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Hello!

I was running an exercise to investigate the market around the main keyword "Retail recruitment" just for the US.

Looking for key competitors, I've found one of them blocking traffic from any other sources but USA. When you try to access that site from any other country it returns a 403 error code. I think the only reason for doing this is to avoid big companies globally based to actually find them or study them in order to compete.

The URL I'm talking about is http://www.c2recruitment.com/... What do you think? Would be another reason to do so?

I also wonder if they are doing that just to avoid undesired traffic in general as it's a kind of market with high amount of impressions but low CTR.

Third theory is that there's some SEO black-magic-for-local-seo-trick I'm missing. Any thoughts?

There are more than one possible answer for this. I believe it depends on your business needs.

You should let Google know about all the versions of the site you have via hreflang, that´s a line of code you must insert within the Let me give you an example:

Those lines are letting Google know that a specific page has an equivalent in spanish, french, portuguese and english.

All the versions should be included, even the one the visitor is actually reading.

That's the basic step, you can choose between having a folder per idiom (example.com/de) or a more specific TLD (example.de) a specific domain is great to point for specific countries and the folder structure is more suitable for pointing to different languages which may cover many countries (spanish may point only to Argentina if you use example.com.ar or to all spanish speaking countries if you choose example.com/es)

I'm sure the community will help you dig deeper on this, let me add some links to get more info on this.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

There are more than one possible answer for this. I believe it depends on your business needs.

You should let Google know about all the versions of the site you have via hreflang, that´s a line of code you must insert within the Let me give you an example:

Those lines are letting Google know that a specific page has an equivalent in spanish, french, portuguese and english.

All the versions should be included, even the one the visitor is actually reading.

That's the basic step, you can choose between having a folder per idiom (example.com/de) or a more specific TLD (example.de) a specific domain is great to point for specific countries and the folder structure is more suitable for pointing to different languages which may cover many countries (spanish may point only to Argentina if you use example.com.ar or to all spanish speaking countries if you choose example.com/es)

I'm sure the community will help you dig deeper on this, let me add some links to get more info on this.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en