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Hi there,

The best way to enable a new country version --in this case for Canada-- is:

• Enabling an international Web structure, ideally with a ccTLD for the country, in this case: yourbrand.ca and if this is not possible due to technical or resources restrictions, then do it through a sub-directory under your current generic domain: yourbrand.com/ca/

• If at some point you need to enable additional language versions for a country, you can extend your structure like this:

• With ccTLDs:

• For English: yourbrand.ca

• For French: yourbrand.ca/fr/

• With sub-directories:

• For English: yourbrand.com/ca-en/

• For French: yourbrand.com/ca-fr/

• When you use sub-directories you can register them independently in Google Webmaster Tools and geotarget them.

• You can always (whether ccTLDs or sub-directories) use the hreflang annotations to inform Google about your different pages language and country targeting.

• Make sure to translate and localize all the information of your pages: From URLs in the appropriate languages, to titles, meta descriptions, headings, text, currency, addresses, etc.

• Always link between the different country versions through a crawlable menu.

• Avoid automatic redirects, is far better to suggest the appropriate version as Amazon does here with their Spanish version.

• Build your new countries versions popularity, targeting locally relevant and authority Websites in your sector there.

Take a look at this International SEO checklist I published some days ago at Moz with the most important steps you need to take for an International SEO process.

I hope this helps!

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 there,

I've checked your ranking  with a non-personalized result and I see your website is ranking with this specific page: www.office1web.ie/office-furniture that has in its title both the Office and Desks keywords:

"Office Furniture** | Desks and Desking | Tables at Office1web.ie**"

As you can also see in this screenshot: http://www.screencast.com/t/tuMZvCKku

Additionally, although the page content is targeting the "Office Furniture" keyword is also featuring information about Office Desks which mixed with any potential incoming external or internal links with this anchor text and the overall popularity of this specific page (along with the relatively low competition that you can verify with the domain popularity and page popularity of the other ranking pages) could positively influence its rankings for this query.

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 Benjita,

The best way would be to migrate the content that you still want to keep (the one that is getting visits from your users, getting organic search visibility, rankings and traffic) from the old blog: www.ourcompany.blogspot.co.uk to the new address at: www.ourcompany.co.uk/blog/ (great choice on using a subdirectory for the blog, btw, since it's usually better than subdomains).

In order to do this, the best is to implement 301 redirects from the old blog URLs to their new addresses:

www.ourcompany.blogspot.co.uk/blog-post-here.html 301 redirect to www.ourcompany.co.uk/blog/blog-post-here.html

In order not only to take your users from the old to the new destination, but also pass the link popularity value from the old to the new, and be able to keep the rankings that the old ones were getting.

If at some point you decide that you don't want to take certain content to the new location, then it's recommended that you assess what will be the impact of it: Is content that is getting a lot of traffic and ranking well? Is it because it is duplicated or non-relevant content anymore? If at some point it is getting organic search visibility and traffic then you might want to redirect this content to pages in the new blog location that will address the same information: For example, if you had a post A and post B talking about the same topic and you want to only enable a post A in the new blog, then 301 redirect post B to the post A at the new location, the relevance will be kept and you will be able to consolidate it all in a more relevant, better organized Web architecture. So this can be seen as an opportunity for you to improve your current organization.

Besides implementing 301 redirects from each of the old URLs to their new addresses on the new blog, it's also important that you:

• Update links going to the  URLs in the old blog to the new one
• Generate an XML sitemap for the new blog, create a Google Search Console profile for it and make sure you submit it.

Check out migration best practices at: https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos and https://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

I hope this helps!

Aleyda

Hi there Saijo,

The .com.au ccTLD is by default already geolocated to Australia so unfortunately it's not recommended to be used to target other countries. Please see Google's ccTLDs treatment here where it says: "These are tied to a specific country (for example .de for Germany, .cn for China), and therefore are a strong signal to both users and search engines that your site is explicitly intended for a certain country.".

