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Hi Robert,
The rewrite rules shared by Patrick should work well for that although you could also use Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin that features options to do that through the control panel.
Nonetheless, in general what can be better in performance and also for tracking purposes with your site URL, leaving tracking parameters while avoiding content duplication content is to use canonical tags. You can also set them easily for Wordpress with Yoast's plugin.
I hope this helps!
Aleyda
Hi Spencer,
The rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag inclusion along with the Geotargeting option in Google Webmaster Tools (if the websites are not ccTLDs but generic domains) are solutions for these situations: When you have two websites targeting different countries with the same language and they're competing with each other in SERPs, cannibalizing their opportunities and that might end up also with content duplication issues at some point.
About your concern: "Currently for some of our keywords US is #1, UK is #4. If we implement rel alternate, will it just remove our US page".
Your US website would be removed for the UK search result pages indeed and although in the short term this might seem as counterproductive, the reality is that this result from a relevancy perspective doesn't belong there since you already have your UK website targeting those users especially.
This also means that you can also be losing opportunity by having UK users going to the US version that is not as relevant for them, so their experience can be poorer and the conversions might not be the same. Additionally, as I mentioned before you might end-up suffering from content cannibalization / duplication issues with both websites showing the same or very similar content without giving signals to Google that they're not really duplicates but two versions targeting different audiences.
Because the previous in the long-run the best is that you make the most out of your international Web versions (country versions in this case) and give the necessary signals to Google so these start ranking in these countries search results instead.
In case your US version is a .com domain and it's also attracting rankings, organic traffic and conversions from abroad, excluding the UK (for which you have your own UK website version) then you can leave that website without a specific geolocalization in Google Webmaster Tools and just specifying the language in the hreflang attribute (not the country) but if you have a specific website version for the UK then you should definitely specify that this website (whether it's a .uk ccTLD, subdirectory, subdomain or another generic domain) is geotargeting to this country.
I hope this helps!
Hi there,
Hreflang annotations serve to inform Google to which language (and additionally if you want to geotarget, country) each of your URL versions are targeted.
You can use the hreflang default annotation, as described here, when you want to show a default URL for a language / country that you're not targeting, which sounds like the situation you describe.
On the other hand, Bing doesn't support hreflang, but you can use the content language meta tag instead that they do take into consideration:
Thanks,
Aleyda
Hi Justin,
If you're targeting French as "language" and not as country, and you only have one French site version for all your french speaking users then you don't need to add the specific country, just the language to the hreflang 
It's much simpler!
------> English to the US. If you don't only target the US with it but any English speakers worldwide, then remove the US to become:
The same with the French one:
Like that you only need to add these two tags in your English and French (language targeted) URLs
The issue is that you were mixing language and country targeting which are two different things.
I hope this helps!
Hi Edward,
It's not recommended to rely on Google capacity "processing" scripts to show any key content on your site, in this case, additional language or country versions. If the information shown in the HTML code and the Google cache version of the pages is not the relevant one -and only one is shown the whole time for example- then it's not being correctly rendered. You can also verify this with the "Fetch as Googlebot" functionality from the Google Search Console.
If you want to make sure that each of your language/country versions are really accessible then the best is to make sure each piece of content is published as text in their own specific HTMLs whether in ccTLDs, subdirectories or subdomains for country versions or also, subdirectories or subdomains for language versions; making sure to use the relevant terms and topics for each language/country audiences (which might not necessarily be the literal translations among them, so a unique keyword research, content writing and optimization process by a native speaker is required)
Thanks!
Hi there,
You should add in the hreflang annotation the final URL showing the content, not one that is just 301 redirecting to another. Are you seeing errors in the Google Search Console "International Targeting" report? If you see "no return tags" errors there for Japan, then means Google is not being able to identify them.
Thanks!
Hi there!
To target countries the best way to go is with ccTLDs and if you don't have the ccTLDs then it is with subdirectories within a generic TLD, so you'll have:
Please keep in mind that the "name" of the directory here it's not important but is just to keep it usable and short and follow the language naming conventions. What it is important is that each country has its own consistent directory structure.
