Geotargeting Issues

[Melia]

Hi,

I am having a problem with geotargeting. I have gTLD (solmelia.com) but my international languages are in subdomains. My english version is showing in the google mexico search engine.

I need to know what I can do to show our international as well as regional languages (fr.solmelia.com) in the right search engines.

Also, having problem with mexico (es) and spain (es) causing dulipication issues and showing in both search engines.

I dont think geotargeting in webmaster tools would be the action or setting a lang attribute.

Let me know what you think I should I do.

[MotionPoint]

Hi Antonio,

Just make sure to keep it consistent within markets and languages, at this moment you have to make a decision for your global domain structure and that depends on your marketing/business strategy and technology capabilities.

I'll use Canada as an example of URLs I have seen:

www.domain.ca (EN content)

www.domain.ca/fr (FR-ca Content)

www.domain.com/fr-ca/ (FR-ca content

fr.domain.com (FR content)

ca.domain.com/fr (FR-ca content)

I can keep giving you examples, on how easy is to create a big mess with a global structure. In the case of www.motionpoint.com we use subdomains for languages not for countries, but we keep it consistent for the whole site but Spanish, which we should have ES instead of Espanol. but that will give you the idea.

The more clear structure you have the easier is for search engines to relate your content to a language or market.

Let me know if this helps.

Blas

[Melia]

Hi Motion Point,

What do you mean standardized URL? Do you mean ccTLDs with subfolders or subdomains of regional languages?

[MotionPoint]

Hi Antonio,

I agree with the recommendations by John Barth, however, I would suggest to have a standardized URL structure for your country & language URLs. To identify your right structure think about your .com site targeting Switzerland, you need at least 3 languages (DE,FR,IT) plus I guess English. You will need to differentiate country and language.

If you need further help please IM me.

Thanks

Blas

[john4math]

The best thing to do is set up the geotargeting in Webmaster Tools for Google, and for other search engines, set the country and language you're targeting on the HTTP headers or in a meta tag (see here).

Your English version is probably a lot more popular and has a lot more backlinks to it than your regional versions, so it will rank better as compared to your region-specific subdomains.

To make it easier to find the right version, you could make it more clear on your site how to find the different international versions.  For example, if you can't read English, you won't know to click a link that says "international versions".  We got around this on the site I work on by using flags in the UI, since most people are familiar with the concept of each country having a different flag. (see http://au.ixl.com/ for example).