So if you want to use only one property to target many countries then you should use a gTLD with subdirectories for each country and geolocate them with the Google Search Console. You can also use hreflang annotations to avoid international search misalignments issues too but this can't "override" the ccTLD geolocation preference (in fact, if you go to Google Search Console with a ccTLD you'll see is already targeted to its specific country and cannot be changed).

The other option is to set specific ccTLDs for each country, but not using one ccTLD to target other or many countries for which is not targeted by default as you suggest. Sorry it doesn't work that way!

Hi Daniel,

I agree with Emanuele, you can invest your time and resources in much more valuable, long-term link building strategies, that will be much more beneficial for your clients without risks that links from directories that are not necessarily that relevant or an authority towards your industry.

Instead of thinking where to create links with high PageRank you should instead identify along with your clients how you can create and promote valuable and attractive assets (from content, guides, tools, giveaways, contests, etc.) with them in order to not only improve their Website popularity (with natural links, shares, references, +1's, citations, etc.) but that are also aligned with their business goals and allow you to improve your branding, loyalty, conversions, etc.

If you have a bit of time you should watch the #RCS presentation of Wil Reynolds at Mozcon last year where he covered this topic.

You can see what I talk about and get inspired by taking a look at this summary with the slides of the latest LinkLove presentations.

By switching your focus on building links like this you can really create a competitive advantage over your local competitors that from what you shared might still be building links in a more "artificial" way.

I hope this helps!

Hi Chris,

To redirect your old domain to the new domain with the same path for all the URLs except a specific directory, for example: /blog/ that is going to be renamed /newblog/ in your new domain, it will be:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On</ifmodule>

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/blog/(.) [NC]
RewriteRule ^blog/(.)$ http://www.newabc.com/newblog/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^abc.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.abc.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newabc.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Jesus,

Here's the Mexico section in Yahoo where you can include your Mexican targeted website.

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,

There's much more you can do:

• Link all of your language versions using a crawlable language menu. Like this Google will be able to initially crawl and index these versions.
• Create a Google Webmaster Tools profile for each one of your language versions independently, like this you will be able to generate a specific XML for each (besides tracking each one of them much more easily), and if they are not only language targeted but also, country targeted, you can also geolocate them through GWT too.
• Add to each specific XML sitemap the hreflang annotations referring to the language of each one of your websites as specified here. To help you with this you can use this MediaFlow tool.
• Add the hreflang annotations in the HTML too, in the head section of the HTML of each one of your different pages, as specified here.

The more of these you do, the easier will be for Google to identify that these new version of your sites are targeting these additional languages.

Thanks!

Hi Dan,

What is is important in these types of scenarios is that you make sure that the redirects are relevant from a user and SEO perspective, since although the link popularity from the old pages will pass by just 301-redirecting them to their new location, what it is important to preserve is also the relevance of these redirects, since these old pages could be already not only externally linked, but also ranking for keywords relevant to their specific content, so if you do a "bulk" redirect to a new page that is not optimized for these keywords (and is very unlikely that a single page is optimized and relevant for a high diverse amount of content and keywords that are at the moment covered through many different pages) you will lose those rankings.

Because of this, take a look at which are the keywords bringing organic traffic to the "old pages" you want to redirect and what you should do to preserve this organic traffic is to redirect them to the new pages on your new domain that also cover these topics, so they will still be relevant for them and when you redirect to them, you won't not only refer the popularity but also keep the rankings and make sure that your users are finding that they were looking for (or at least, something similar).

In case you need to provide information to your users telling them that they're being redirected since the old pages have been migrated because of an acquisition, you can do it so through a message "banner" like the one that Yahoo uses here to warn visitors that they have been redirected to another language version, in a non-intrusive way.

The best way to implement 301-redirects is server side. In case you're using an Apache server then you will need to edit your .htaccess file that you can access easily via FTP for example, and should be located in your root domain.

If you would redirect your old domain pages to a new one preserving the URL structure you would be able to do this with rewriting rules, very straightforward in this case:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Nonetheless, if you need to implement them in a page to page level, since the URL names of in the new domain are not the same than in the old one, you might need to implement them in a page to page basis:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^oldurl.html$ http://www.newdomain.com/newurl.html

I hope this helps!

