SEO difficulty between languages?
-
Hello,
I would like to know if there are certain factors that determine SEO difficulty between different languages or countries.
Is doing SEO more difficult in Japan than in the United States?
What would be some factors that could help determine the above?
Thanks in advance,
-
Hi!
Your question is not so simple at all. The reason? Simple: it is not a matter of factors, but a matter of how the web is used, how SEOs has done SEO in their countries and the "search market" competitiveness existing in any countries
To give you an example:
US Search Market is surely the most competitive of all... you can see it indirectly checking the cost per keywords in Adwords. For a site in the States it is not enough to do "simple SEO", are needed more links and unique domains linking to you, you have much more "noise" (aka spam sites) to fight against, also the Social signals needed are much more than somewhere else.
On the contrary, in a Market like the Italian one, that is smaller, things can be easier. You can rely more on things like old classic article marketing (I see sites ranking great just with that), really good sites aren't so many, just a minority of sites do a good SEO...
On the other hand, because of the cultural gap, an American SEO probably won't be so good doing Italian SEO. Not just because of the language, but also because he doesn't know the mentality and, therefore, how Italian search things in the Internet.
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
-
International SEO Mobile directory
I was wondering, What if I went with international sub-directory route (not ccTLD), for example: sitename.com/fr (fr being france)...But the question is, what's the best practice for MOBILE?sitename.com/mobile/frORsitename.com/fr/mobileORm.sitename.com/fr Again, ccTLD is not an option (currently, sites are in ccTLD but we are now transitioning to sub folders)Now, the next question is WHY is it best practices for it to be sitename.com/mobile/fr or sitename.com/fr/mobile or m.sitename.com/fr ? Please cite source. Thanks!
International SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Backlinks to URLs with Language Parameters (for Chinese version of website) and SEO?
Hey all, We run a large eCommerce site in Australia and are preparing to launch to the Chinese market. Our site has been fully converted to Chinese and displays the version of the site detected as default in the user's browser unless they manually select otherwise. This is done by appending the parameter "?la=zh" onto the end of the URL, so for example the Chinese version would be: **www.example.com/australia?la=zh ** This then forces the product catalogue to display the relevant language version. My question is, for SEO purposes and back links in particular, since they aren't really a "true URL" (i.e: strictly speaking they aren't different "pages", just the same page being populated with different characters), would getting links from Chinese websites to the URL "www.example.com/australia?la=zh" really be viewed as any different from just "www.example.com/australia"? Do they pass the same amount of juice and is the difference detected by the engines (thinking mainly about Baidu in particular but of course Google as well)? Feedback from anyone with experience in SEO for multi-lingual sites would be much appreciated, thanks.
International SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
Same language manage many country
Hello, I would like to hear how you would handle the following situation. I make website for people with a .be domain that also want to score in .nl . Both countries speak dutch. There are however slight variations between the two countries. For some it does not matter for others it can be handy. Ex. A specific product might be called diffrent in one country then the other. The main problem is for those that have a .be domain will not score on a .nl domain and visa versa. This due geo targeting. What would you do? Imagine we already have a .be domain (.be == belgium, .nl==Netherland both speak dutch) A: Buy a .nl and copy and show the same content on .nl as .be
International SEO | | nono_1974
B: Buy a .nl and make new content (lots of work)
😄 Buy a .EU, .com adres and Geotarget nl.somedomain.eu , be.somedomain.eu . But what about the content The main problem is double content and targeting the two countries.0 -
Best way to enter Canada, SEO-wise?
We are thinking of splitting our e-Commerce site into a Canadian site w/ localized content, a potential French version and for additional relevance w/ localized currency. What would be the best way to go about this if we were wanting to gain traction as soon as possible on the organic side? Split the domain into domain.com and domain.com/ca/ (subfolders) Split the domain into ca.domain.com and domain.com Or split the domain into domain.com & wirelessemporium.ca Also, what are some key best practices we need to keep in mind to avoid duplicate content issues, etc?
International SEO | | eugeneku0 -
How to SEO for Spanish-Speaking People in California
I found myself in need of translating our current website into Spanish language so that we can target the Spanish-speaking population of L.A. and surrounding areas. I have several questions: 1. What should my url structure be? ex: domain.com/es/subpage
International SEO | | cgman
would that work? 2. Do I need to worry about any header information? Do I just translate the whole thing into Spanish with meta info etc..? What about rel="canonical", what do I need to do with the spanish translated pages? Any other tips for SEO in Spanish? I plan on hiring a translator to translate the entire website into Spanish and thought about putting it in its own sub-directory, for example: domain.com/es/ Thanks for looking!0 -
Is it possible to geotag language folders on a .co.uk domain
Hi all, I'm going around in circles a little on this one, so I thought that I'd as as I haven't found anyone asking quite the same thing (sorry if someone has). I have a .co.uk site and would like to set up some different language variations. I've been looking at the subfolder route for now (budget is limited). Can I set a geotag in webmaster tools on a .co.uk site or does it need to be a domain that Google considers country neutral? Many thanks for any suggestions!
International SEO | | ceecee0 -
Pop-up to select country. Any negative SEO effect?
Hi there! We have similar websites in different countries (it's an ecommerce site). Some times, those websites share the same language and, for example, people from Mexico end up in a page from our website in Argentina. Therefore they see our products in their language buy in a foreign currency. We would like to show them a pop-up (like a shadowbox) depending on their IP to allow them to go to their local website. There wouldn't be any redirect. Would that affect our rankings in any way? Would Googlebots see that as well? Thanks!
International SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
Multi-lingual SEO: Country-specific TLD's, or migration to a huge .com site?
Dear SEOmoz team, I’m an in-house SEO looking after a number of sites in a competitive vertical. Right now we have our core example.com site translated into over thirty different languages, with each one sitting on its own country-specific TLD (so example.de, example.jp, example.es, example.co.kr etc…). Though we’re using a template system so that changes to the .com domain propagate across all languages, over the years things have become more complex in quite a few areas. For example, the level of analytics script hacks and filters we have created in order to channel users through to each language profile is now bordering on the epic. For a number of reasons we’ve recently been discussing the cost/benefit of migrating all of these languages into the single example.com domain. On first look this would appear to simplify things greatly; however I’m nervous about what effect this would have on our organic SE traffic. All these separate sites have cumulatively received years of on/off-site work, and even if we went through the process of setting up page-for-page redirects to their new home on example.com, I would hate to lose all this hard-work (and business) if we saw our rankings tank as a result of the move. So I guess the question is, for an international business such as ours, which is the optimal site structure in the eyes of the search engines; Local sites on local TLD’s, or one mammoth site with language identifiers in the URL path (or subdomains)? Is Google still so reliant on TLD for geo targeting search results, or is it less of a factor in today’s search engine environment? Cheers!
International SEO | | linklater0