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We want address the search market for USA and UK. Therefore all english pages have small regional variations with similar content.
Since a longer time (after a relaunch) Google has problems to identify the right page (/en-gb/) for the right search market (UK) - although we use hreflang and sitemaps from the beginning.
We monitor those in moz for our UK campaign (/en-gb/ pages) by jumps in the ranking of individual keywords (>-50 and >+50).
-50 means not that the ranking of our website is lost. In this case Google will substitute the ranking of the /en-gb/ page with the variant /en/.
One excample:
https://www.openmind-tech.com/en-gb/industries/cam-software-for-motor-sports/
This page lost the ranking and the other languag variant is ranking for position 2.
https://www.openmind-tech.com/en/industries/cam-software-for-motorsport/In the moment I have no idea what we can change in our html code.
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@Tom-Capper
Thank you for the hint. I will check it. -
Assuming your Hreflang is consistent, which it appears to be, and all variants are crawled and indexed, this usually occurs when the differences between the pages are too minor.
You might be able to see in GSC if Google is considering the /en/ version to be the canonical of the /en-gb/ version, for example, contrary to your tagging.
If that is indeed the case, your options are to either to make the variants more different, or reduce the number of variants until they are all significantly different.
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