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Hi Thomas,

If a page doesn't have an equivalent on the other country version then you don't need to specify hreflangs really, you can just specify the one of the page that exist if you want, to keep the consistency, although if you see: the goal of the hreflang is to specify Google which is the "best" URL to show in their results when a search is done and there are many that could be relevant as they target the same queries, but should be targeted to different audiences, since in this case there will be only one, then it's not necessary to do it.

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Allie,

Can you please specify for which type of sites you were moving to and to which Web structure you moved? For example, if you moved from ccTLDs to sub-directories on a new domain.

In this case about international migrations is not only that you validate the typical migration best practices of 301-redirects from old to new Web structure, updates of new links and XML sitemap, but also that you make sure that the new web structure where you are migrating is correctly geolocating to the appropriate country markets, geolocating the subdirectories or subdomains in GSC if you're not using a ccTLD, using hreflang annotations, making sure the content is relevant and optimized for the targeted country or language, using the appropriate popular terms and keywords in those markets, etc.

So as you can see, besides the typical best practices of a migration it should be about you verifying if you kept the international targeting and configuration that you might even have had in the past and now you don't ... and how you're keeping the relevance that you used to have too.

Thanks,

Aleyda

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 Cosi,

Check also if you have registered the right protocol of your domain http vs. https or if you have register the right subdomain (maybe you're not using www or non-www, but another subdomain?) - definitely looks as the type of situation where you haven't register the property with the "right" name  and the final location of your site where your content and information is (maybe you're redirecting to another place?) if you don't see any data for it, neither indexation, crawling or search visibility.

Another hypothesis would be that you still have very very few pages and that's why you don't obtain any data for the search visibility, however, you should be able to see it on the crawling and indexation reports.

The final one would be that you're blocking all crawling and indexation from happening on your site and therefore you don't have any. Take a look at the robots.txt configuration, also any potential blockage at other levels, such as server level in htaccess or even with the noindex meta robots tags (although that would block the indexation and not the crawling).

Thanks,

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 Rudd,

You have answered yourself to your questions by giving the background of the issue (thanks for doing it too as this is key to identify these type of issues):

"A week ago we changed our canonical links which were actually randomly referring from .be > .nl and .co.uk to .com."

This was certainly the problem which is still causing this as a consequence today... as you were telling before to Google that the original versions of your Belgian pages were the Dutch ones, and the same with the UK version pointing to the .COM one, so Google did what you were specifying and that's the reason why it was showing these other pages in their cache instead of the Belgian and UK ones, because they were "their originals". This has nothing to do with hreflang... it had to do with the way you were configuring your canonicals and what it meant.

It's great that you already fixed your canonicals though The thing is that Google seems to not having yet updated the information... you will certainly give it a bit of more time if that just happened a week ago. My recommendation is that you should resubmit for recrawling your Belgian and UK versions via Google Search Console so Google recognizes your current configuration and not the old one... once they do it, they will correctly show the right content in the cache, as now you have your canonicals set to inform that they're the original versions of themselves.

Thanks,

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,

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,

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!

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 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 there!

The best way to create content targeted to each of the countries audiences is to develop a keyword/queries and competition research for each one of them, to identify how the users search in each one of them. Note that even if there are many countries speaking the same language the terms might be different due to localization (centre vs. center, flat vs. apartment, trousers vs. pants, etc.), seasonality, audience preferences, etc.

Here are a few guides where I share how to start doing international SEO where I include tips and steps for the initial analysis:

• https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-to-international-seo/
• http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/international-seo-strategy-guide/

The tools that you will use and the way you will do the keyword research is the same than the one you would do it for English in the US... as most of the keyword/competition research tools support other countries too, from Google Keyword Planner, to SEMrush, SearchMetrics, KWFinder, KeywordTool.io, etc. what is important is that you choose the right language/country combination when doing the research and if you're not a native speaker, that you hire one to support you, as it's important to have a real understanding on how you will target your international target audience.

If you have any other doubt, just let me know!

Aleyda

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 Marcel,

Content duplication shouldn't be an issue if you are using ccTLDs targeting to each country (as you are already doing with The Netherlands & Belgium), the geolocalization feature is disable in the Google Search Console already when you are using ccTLDs as they are "automatically" geolocated to the country of the extension. In fact, this is the "ideal" way to internationalize your web if you're targeting to countries (and not languages) and give the best possible signal to Google that you are targeting to different countries, as in this case.

