Questions created by dmduco
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Rank regional homepages using canonicals and hreflangs
Here’s a situation I’ve been puzzling with for some time: The situation
Technical SEO | | dmduco
Please consider an international website targeting 3 regions. The real site has more regions, but I simplified the case for this question. screenshot1.png There is no default language. The content for each regional version is meant for that region only. The website.eu page is dynamic. When there is no region cookie, the page is identical to website.eu/nl/ (because Netherlands is the most important region) When there is a region cookie (set by a modal), there is a 302 redirect to the corresponding regional homepage What we want
We want regional Google to index the correct regional homepages (eg. website.eu/nl/ on google.nl), instead of website.eu.
Why? Because visitors surfing to website.eu sometimes tend to ignore the region modal and therefor browse the wrong version.
For this, I set up canonicals and hreflangs as described below: screenshot2.png The problem
It’s 40 days now since the above hreflangs and canonicals have been setup, but Google is still ranking website.eu instead of the regional homepages.
Search console’s report for website.eu: screenshot3.png Any ideas why Google doesn’t respect our canonical? Maybe I’m overlooking something in this setup (combination of hreflangs and canonicals might be confusing)? Should I remove the hreflangs on the dynamic page, because there is no self-referencing hreflang? Or maybe it’s because website.eu has gathered a lot of backlinks over the years, whereas the regional homepages have much less, which might be why Google chooses to ig nore the canonical signals? Or maybe it’s a matter of time and I just need to wait longer? Note: I’m aware the language subfolders (eg. /be_nl) are not according to Google’s recommendations. But I’ve seen similar setups (like adobe.com and apple.com) where the regional homepage is showing ok. Any help appreciated!0