It's fundamental that the look and feel as well as all of the elements of each ones of your different country versions (in the different directories) are localized to target their audience: From the translation of the URLs, titles, descriptions, headings, text, etc. to the appropriate language, using the right currency, etc.
In order to geolocate each directory and inform Google that they're targeting different countries you can do it through Google Webmaster Tools with the "Geolocate" option by registering each directory independently and targeting it.
Additionally, if you have many country versions with the same language (US & UK or Spain & Mexico), in order to avoid having content duplication issues, informing Google that each one of these pages are in these languages but targeting different audiences you should use the hreflang tags as specified here.
By doing this you'll make sure you'll have the base set to target your different country search audiences with Google without running into content duplication issues.
For more information about how to establish and identify the best strategy to follow take a look at this post I wrote some time ago about International SEO strategy.
If you have any question just let me know!
Hi there!
It's ok (and needed) in these circumstances to use a parameter in the URL since you cannot simply add a direct link otherwise your mobile users who select to switch to the desktop version will end-up in a redirection loop. What you can do to avoid any type of content duplication issues in this type of settings is:
By doing this you won't have any content duplication issues. If you want to learn more about Mobile SEO take a look at the Webinar I did sometime ago in SEOmoz here and this post where I answer the most common Mobile SEO questions.
Thanks,
Aleyda
That's another question that has nothing to do with hreflang usage but about the best International SEO targeting to follow in your case and that will depend a lot on your business and capacity. I wrote about it here: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-to-international-seo/ if you still have questions you might want to open a new thread specifically asking about that topic.
Hi Wesley,
If you enable a new language version totally optimized in another language (From the URLs, to titles, descriptions, text content, comments, etc.) there shouldn't be any problem. If you want to help Google to identity that this is your French version (in this case algo specifically targeted to a Belgium language), you can use the hreflang tag specifying the language and country, as explained here, in your pages html head section. Additionally, you can add the hreflang annotations in your XML sitemap as described here. You can also use this tool to facilitate the process.
Best regards,
Aleyda
Hi Mark,
The best way to approach if your client wants to target each country with a gTLD is enabling specific subdirectories for them:
yourbrand.com/sa/ for saudi arabia
yourbrand.com/ae/ for the UAE
.. etc.
and then register and geolocate each one of them in Google Search Console International Targeting: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en
Besides this, you should use hreflang annotations in order to inform Google the relationship of the different pages you will have for each country & language, and make sure that they rank the right version for the right country/language results. You can generate them easily by using: http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/
Like this, with the geolocation in Google Search Console + the hreflang usage it's going to be understood that they're not duplicated pages, but pages targeting to different countries and versions even if the content is pretty similar or the same, although of course, I would also recommend that you really localize the content to make it very specific and as much relevant as possible to every audience -always in their own language, using their own terms-, even if they speak the same language, there are always terms and preferences that will be different, and therefore a need to personalize the content to target them.
I hope this help
Hi there,
As Marcus mentioned before, at the moment geographical targeting is country based, not per continent, so you're correct: hreflang works for languages or / and countries and the geotarget option in Google Webmaster Tools (when you're not using a ccTLD) is only for countries.
So there are really two alternatives: language targeting (although each language is different in each country) or country targeting (which is the ideal in order to connect with each audience, localizing the content as maximum and leveraging all types of local characteristics).
With language targeting you will avoid having content duplication issues (since it will be only one English or one Spanish version), nonetheless, as I mentioned, it can be tricky: The Spanish spoken in Spain is different than the one from Mexico and each other Latin American country. Seasonality and currency are different. People's culture, tastes and local characteristics too. So language based versions might serve to have a "generic" approach to these audience but not really targeting them as specific markets.
On the other hand with country targeting if you have two English versions you can refer each one to the appropriate country with hreflang, ccTLDs (if you use a generic domain, then with the geotarget option in Google Webmaster tool) and then by doing local link building focused on each country, to enhance the popularity of each version there. This would be the recommended approach. If you can't enable many countries because of resources restrictions then start with the most important ones.
