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I would not recommend IP based redirects. You can detect and do an initial redirect (with a javascript overlay telling people that you think they are in a specific area), but you'd have to give all users (including Googlebot) the ability to go to the other URLs as well.

HREFLANG is not meant for geo-targeting and IP addresses only tell you location. You only need HREFLANG if there are language changes within a country targeted site or universal (not geotargeted) site.

Even ignoring that, the HREFLANG would not help if people were always redirected based on IP, so I don't suggest that.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any more questions.

I am not sure there are titles that will ensure anything. Just like any direct mail or email marketing tactic, people get used to overused ones quickly and easily. My advice is not to use the same title every time, but craft each on to each person you are reaching out to. Trying to do guest posting en masse is not going to be worthwhile for you.

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.

These are geo-targeted sections and not translations right?

If so, the HREFLANG tags are not needed. Those are for translations. If you have the subfolders marked in Google WMT as geo-targeted to those countries, you should be okay.

How long have you had this setup?

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

With HREFLANG tags, you are sending weird signals. I would recommend ensuring that /ie/ is claimed in Google WMT and targeted to Ireland. The content in the subfolder needs to be specific to your Ireland market, meaning it needs to have different content. It doesn't have to be completely different, but different. Otherwise, it looks like duplicate content and the SEs are going to pick the stronger of the two.

Right now, you are telling them that the only difference in the content is that /ie/ is in Irish English, and /gb/ is in British English. It's not different enough to warrant showing the other content over your main homepage as that is stronger.

Does that all make sense? I would remove the HRELFANGs, ensure the right targeting is in place and that the content is different per country to target those countries.

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.

Hmmm, I am thinking there are two possible solutions.

1. Create a "site" per country (subfolders like you have now), but use canonical for the pages that are duplicated, the pages that are the same across all countries.
Also use javascript to detect a new user's location (don't auto redirect though, ask) to get them to the "right" version of the page, if they come into the non-country focused general page.

2. Create a "site" per country (subfolders like you have now), and spend the resources to change the content on each page just enough to target that country. It doesn't have to be much, just enough to target that group.

Option 2 is the most time and resource intensive. Option 1 can be messed up quickly if the technical implementation isn't done right.

I know that's not a clean answer but international never is. There are always so many moving parts.

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.

Nope, not needed, unless you are changing the language.

Now, if you wanted to do one big site and then offer certain pages that are the same except for "translation" - and it's a local dialect translation, then yes, HREFLANG would be used in that situation.

So you could use HREFLANG rather than a canonical between the kinda duplicated pages if they are changed only in dialect translation. But since there is different content per country, you would still need that geo-targeted section for the content that is different.

domain.com/congo/about-congo-office (I don't know the country code for Congo) - No hreflang, will be geo-targeted with the subfolder.

domain.com/congo/similar-product-page - If just translated to the local Congo English dialect, use HREFLANG with all similarly "translated" pages. If not changed at all, use canonical to the original page. If changed overall to target the Congo market, no canonical or HREFLANG needed.

The one issue I see is that at least for the homepage, these two sites are identical. You have so many different geo-target sites, but between two sites of the same language regardless of location, does anything change? I'm seeing no differences on the homepage so I need to ask.

This might be part of why .be is cached for .nl, you're not giving them something new to index. They are hreflang'd as well, which is telling them even more that the content is the same.

I am going to assume that .be launched before .nl, or has gotten more play in the search results. Something is making it the go to for Dutch.

Few questions before I can answer this:

Were the links you got going to drive people to your site? Would those people find your site interesting and relevant?

Is the content getting links still going to exist? Meaning will the links still make sense?

Just redesigning your site should not affect link equity, but if your links were acquired just for linking purposes, I don't think they will do much for you over time anyway.

Perfect candidate for geo-targeting! You can keep them on one domain though if you're interested. You can do subfolders and geo-target each, but not sure if that works with your setup. Regardless, if you do the .com, and want that to be US only, make sure to claim that domain in GSC and Bing WMT as the US. .com is a general TLD, so it doesn't auto-geo-target. ccTLDs like .co.uk do automatically take care of this.

Keep in mind that in best practices, if you have two pages with the same content across two domains, usually the SEs will pick one, the older stronger one. Try to find a way to differentiate the content that is the same across the two sites. You can also use hreflang between the two sites to help the association, but that is really meant for translated content only. However, people have seen it help.

To ensure people are getting to the right content, I recommend detecting the user's location by IP and ASKING if they live in the US, UK or others you might geo-target. Then set a cookie. They will always get to the right content. Google will crawl from the US, ignore the JS for the most part, and will index everything.

Think about the .com and subfolder idea, that might be better for you.

Hi Moon boots!

First be aware of the .eu TLD, it isn't a geo-targeted TLD as the EU isn't a country. Keep that in mind, you can't target regions, just countries.

Can I ask why you want to go down the route of ccTLDs? Does your content need to be different in each country? There is no problem with keeping everything on a .com, but let me know if there are external factors at play here.

Where you host the TLDs doesn't matter much. The localization is a signal, but not a huge one. If you can give us some insight into your situation, we can help better. Thanks!

I'm not sure I understand. I assume you are in travel something, and usually, the English speaking audience is of more interest. Now, it is your local audience due to lack of traveling. To be clear, a title tag change can have an impact in under a week. However, the search engines retain the right to ignore your title at any time - they do it all the time with titles that they deem irrelevant.

I'd need to see the pages to be sure, but as long as they are relevant to the audience you are targeting, you should be okay in theory.

Can you tell me more? Is your target market multi-lingual? Can you expand on why you would change your title language but not the site language?