Nonetheless, additionally you should also implement hreflang annotations: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en in order to avoid the situation that due to a higher authority -with stronger link profile- one of the domains rank instead of the other in the non-relevant country. I've seen that you are already including hreflang annotations on your sites pages, however these are not correctly implemented because you are only pointing to the other country URL and specifying its language and country.

You need to always specify the language and country of the own page where you are adding the annotation as well as its alternative (check out the specification I included above). Please read: https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool and use this tool to see the type of tags you need to add: http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/. This is how you're going to avoid showing a result for the NL in BE and viceversa.

However, the problem that you describe though sounds like if you have suffered from a lost of organic search visibility due to other reasons that don't have to do with internationalization: whether being affected after an update, a configuration change or issue on your site, etc. since I went to check your SEO visibility profile on SEMrush for NL: https://www.semrush.com/nl/info/lavistarelatiegeschenken.nl+(by+organic_positions)?positions=lost that show a few keywords with a negative trend and an overall negative visibility behavior on the site: https://www.semrush.com/nl/info/lavistarelatiegeschenken.nl+(by+organic) since January specifically.

My recommendation is that you run a full SEO audit, instead of just focusing on international configuration that is very unlikely to cause this -unless you had release a new international version that wasn't correctly targeted, but is not your case- and verify especially if this coincides with a recent update (in January there were a few that you can see here: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and https://www.seroundtable.com/google-fluctuations-continue-likely-not-penguin-21489.html) and if you are suffering from content optimization issues for example that could have triggered this.

If you have any other question just let me know!

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 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!

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 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 there,

The best way to solve Google's search result misalignment issues is by using hreflang annotations in order to specify the language and country target for each one of your different sites pages and refer to Google to the relevant version in each case. Please check:

• Google's specification to use hreflang annotations.
• Examples of misalignment situations (as yours) and the explanation on how to use the hreflang annotations with a tool.
• More examples on how many different sites use hreflang annotations

I'm pretty positive that if you use the annotations correctly the situation will improve

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Fisken,

The best way to proceed depends on who you want to target:

• If you look to target a global or location independent English speaking audience (they might be in any country, the US, UK, Europe, etc.): Using a .com (or any generic domain, which won't be restricted to a specific country) will be the best way to go.
• If you look to target only English speakers located in Sweden: The easiest way would be to enable a sub-directory in your current .se domain: yourbrand.se/en/. If a sub-directory is not possible, then you can also enable a sub-domain for the new language, although if the site is small, I would recommend the sub-directory as it's easier to set and it inherits in a direct way the current popularity you have from your current version. This is not so straight-forward when working with sub-domains. Please, keep in mind that this option is only good if you really want to just target English speakers located in Sweden, not abroad; as if you keep your English version inside your .se domain it will be automatically geotargeted to Sweden.
• If you look to target a specifically located English speaking audience abroad: Use the country specific ccTLD to target its English speaking audience. For example, if you want target specifically people in the UK or Australia, the best would be that you use a .uk or a .au ccTLD for each case. Choose this option only if you really want to focus your English speaking version to people located in a specific country.

For more international SEO information, please take a look at:

• International SEO Fundamentals
• International SEO Checklist 
• 7 International SEO Factors 

If you have any doubts, just let me know!

Hi Kyle,

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

I hope these help

Hi Sam,

To launch a new international version targeting a new country you have 3 options: ccTLDs, sub-directories and sub-domains, as shown here. All of them have pros and cons:

• ccTLDs: The best to geolocate and ideally if you have the resources this would be the way to go. However it might be harder at the beginning to grow their popularity as they will be independent domains (won't be able to inherit the popularity of the current, older domain). Nonetheless, by using the ccTLD search engines will identify in a much more direct way that you're targeting to another country.
• Sub-directories: Under the main domain, you would need to enable one for each additional country. With them you'll be able to "inherit" and consolidate the popularity of the main domain which will help at the beginning to get traction to rank. However, you will need to additionally geolocate each sub-directory with Google Webmaster Tools so the search engine identifies that they're targeting to different countries.
• Sub-domains: In the main domain, you would need to enable one for each additional country. Here the consolidation of popularity is not so straight-forward as in sub-directories as sub-domains are also seen sometimes as independent entities but they might be better when you need to enable a complex and deep Web structure for which you don't want a sub-directory as it will add a an additional level of deepness in the URL. Sub-Domains also need to be geolocated with Google Webmaster Tools.

For all cases, you can also use hreflang annotations to specify the language and country targeting for each page.

I hope this helps!