More over, from what you mention about targeting Europe as a whole, even if you enable a domain of the type: www.yourbrand.eu for Europe, it is likely to be treated as a generic domain as Google specifies here, and then inside this domain what you would really have --as I understand from your description-- are language versions targeting Europe in General:
The issue comes when you have the same content in English for your American audience in www.yourbrand.com or in Spanish (for Spanish speakers in the US) in www.yourbrand.com/es/ that could cause a content duplication issue with www.yourbrand.eu/ and www.yourbrand.eu/es/.
If this is the scenario, then the best you can do is to differentiate the content, changing them by giving signals that one is targeting the US audience and the other, well, what would be English speakers in Europe. But again, there's no real support or straight-forward solution for this scenario since beyond what Google supports, is not "natural" or the best alternative from an "international audience targeting" perspective.
If you have any other information that you think would be relevant to give you additional recommendations please let me know.
I hope this helps!
Hi Thomas,
Why do you want to merge them on a single domain? If you want to consolidate everything on a single .com domain -which is recommended in case you don't want complexity and capitalize your authority better, while targeting international markets effectively-, then it would be to:
Migrate by 301-redirecting your current domains to their relevant country directories that you will enable in your .com, and that should be geolocalized independently each one through the Google Search Console (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en) to their specific countries: .com/gb/ to the UK and .com/us/ to the US, so each one of them can effectively be geo-targeted. Since you have an independent mobile site on an "m" subdomain this case you also have to do the same for them: m.yourbrand.com/gb/ geolocalized to the UK and m.yourbrand.com/us/ geolocalized to the US.
Use hreflang annotations (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en) to specify for each one of the site pages their language and country alternatives, for example:
Since you will be moving domains anyway, I'll directly migrate to the new .com site already using SSL, instead of splitting these two migrations by migrating to the .com first and then doing a migration towards the https version of the .com a few months after, the direct migration towards the https version will add maybe a bit more of complexity and additional validations to make, but since you're migrating anyway many of them you'd need to follow and do anyway.
Finally, be aware that after any change of a Web structure, specially from one domain to another (and if this other doesn't have a highly authoritative link profile yet) will always have a short-term negative effect, so is important that you start an SEO process not only to make sure you follow best practices when migrating but to validate afterwards and grow the new domains results based on what has been found on a technical, content and link profile audit and the desired results: Optimizing the new Web structure, Optimizing or creating content, optimizing or creating links, etc.
I hope this helps!
Thanks,
Aleyda
Hi there,
The hreflang annotation along the canonical tags are correctly implemented on the page, the issue you have is regarding the redirects... and it's a big issue since your UK page is not even indexed because of it.
So, to clarify, this is the logic that you should follow with hreflang annotations across canonicals, your configuration says:
When on www.americanholidays.com:
With rel="canonical" href="http://www.americanholidays.com/" /> that the original version is itself, which is ok.
With rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ie" href="http://www.americanholidays.com/" /> that this page is targeted to English speakers in the Republic of Ireland.
With rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/" /> that this is the alternative version of the page targeted to English speakers in the UK.
This is all ok! It should be the other way around for the UK version... when on http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/ it should be:
With <link <span class="html-tag">rel</link <span>="canonical" href="http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/" /> that the original version is itself, which is ok.
With <link < span="">rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ie" href="http://www.americanholidays.com/" /> that this page is the alternate targeted to English speakers in the Republic of Ireland.
With <link <span class="html-tag">rel</link <span>="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/" /> that this is the page targeted to English speakers in the UK. </link <>
Unfortunately I cannot check what you have in the UK version of the page because of the mix of 302s and 301s redirects that you have towards the Irish version, which are causing that it doesn't even get indexed on Google:
Eliminate the redirects -each page should be accessible on its own... and if you want at some point refer Irish users that might end-up going to the UK version or viceversa, what you should do is IP detection and show a little banner recommending that there's a better option for that country but not automatically redirects anywhere-. If you do this and the proper hreflang annotation configuration in all of the pages along with a geotargeting of the /gb_en/ directory in the Google Search Console to the UK (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en) you should have an ok working international Web configuration.
Thanks!