Keith and Bryan are dead on. If your homepage is better for users looking for insurance, then why is there an insurance page? My guess is because your site offers more than insurance.

Yes, getting links to the homepage will be easier, but that should not be the reason for killing a well ranking page that seems to be the better page.  I'd recommend updating the insurance page to make it convert like the homepage and let it remain the focus of insurance traffic. Then make sure that your homepage links to the insurance page with good anchor text, and that it doesn't link to another page with any insurance related text.

Ah, that makes more sense. Is there any way that traffic could be coming from those domains without having gone to your site first? Can you give me an instance of a path a user might take?

Example: User goes to product page on shop.domain.com, checks out, is referred to na.otherdomain.com, and comes back to shop.domain.com.

I am trying to see if there is another issue in the path of the user.

Also, can you share the tag you are using on your site for GA?

Did you figure this out?

Did this ever get resolved?

I am going to agree with everyone here and add that while there are not "limits" on the other H-tags, they don't hold much value anymore. Don't use this as a "tactic" to rank. Spend your time on other things specifically on building relationships in your industry.

So good to hear!

I built a tool to help people understand how to best go about international expansion. It's here: katemorris.com/issg

Thanks for the shout out Ryan!

Hi Angelos.

1. The short answer is yes, you should do all of those entries. Annoying right?

The best way to go about this is going to be writing a script to do the heavy lifting, but I am not cool enough to tell you how to do that. The idea would be to make one sitemap in one language, and if the URLs are identical except for the language code, then changing up everything for the next language and moving on one at a time.

You should have one main sitemap per language if you can get all of your content into one sitemap. Then have one sitemap index hosted at domain.com/sitemap.xml.

If that's not possible due to the sheer number of pages, do a sitemap index per language that references multiple sitemaps to cover the content in that one language. Then have another sitemap index that references the other indices per language.

2.  See above. The main sitemap index should be at domain.com/sitemap.xml, BUT you can have each language sitemap hosted in each subfolder. Example: English sitemap at domain.com/en/sitemap.xml and Spanish sitemap at domain.com/es/sitemap.xml. This requires listing many sitemaps in the main robots.txt file or having a robots file for each subfolder. It's a lot more work than working with sitemap indices.

3. If you have claimed all language subfolders as independent sites in WMT, you can submit the corresponding sitemap. You don't have to put the sitemaps in the subfolders to do this though, you can still use the indices. You also don't have to submit them all individually, but you can and I would as I would want to see the index information in each corresponding account. That's just me though.

Does that all help?

Also, be aware that in this global economy, the IP does not always determine language (think travelers and expats). Be sure to keep an eye out on conversions and bounce rates on the redirected visitors. It shouldn't be a big issue, but it is something to keep in mind.

Hi Carl,

You just pointed out one of the reasons I don't always like having a .co.uk and a .com. It really does depend on each business. I'll do the pros and cons for you and hope that helps. Both ways will work, it's going to come down to your preferences. And don't go by how many there are, just look for what matters to you.

Pros of One Domain:

• You can geo-target subdirectories (domain.com/uk) and have specific product pages for that content that needs to be different but share the overlapping content like About, Blog, and other material that doesn't change.
• Domain authority condenses and gets stronger overall over time. All of your marketing is to one site rather than two. This is paired with the Pro before are why I'd go down this route if I were you.
• Don't have to rewrite all content like the blogs and articles if they don't need it.
• Expansions to other countries later would rank faster since they would be a part of the main domain rather than a brand new one (ccTLD) every time.

Cons of One Domain:

• Regional differences (personalized vs personalised) cannot be accounted for in all site content. This might not be a problem for your audience though. You'll still need to maintain and write region specific content sometimes, but not as much as the other way.
• Users outside the US or UK could land on either product versions depending on a number of issues. Again, this might not matter to you. You might not want that traffic.
• It'll take some time to get the targeting right, be prepared for the change over and seeing US/UK content ranking over the other sometimes. It happens, but the search engines get it right about 80-90% of the time in the wild.

Pros of Two Domains

• Can target content, all content on the users in that area. Only useful if that is needed.
• ccTLDs are the strongest country specific marker. It is not make or break though.

Cons of Two Domains

• Maintaining two sites, two domain names, two sets of content. Cost and time factors.
• Marketing needs to be done separately for each site.

Hi Batchbook,

I am going to give you a slightly different answer than seowoody.

The issue you are looking at is geography based, not language based from what I can tell right now. That means you don't need hreflang (maybe). This might be different for the actual situation though. Your customers needs determine what route you should go down for international, and I can't tell you what to do without knowing more (Like SEOWoody said).

With all of that being said, use this tool and report back to me your end result (it's something I built). Then I can help you figure out how to deal with this:

http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/

When I say just translating, I mean only translating to the main language of the country and not changing the content. Just translating content is not targeting the country. You should be hiring someone native to that country to help rewrite things for the people in that country. Geotargeting means each country has content that is targeted to them. If a company is not going to take the time to target the content to the country in question, then it is just mere translation and that can cause duplicate content issues.

Make sure it isn't an IP based forced redirect. Google only crawls with a US IP address (which would cause indexation problems) and any automatic redirect could make some customers mad. As an American in the UK for the last 10 days, I can promise this is true.

Paid is typically AdWords and AdCenter, paid search things. But stuff like Reddit advertising, Facebook, Twitter, and other display advertising, and maybe PLA based advertising (that might be your Google), is Other Advertising.

When you click into Google, have you added a second metric of something like destination URL to see where the traffic is going? That might give you some clues.

PLA = Product Listing Ads

Any number of things. I'll try to list a few here:

• Banned bingbot or its IP address range in your robots.txt or .htaccess file
• Changed to https recently?
• Sitemap has many errors - Bing is much pickier than Google on this.

Did anything change about the site recently? Bing is much pickier about the data they get, the links you get, and ANY kind of overoptimization.

It's traditionally untagged paid advertising like Facebook. Paid Search is typically campaigns from AdCenter or AdWords, the search engines themselves.

Alright, so this is going to be a long and involved answer.

You are geo-targeting the root domain to the UK, but you also have it double tagged in HREFLANG. One is general English (root domain) and other GB English to the same place. Then you have an x-default pointing to the same place.

Google officially thinks that www.allsaints.com is a general English landing page and are probably ignoring the UK geo-targeting. Due to that, the fact that your root domain homepage is stronger than any other version, and because the content is basically the same, it's seeing what you see as your UK homepage as the root domain homepage without any targeting.

In short, you are sending mixed signals and need to sort that out. This might not all make sense but right now you need to:

• Remove the "en" hreflang tag since you have english variations.
• Remove the x-default hreflang tag since that page is not a place for anyone to land and choose a location/language. (ex. fedex.com)

Doing those two things might help clear up some of the confusion, but I also think you have the wrong international technical strategy. That's a whole other thing. Please DM me if you would like to talk about that, but the above should solve your posted problem.