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Hello John,

Thanks again for your help – it is much clearer now. We don't want to trick our users, but we do want them to use the piece of content we have created without being overwhelmed by the brand. What we're probably going to so is host the content on our corporate URL but create a whole new design – much less branded  – for that content.

Hi John,

Thank you for your answer; unfortunately I am not completely satisfied with it if I may say, as I am not looking for generic SEO resources / responses here, but rather a tactical answer on the advantages and disadvantages we could find in detaching our content from our brand.

The website that should be considered for this is www.esl.co.uk – sorry I was not going to write URLs here, so please do remove it if it has to be removed – and the 13 other versions, all hosted on local URLs. The site you mentioned above is our group website.

Hi John,

Thank you for your response. In fact, the 14 domains have similar content (our language courses portfolio) but this new domain would be just the quiz – so the content would be completely different. If we were to get a new domain, it would be one without our brand name (unlike the 14 other ones) but rather with our project's name. It would be a multi-language website, from which I would point to our various corporate websites from a section in each language.

Does this makes sense?

Hi Jay, I work as an Online Marketing Manager for a language travel agency and would love to take a look at your product. Can I have a sneak peak, please?

There is one question that keep bugging us and for which we are looking for a logical answer – to put it short, in which context(s) is it preferable to publish original content on a company website vs on a dedicated external platform with its own URL?

To give a little more details: we an education company that provides languages course abroad and that functions like a specialised travel agency. Each trip is very specific – it depends on people's language level, objectives, budget, etc. – so we provide tailor-made advice for each of our students. Our site is not an e-commerce site, and a typical call-to-action is a request for a 1-to-1 interview with one of our agents, or a quote request for a language trip project. The top conversion for us is an enrolment for a language course abroad.

We have a corporate websites structure where we have 1 website per locale where we operate, which means 14 websites in 7 different languages. We produce smaller pieces of content for these websites in a dedicated section – the rest of the website being mostly a presentation of our products, services and destinations – but here we intend to create a very large Quiz which will be based on multiple audio files. The content will be translated into multiple languages (likely 10 different languages) and will require some rather heavy development. We intend to add sections for scoreboards, stats, a log-in section (probably Facebook), etc.

This sounds to us like something we should host on a specific URL, but then how can we make the most of the SEO benefits that we will (hopefully) get with such content? We plan to have an about section where we explain a little bit who we are, where we will probably link back to our corporate websites, but of course we want our project to live for itself and to be as far from commercial as possible – while still making the most of the SEO benefits.

How can we do this in the most subtle / logical way? Would it be better to host our Quiz on our corporate domains?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Maëlle

Thank you very much for your response, Simon.

Having the international version of our site showing in the UK would not be a critical issue, as we make it easy to switch to the other languages/markets versions.

It is quite odd that Google does not view translated content as duplicate, I wasn't aware of this – would you be able to provide with some source where this is explained, please?

Also, do you have a view on my question re the rel="canonical" tag – would there be any reason not to use the "hreflang="x" tag but use instead the rel="canonical" tag, thus specifying a "master" version out of our 3 French versions, for instance?

Hello,

We have multiple websites targeted at multiple countries and languages, each with the correct country extension. We have a corporate blog for each of these websites, where the blogs are subdomains of the main website.
Currently we have a process of rewriting our blog posts completely – while keeping the same subjects – in order to have original content on each of our blogs, although we have up to 3 blogs in the same language.

These are the languages we target:

• French – FRANCE
• French – SWITZERLAND
• French – BELGIUM
• Italian – ITALY
• Italian – SWITZERLAND
• German – GERMANY
• German – SWITZERLAND
• German – AUSTRIA
• Spanish – SPAIN
• Spanish – COLOMBIA
• Spanish – PANAMA
• Czech – CZECH REPUBLIC
• Swedish – SWEDEN
• Dutch – BELGIUM / NETHERLANDS
• English – UK
• English – INTERNATIONAL

The process is obviously very tedious, and not always applied rigorously – i.e. some of the texts are posted on 2-3 different blogs, creating duplicate content.
The questions :

• Would there be any reason for us to privilege the use the rel="canonical" tag over the "hreflang=x" tag, thus giving privilege to a "master" version for each language?
• Are there any risks in using the "hreflang="x" tag for our blogs considering that the posts would be very similar, except for references to additional content? Could there be any risk that Google would consider our sites as duplicate content after all?
• Should we specify on each blog that we have all the above versions, or should we only specify the other markets versions in each language? For example, should we specify on our French, Swiss and Belgium blog that we have 3 different French versions, on our UK blog that we also have an international version, and so on, or should we list all versions on each of the blogs?
• Does the "hreflang="x" tag facilitate the indexation of each of the versions in the SERPs of their targeted market?
• Lastly, are there any precautions we should take in order to put this in place?

Looking forward to your feedback.

Best wishes,

Maëlle