Aleyda

Hi there,

In order to rank for specific languages and countries is important that you build a crawlable and indexable site structure, with their own URLs that will be ranked (the Google translate plugin won't help you with this), with optimized content for each one of them, and after, you build links from sites in these countries towards them. Remember the fundamentals of SEO: Is Relevance (relevant text content that is indexed and optimized) and popularity (links, citations, references).

Please take a look at this presentation I did a month ago that will take you through the most important aspects of the process: from researching the best way you should target the audiences (language vs. country targeting), the best type of web structure for your international versions (ccTLDs, subdirectories or subdomains), the usage of specific annotations in order to tell Google the content is in a specific language (hreflang tags), and then of course, identify the appropriate relevant sources for each country to build links from, etc.

To go more in depth with your international SEO strategy, take a look at this post, where I also share some dos and don'ts and finally, these recommendations to take into consideration when developing your international web versions.

As you can see, this cannot be achieved with plugins to automatically translate content, is a real investment to identify the best language / country opportunity and then develop a whole site structure targeting them, this is why it's very important to validate well at the beginning and do a in depth research, so it's cost effective and help you effectively achieve your international SEO goals.

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Norberto,

The IP location it's a signal although it used to be stronger in the past and having a US IP won't interfere on ranking in Spain, for example. Now Google has additional and stronger  signals: like the use of a ccTLD or geolocating in Google Webmaster Tools, plus specifying the region also in the hreflang annotations and your content itself: adding the location where it's targeted to in the different elements of the pages.

Of course, if you can invest on hiring a hosting service with an IP in the location where you're targeted and won't suppose a too high investment for you, do it (it will likely impact positively on the site speed, for example), but as also happens with other factors and signals in SEO, is that the benefits you get should surpass the cost of the changes you'll do.

Thanks!

Hi Paul,

As Andy mentioned earlier, the complexity here comes by the fact that these IDs cannot be simply removed since they play a role in the Magento product/category system.

The first step would be that you identify how these are generated to identify the best way to optimize it to become relevant or at least doesn't add more depth and complexity in the URL structure.

I've seen that there's a URL rewrite area in Magento with some system configuration options that you might want to take a look here and to this in-depth guide explaining Magento URL rewrites.

I've also seen that a similar question has been asked in Stackoverflow and as you can see the potential alternatives discussed here goes into Magento's system configuration.

Hope this helps!

Aleyda

Hi Jesus,

No, is considered a quality directory because of its authority. Plus, not all requests are published, you pay for them to consider your submission but if it's spammy or non-relevant won't be published. This is the type of criteria that you can apply to any directory really: What's their authority? what's the quality of the other links featured? Do they charge to review the submission or directly publish the link?

On the other hand, one spammy link won't hurt your site (unless is the only link it has or one of the few!) it's required more than that. You might want to consider also doing other type of tactics and building a full link building strategy for your site instead of concentrating so much on a few directory links though.

Here's a list with ideas and another with resources to inspire you.

Thanks,

Aleyda

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:

• For the US: yourbrand.com/category-a/
• For the UK: yourbrand.com/en-gb/category-a/
• For Spain: yourbrand.com/es-es/categoria-a/
• For Mexico: yourbrand.com/es-mx/categoria-a/

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:

• Add a link rel="alternate" tag in each of the desktop URLs referring to their specific mobile URL versions and a link rel="canonical" tag in all of the mobile URLs referring to their specific desktop URLS versions, as specified here by Google. Take a look at an example here
• Configure the appropriate canonical tags in your Desktop URLs as specified here by Google, so they always refer to their original URL versions (without parameters). This means that in http://www.website.com/?m=off you should add this canonical tag:```
  pointing to its original URL version... and do this with every URL (referring to its own original URL version).

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

Hi Thomas,

The "ideal" scenario to target different countries is through ccTLDs: yourbrand.es, yourbrand.com.mx, yourbrand.co.uk. If this is feasible for you (from a technical and resources perspective), then you shouldn't use sub-directories, but show the content directly through your ccTLDs, targeting each relevant country with them.