Aleyda

Hi there,

Bing also does and Yandex too. Unfortunately I can't confirm this with Baidu though and haven't seen any online documentation. I'll let you know if I'm able to confirm!

I hope this helps!

Hi Thomas,

I've seen that you're language targeting through different sub-directories, that although is not the ideal solution if you want to specifically optimize and target to different countries (not languages), is the least expensive solution at the beginning when enabling international Web versions.

The sub-directories also allow all of your international versions to inherit and consolidate the authority of the domain as a single entity (instead of spreading it and need to develop independent authority if they were placed in sub-domains or enabled in ccTLDs, if you decide to geotarget).

If in the future you identify that you're having issues to specifically target some countries with the language target approach and you already have enough resources, then it might be time to geotarget, enabling different countries versions of your site for the UK, another of the US, etc.

Take a look at the following resources that will also give you more criteria to take into consideration and information about the International SEO process:

• International SEO Checklist
• International SEO Do's & Don'ts 
• International SEO Tools 

I hope this helps!

Hi Denise,

The first thing to do is to make sure that Google mobile/smartphone crawlers are able to correctly find and index the mobile subdomain, which is from what you describe the issue you have. In order to do this, you should verify:

• How your mobile site crawled by Google mobile/smartphone crawlers. You can do it with individual mobile pages going to the "Fetch as Google" option in Google Webmaster Tools and also crawl your whole site with Screaming Frog using the mobile user agents (you can select it by going to the "User Agent" option in the "Configuration" section). Like this you will be able to check if the mobile crawlers are able to find the correct site version and all of the URLs or if they are incorrectly redirected.
• If you have added canonical tags pointing from the mobile pages to the desktop ones without adding the "rel alternate" tags pointing from the desktop URLs to the mobile versions, as specified here. Or if you're not correctly using the canonical annotations placed in your mobile URLs in any other way too!
• If you are disallowing the m. subdomain with a robots.txt by mistake.
• If you are noindexing the pages in the m subdomain with the meta robots tag by mistake.

I hope this helps!

Aleyda

Hi Paul,

In order to give you an answer about the best international Web structure, could you please confirm: Where's your target audience for your site? Do you want to target the audience of some specific countries (those where you will have the courses from)? Or do you want to target audience that speak a specific language abroad? Could you please confirm the country and language target for each one please?

For hreflang tags best practices you can refer to this post I wrote at the Moz blog with examples and a tool to help you generate them.

You can still using "self" referral rel canonical annotations in each one of your pages since these won't be seen as duplicated (they will be whether targeting to different languages or in the same language but to different countries) but you don't need to use cross-language or cross-country, as Google describes in their international FAQ.

It's important to note that each of your international Web versions should feature specific content optimized for each one of them in the relevant language, targeting its specific audience, from Titles, Meta Descriptions, URLs, all should be in the relevant language, with specific terms used by the visitors you want to attract. This is why doing a full initial research to identify if there's enough volume in each country and language to compensate to build independent Web versions is fundamental.

Please, take a look at this International SEO Checklist I published at the Moz blog, that will help you validate each step you need to take for an international SEO process and take a look at the slides of my MozCon presentation about International SEO, where I describe and share resources for each one of them.

Thanks!

Hi Andrew,

Passing or not W3C won't mean your site is mobile friendly or not, there are other, far more meaningful criteria and validations you should do. Foe example:

• Your site is correctly shown and accessible through the most popular devices used by your users. You can use Opera Mobile Emulator to test it.
• Your site loads fast in mobile devices (that usually have also more speed restrictions). You can use PageSpeed Insights to test it.

In dependance of what type of mobile site approach you have followed (parallel mobile web under a different URL structure, dynamic serving or responsive Web design) you also have good practices and additional recommendations that you should assess.

Please take a look at this Moz post where I shared the answers to the most common questions during a Mobile SEO process, you will likely find the answers to your questions there.

I hope this helps!

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 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 Greg, great to hear that it's working ok and was a cache issue. Thanks for the update!

Hi there,

I see that it's whosjack.org that you have redirected to http://wjlondon.com/ at the moment, so I guess you have already done the migration? I see that you already have some internal pages indexed in whosjack.org, although you have also 301-redirected them to http://wjlondon.com/ (check if all the internal links go to the new URLs, also use the change of address option in Google Webmaster Tools).

Ideally, especially at the beginning, you should focus on a single domain, to consolidate your content and popularity. Additionally, you should avoid featuring the same content on two domains, since it would cause content duplication issues.

For domain migrations, take a look at these best practices, where I also link to other resources that will help you to plan and implement to minimize any errors and negative SEO impact.