On the other hand, if ccTLDs are too expensive for you at the moment, what you can do is to buy them so you can "protect" your brand for the future, and right now only use sub-directories for each country that you want to target inside your generic domain: yourbrand.com/es/ for spanish, yourbrand.com/uk/ for the UK, yourbrand.com/fr/ for France, and directly show your country targeted information through each one of them.

Since you will be using sub-directories to show the information to your international audience, then what you should link internally through your site and share with your users are the different sub-directories versions (not the ccTLDs), although since your ccTLDs will be "parked" you can 301-redirect them to their relevant countries sub-directories, just in case someone arrive to them.

Then what you can do is to geotarget each subdirectory through Google Webmaster Tools to the relevant country, where you can register each one of them independently.

Additionally, you can use the hreflang annotation in the different country versions, pointing out the language and country of each HTML.

For more information about international SEO please take a look at this checklist that I just published a few days ago at Moz, with the main aspects that you should take into consideration when going International.

I hope this helps and if you still have any question please let me know!

Your registrar usually gives you the option to choose if it's a temporary or a permanent situation so it forwards with 302 or 301 depending on that. Nonetheless, you can check directly yourself very easily with: http://web-sniffer.net/ by taking a look at the HTTP response header of the forwarded domain (and see if it's a 301). Good luck with the new domain

Hi Michael,

For Belgium, if you want to target both the French and Flemish speakers and you have identified that have enough search volume for the keywords that you would like to rank and convert that will compensate the development of these two versions from a technical and content perspective (remember that they will need content in each relevant language), then you would need to enable a directory for each one:

• www.headoverheels-fashion.com/be-fr/ With content in French targeted to Belgians
• www.headoverheels-fashion.com/be-nl/ With content in Flemish targeted to Belgians

In this case, both directories should be registered and targeted independently in Google Webmaster Tools to Belgium, nonetheless, the data you would get in each will be unique since they will related to the keywords in different languages.

You can also use the hreflang annotation for each one of your different country versions to specify its country and language as Google describes here.

I hope this helps. If you still have any doubt please let me know!

Hi there,

In order to increase your rankings in German speaking search results it's recommended that you:

• Use the rel="alternate" hreflang="de" tag, as specified here by Google in order to inform them that this content is in German and targeted to these users.
• Build links from specific German speaking websites, from blogs, communities, forums, news sites, etc. specially those hosted in German IPs and with German  (.DE) or Swiss (.CH) ccTLDs
• Since I understand that you're using a .com domain to rank for all of the German speaking countries with the same content, both Germany and Switzerland and not specifically targeted to a specific country (so your site is language, not country targeted) in this case you're not able to geotarget it in Google Webmaster Tools which would be also an additional possibility if you had for example, a specific German version targeting Germany with: yourdomain.com/de/ or targeting to Switzerland with: yourdomain.com/ch/, nonetheless, if at some point you are, is important that you also know of this setting. Moreover, if you switch towards a country targeted domain structure, instead of using a generic domain such .com the best is to switch over a .de targeting Germany and .ch targeting Switzerland.

These additional signals should help!

Hi Kyle,

For Baidu search rankings check Rank Tracker (desktop) and Rank Watch (Web based), they both do it.

I hope these help

Hi again Dan,

I would recommend that you first follow this checklist so you make sure your whole migration is SEO friendly and that you're not forgetting anything in the migration process and that you validate everything well.

The best process is the one the most straightforward one: do the migration as simple as possible (from one domain to the other with 301 redirects) and avoid changing many things at the same time. Please keep in mind that redirects will help but is not the only thing you should do, take a look at the checklist and you'll see.

It's actually natural that in the following days after the migration your rankings drop, search engines need time to crawl and index again the URLs in the new site, identify that you have moved your content from the old domain to the new one and with the help of the 301-redirects.

Among the additional things you should do to have an SEO friendly migration that you'll see in the checklist are that you should notify Google that you've moving your domain through Google Webmaster Tools (there's an option for this), create a new profile and generate a sitemap for the new domain, verify that the 301-redirects are all well implemented, that the content relevance is also kept in those pages for the keywords they were ranking with, that external and internal links going to the old urls are updated and now go to the new ones, prioritizing those landing pages that had the most highly relevant traffic, trying to change the minimum from the structure -keep one change at a time to be able to identify any issue-, check and follow-up on crawling errors). If you do everything what is recommended on the checklist little by little you should see how you start regaining your rankings again, but you need to give time (usually at least a couple of months if everything goes right).

So, there are a lot of other factors and I will make sure to follow the recommendations to minimize the negative impact, although is impossible of not having it. What is definitely not recommended is that you are updating many times your URLs or that you redirect many times, this is why this process should be effectively planned and designed validating all the aspects from the beginning and making sure that the more relevance signals you can keep (like the keywords in the appropriate elements of the pages) the best it is and making one change at a time makes things much more simple (first migrate, then one the effects of the migration have gone you can start optimizing and changing the new domain architecture) otherwise it can get really messy and this is what you're already experiencing I'm afraid.

I hope this helps! Aleyda

Hi there!

There can be geolocation factors that could affect your mobile search results, additionally maybe some of the sites that you're competing against for desktop are not that relevant towards that location but your site is, or maybe for some of these sites Google identifies that they're not suitable to be displayed in Mobile and even if you don't have a specific Mobile version your site can be still identified as suitable to be shown in Mobile search results and for any of these type of reasons you might you end-up ranking better.

In order to verify well how you attract the visibility with your desktop site with mobile search results:

• Take a look at your Google Analytics, verify specifically the organic search traffic coming only from mobile devices. Identify which keywords are bringing this traffic and the pages that these visitors are going to.
• Go to Google Webmaster Tools and select the "Traffic >> Search Queries" and select the "Mobile" filter and see which keywords and pages are giving you mobile search visibility.
• Use a mobile emulator or a user agent switcher to simulate a mobile search result and closely analyze how your current pages are shown there, who you're competing with, your link popularity and relevance against them, etc.

All this will give you a much better idea of your current mobile search situation. If you identify that you're already getting a reasonable amount of traffic and there can be potential, I would suggest that you do a Mobile targeted keyword research, following the steps that as I described in this Mozinar... you might identify much more opportunity through Mobile SEO.

I hope this helps!

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.

You shouldn't remove them. If you implement the 301-redirects and do everything what's described before, although it might take some time, they should be eliminated from the index while referring their value with the redirects.

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 Matthew

The IP location it's a signal although it used to be stronger in the past but is still is. Take into consideration that is not the only signal to inform Google that your site is relevant towards a specific country: The usage of a ccTLD or geolocating in Google Webmaster Tools, plus specifying the region also in the hreflang annotations and your content itself: adding the location where it's targeted to in the different elements of the pages, are also additional signals that you should align as much as you can to inform Google where is your relevant country market.

So when someone asks me this question looking to move their site towards a local hosting or a service that can provide the IP of the country where the site is targeting what I ask is that if it also makes sense to make the move for other reasons (better speed for your visitors in that country, better support, etc.) and from a cost perspective, then they should do it. Nonetheless, if it's a painful migration that will cost too much and they still have other factors to optimize, then I would likely recommend to see first the impact of these other aspects that won't cost that much to implement.

In your case is different, since from what you say is about "moving away" your server from the relevant country, then in this situation is about saving or earning in other aspects that are not SEO since you will be taking away a signal that you were already providing. So instead of this what I would do first is to try to find another service that can keep providing you the UK IP and that also meets your other requirements, trying to keep the signal you were already giving while achieving the goals you're looking to have by changing your hosting service.

In the case this is impossible, then yes, you would likely have to assume you will be losing a bit of the "geotargeted" relevance you were already giving, and in dependence how you're optimizing the other relevant factors towards this, it might have a stronger or weaker effect.

Thanks!