I hope it helps!

Hi there,

Link building is about earning popularity and authority endorsements by your audience --as a consequence of having effectively connected with them, they have found your site, services and products useful--, so if your Website is targeted to a specific audience in a country then, although is true that search engines will also take into consideration links from any other sources, what is natural and consistent with your site targeting, is that these links come from the country audience that the site is targeting.

In order to implement this, identify which are the most popular sites, blogs, media in your industry for that country --and in general for that country too--, who are linking to your competitors in that country, who are your industry influencers in that country too... by doing this you will likely better understand and identify a scalable link building strategy to better connect with your audience in that specific country.

I hope this helps!

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!

Hello there!

Like Wesley mentioned before the best way to avoid any "non-desired" crawling and indexing of your development or testing environment is by requiring authentication (whether with htaccess or your own programmed login/password screen).

Unfortunately sometimes there have been situations when search crawlers don't necessarily follow robots.txt directives. Additionally, beyond search engines you might want to protect your development or testing environment, making sure that only people with the required access to it can enter. Because of this, the best way to go is requiring authentication to access to your subdomains, not robots.txt.

I hope this help!

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!

Hi there,

Could you please elaborate more and share an example of the type of input and also the result you want to obtain?

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 Simon,

I agree with Chris comments. The way you're implementing the "seasonality" update is certainly not the most SEO friendly nor the easiest to implement (by replicating your entire structure in your main and a sub-domain, which is not the best from a user experience, architecture and crawling perspective, even if you manage to not fall into content duplication issues by using canonicals or noindex, follow meta robots).

There are many websites that update their content based on the season, for example, take a look at how Zappos does it, by enabling many offers in the available spots of their home page, giving them enough visibility, that take the user towards a internal landing pages gathering the offers targeting that season (which are the ones that will rank for those season keywords and you can re-use each year) or directly to the categories of the type of products in offers. If you need to update your look and feel you can do it without touching the Website structure, by updating your menu, text, background colors through CSS and even enabling some additional design elements, that won't affect the site architecture.

I hope this helps!

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,

As Eric mentioned before, the solution will depend on how much unique content is there in the paginated pages (from the main category page): If there is very very little unique content, crawling and indexing them won't really help on earning more search visibility with them (usually in these cases would be additional long-tail type of keywords for that product category) but just to consume the crawlers time and effort. Being this the case then the best way would be to canonicalize the paginated pages towards each one of their appropriate main product category page.

On the other hand, if the possibility exist to differentiate them: By featuring additional pages descriptions for each one of the paginated category pages or users reviews or ratings, or product descriptions of enough length, that can serve to give additional relevance value, then the best way to go would be to implement the rel next & prev annotations.

Hi David, Even if users search for a generic, non-geotargeted keyword, in dependence of the type of keyword (potential local businesses or services), user's history, location, intend, etc. Google can end-up geotargeting it and provide users with a blended or maps type of results too. If this is the case you're talking, then what Brian's commented above would be the right way to go: If your business is relevant and has presence nationwide create optimized, relevant landing pages for each of your cities starting with the most important ones, those you look to attract traffic with (featuring specific information about your business or services for them, and if you have physical presence in each one of them, then your address and phone, creating if possible additional presence for each one in Google+ for businesses too). Thanks!

Hi again. I've just seen your answer above, that you also have the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

In your htaccess so I've added it before too:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

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

and again worked fine! Do you have something additional to that?

Thanks!

It's there something else then in your htaccess? I also checked it with http://htaccess.madewithlove.be/ and worked fine. Could you please test it with another domain so you can take a look it's ok? I'm afraid that it might be something else that you have configured there and that's why it doesn't work since the code is alright.

Hi there,

To be able to give you an answer, could you please confirm: Do you want to apply specific rules to the pages inside the /development/ subdirectory that override the ones that are already included in the root file htaccess or something else?

Thanks for the confirmation!

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 Juan Miguel,

For the non-www to www redirects, from http://piensapiensa.es to http://www.piensapiensa.es you can use:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

On the other hand, to redirect: http://piensapiensa.com and  http://www.piensapiensa.com to http://www.piensapiensa.es you can use:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^piensapiensa.com [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.piensapiensa.es/$1 [r=301,nc,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.piensapiensa.com [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.piensapiensa.es/$1 [r=301,nc,L]

Thanks,

Aleyda

Hi Ryan,

For non-www to www redirects (for all the URLs under the domain) you can use:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Thanks!