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:

• www.yourbrand.eu/ in English (UK, Ireland, etc.)
• www.yourbrand.eu/fr/ in French (In France, Belgium, Switzerland)
• www.yourbrand.eu/es/ in Spanish
• www.yourbrand.eu/de/ in German (for Germany, Switzerland or Austria)

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 Melissa,

To avoid your Mobile URLs to get indexed on the desktop results you need to:

• Add rel=canonical annotations in each Mobile URL pointing to their desktop URL versions
• Add rel=alternate annotations in each Desktop URL pointing to their mobile URL versions

As Google specifies here and you can see in this graphic. Additionally, you can also see in those Google recommendations how you need to set 301 redirects to refer between your mobile and desktop URLs according to the user agent (mobile or desktop) used, as you can see in this other graphic too.

If you look to optimize more your site towards Mobile SEO, you can also take a look at this Moz post I wrote some months ago.

Thanks!

Hi there,

The best way to identify if it's already safe to eliminate the 301 redirects from a previous Web migration/redesign is to verify if the old pages (you need to have a list of those old URLs) that were redirected in the past:

1. Are still crawled and indexed? (You can check the indexation easily in Google with "site:" directly, and then if you identify these old URLs in Google Search Console Search Analytics, by filtering by pages). If so, which pages? Are they also ranking still well for relevant terms? Which ones? Identify why is still ranking instead of the new version of the page: Is the redirect correctly implemented? Going to a new version that is really relevant? The old pages being linked from internal or external sources that are passing high value? What's the historical and trend of crawling activity of those pages over time? Is it going down? (that you can analyze via logs).
2. Are still getting traffic? Identify which source: is it organic search traffic? referral from other sites? You can check this by verifying the URLs activity from the old site version in Google Analytics.
3. Are still being linked? A must if you're still ranking with these pages and traffic. Verify which sources are still linking to them and which are the one passing the highest value. Make the most to update these links to go to the new URL versions to stop passing value and traffic to the old URLs.

If you verify that these old URLs are not indexed, nor getting visibility or traffic anymore either from organic search or any other traffic source, then it's ok to eliminate the redirects.

Nonetheless, if they are still getting visibility & traffic you will need to keep the redirects, otherwise you will lose those visitors (and also give a bad user experience). The goal in this case would be to ask the previous questions among others to identify the reason why are they still being indexed, linked, etc. and update the relevant links, content, etc. to change this behavior and help Google to catch up with the URLs migrations.

I hope it helps

Hi Brandon,

About your questions:

• How you call the subdirectories shouldn't be a matter: /es/ or /es-es/ (it's meant to be descriptive and short for users but non-relevant at this point as a signal towards search engines). However, what's important is how you name the URLs of each language version later: they should be in the language of the content that they show.
• If your international versions are country targeted (meant to be focused on users in a specific country and not language targeted, meant to focus on any user speaking a language) then you should geolocate them through Google Webmaster Tools.
• You should also use hreflang annotation in your different pages, referring to each URL language (and country, if they're geotargeted) too, so you won't end-up facing any content duplication issues, since you might have for example a Spanish version targeting to Mexico with a very similar Spanish copy than your Spain version.  If you add the annotations then Google will know these different URLs are targeting to different countries or languages audience and shouldn't cause a content duplication problem.
• If you can't just translate/localize the whole site structure to other languages, then it's a must that you prioritize. Start with those language / countries that have the higher current audience for your site and have the higher potential to grow too. Enable just the most important landing pages / sections of your site if you can't do them all, the ones that you can really maintain, translate / localize well, to give also the best user experience to those visitors (besides of being able to rank with them well in search engines).

Take a look at this post where I wrote about how to set an International SEO strategy well from the start and avoid running into issues in the implementation later.

Thanks!

Aleyda

Hi Muhammed,

The text of your mobile version doesn't need to be exactly the same than the one from your desktop one, in fact, by dynamically serving different HTMLs you'll have much more flexibility to optimize your mobile HTMLs as much as possible from a content, design and SEO perspective to target your mobile audience.

Just to clarify, since I know is usually a concern in this type of situation: This is not cloaking. If you show the same content to both users and crawlers of the same device type then it's ok, you'll show the same mobile optimized HTMLs versions to both mobile users and crawlers, and the other desktop optimized HTMLs, to both desktop users and crawlers.

I would recommend you to check this post I wrote some time ago with some of the most common concerns when doing Mobile SEO, where this and other questions are clarified.

Thanks!

Hi Jonathan, Thanks for your question!

The answer depends on:

• The demand: With the search behavior of your users: Do they search for your product using the type of wood in their queries? For example: "Product + Wood Type"? If your users use those terms and queries to search for your products then it would compensate to enable them specifically to be indexable instead of using just a filter that could be non-indexable in many ways (to avoid the crawling of pages that are not meant to be ranked anyway and control your crawl budget).
• The supply: The availability of products and content that you have to match those queries: Do you have enough unique products to feature for each type of wood (or whatever criteria or subcategory) that you have identified that your users search for? Would it be considered a "low quality content" page with little value and offer by the users? With no unique description? Would they end-up penalized by Panda if you decide to index them?

If you identify that there's a demand for those specific type of products that would compensate that you specifically enable these pages to be indexable and rank for them and at the same time you have enough supply, with products and descriptive content to feature in them and satisfy your users, then yes, the best would be to create a static structure for these sub-types or sub-categories, instead of just non-indexable filters. If it's not the case, then the best would be to allow your products to be browsed using them, but without indexing these pages specifically.

Would this answer your question? If you can give me more specific examples of the category levels or more specific scenario (without giving specific brand or company names if you don't want or can't) I would be able to give you a more specific answer.

Thanks!

Hi there,

Why are you looking to migrate the subdomains to subdirectories? In general, the most "natural" URL structure for a city organization would be: yourdomain.com/city/category/ since you will be able to consolidate all the popularity that you can attract to the different cities to your main domain structure and on the other hand, optimize (as you should be already doing with your subdomains) every landing page targeting each city.

Nonetheless, if you're already ranking with these subdomains for your keywords related to these cities the effort and substancial benefit that you might look to get might not compensate the effort -only if you see that you're not ranking with this structure and look to consolidate popularity-.

What is definitely fundamental that you do whether you decide to keep the subdomains or migrate to the subdirectories is that each city page (and its subpages) should feature unique, relevant content optimize for them. This shouldn't be necessarily difficult to achieve if you organize and optimize your structure to show:

• The name of each city in the titles, meta descriptions, headings.
• Add your specific office address in each city.
• Add your telephone number in each city.
• Enable and promote user generated content, like reviews, comments, ratings targeting each city.
• Create different offers or promotions for each city.

Like this, despite the fact that these city landing pages might feature similar offering (which is normal since they're the same business at the end) the content will be unique for each one of them.

I hope this helps. If you still have any doubts, please let me know.

Aleyda

Hi there,

The problem are the frames indeed. If you take a look at the cache version in Google of that page: http://kilgray.com/memoq/2015-100/help-en/index.html doesn't show where you are adding the hreflang annotations and none of the content of that page in fact: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1jRFSsVC_MwJ:kilgray.com/memoq/2015-100/help-en/index.html%3Fproject_home&num=1&hl=en&gl=es&strip=0&vwsrc=0

The issue is that with the frames is not only the hreflang annotations that Google won't be able to identify, but the all the content you have in there is not visible and therefore won't be able to rank the pages that use it... which is much more critical than the hreflang annotations.

My recommendation would be to replace the usage of frames, make sure that all of the content is shown through one piece of HTML at a time... and if you include then the hreflang annotations in the head area of the HTML Google will be able to identify them... as well as your content.

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi there,

Seems that is only a test at the moment in mobile organic search results: http://mockingbird.marketing/google-playing-with-click-to-call-mobile-organic-results/ and targeting to local type of businesses. I've checked some of the pages that were already showing these type of results and saw that not all of them were actually including schema but had their phone number prominently featured on the site as well as listed in third party local citation sources, so in this case it's likely Google identifying them with a variety of sources and definitely featuring a consistent telephone number on your site with schema as well as in citation sources won't hurt Unfortunately since it's only a test and Google hasn't really officially rolled it out it's difficult to tell at this point, but hope that this will help to get you prepared.

Thanks!

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:

https://www.google.es/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanholidays.com%2Fgb_en%2F&oq=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanholidays.com%2Fgb_en%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1174j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8

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!