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The redirect service is the gray area here for me. I don't know them or their services. With that parameter in play, you need the self-referring canonical. The hreflang is set up right now, but I don't know how all of this is interacting together.

I'd suggest starting by addressing the hreflang with the parameters in them. Make sure those parameters are not in the hreflang tags.  Also, do you have sitemaps for both languages submitted to Google?

For what it is worth, I don't see things wrong in the SERPs. You are still on the first page for 'NASA gifts' and 'meterorite gifts' in the US. What other drops are you seeing? Some adjustment is expected when making changes like this.

Can you tell me specifically what is plummeting? Just this page? All US, All UK pages? If you can share specifics, I can try to ID what is up. My theory is that the canonical is messing with things, but since you had the issue with parameters in some indexed URLs, it seemed relevant to keep in.

In face, I am digging a little, and when I google your name from my location in the US, this is the first page:

view-source:https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/archive?utm_source=georedirect

The hreflang there has that utm source in it. There is something that might be messing things up. Any idea where that thing is coming from yet? It seems very prevalent.

Also, how is the traffic to your site? With your rankings down, I'd assume a major drop in traffic. But if the URLs with that parameter are taking over, you might still be getting traffic, just to the wrong URL.

It is possible that fluctuations will happen once the canonical is removed. That tag was equating the two pages and google was in the middle of trying to figure out that they were similar but not the same. So removing that canonical is going to reset the pages for a bit. If you are seeing a drop, I expect it to come back up shortly as long as the hreflang is there.

I looked at: view-source:https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery

And am seeing:

<link  rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery</a>" /> <link  rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">en-US</a>" href="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery</a>" /> <link  rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">x-default</a>" href="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery</a>" />

So with the above, you are confusing Google. That is says that it is it's own canonical (good) and is a language variation but you provide no others (including the strong page that is the UK). Rather than the above, it should be this: 

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery</a>" /> <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">en-US</a>" href="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery</a>" /> <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">en-GB</a>" href="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.thespacecollective.com/meteorite-jewellery</a>" />

The X-default is meant for pages that allow the user to select a country and/or language for a big company like IKEA or fedex. 
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No canonical at all for either side, rather they should have hreflang tags that act as canonicals but not as strong (they are specific for language differences).

Ah, apologies on the logs thing! You can read more about it here: https://moz.com/blog/server-log-essentials-for-seo

It's not something you can see from search console. You'll need to get to your logs from your website host. Do you have a developers you can talk to or a website host team that can help you out?

The canonical!!!! Yeah, that is a problem! You should not use a canonical when dealing with international signals. You need to use HREFLANG. https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

On the linking, if Moz isn't showing anything, consider looking at search console. There is a links area, and if you can find the URL in the list of top pages, Google will give you an idea of where they found that URL.

It can have SEO impact as Google primarily crawls from the US. They will from other locations but this has flip flopped over the years. This might be something that is causing this problem, if they are getting redirected to the US side but see many people mentioning the main domain (what you call the UK side).  You can check by looking at your logs for when Google crawls and check the IP address in their list mentioned here. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en That will narrow down if it is a problem.

However, I do want to stress that using IP based redirects is frowned upon from a usability perspective. Giving people more choices is almost always better. A situation to consider outside of the issue that Google itself crawls from the US: When not in COVID times, people travel. I once tried to design my IKEA kitchen when traveling for work. I went back to continue my design I did one night in my hotel room, and it was gone! Little did I know, the design I did was on the UK side. People travel and you don't want to stop that from happening.

I get your point though, which is why it is preferred to do something like, funny enough they figured it out, IKEA does. If you go to ikea.com fresh, they welcome you with a message that they think you are in the US. It doesn't have to be a whole page, many sites use popups. But I would strongly urge you to consider this. And with that, I promise to drop the subject

Now, back to ranking. I see you at #6, and I am fresh eyes in the US space. I looked for NASA gifts and got this at exactly #6.

Where are you looking at ranking? Moz or Google Search Console or ?

I do see the issue with the meteorite jewelry. I see the URL https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery?utm_source=georedirect -- It's canonicalized properly, so Google is being ... annoying. I would, if you have time, take a look at how that is exact URL is linked to. Somehow, that one is seen as particularly powerful, so if you can narrow down where it is and get that parameter removed, that should change over time.

My guess is no. It might correlate someday, the number of messages and how generally popular you become, but messages are not public data. Google and Bing can't crawl that data, so they can't use it. Social signals like likes, replies, reviews, etc are available metrics, so they can at least be taken into account. However, it was and still remains not a direct signal, more of a correlation.

First major thing, you are auto redirecting based on the user's location. I would not do that, rather ask the user where they want to go. But that is more of a usability thing.

Second, I don't see an issue with one search for "nasa mercury memorbilia" - the US page showed up for me. Can you be more specific about the terms and pages that are seeing problems? Below was my earch result and it is for the US page (I checked to  be sure, not just going to the page).

Oh yeah, remove away.

Direct traffic is almost always going to be one of your top traffic sources. There are a number of reasons people end up in this bucket.

1. They open a new browser and go straight to your site. There is no referrer to track here and is what people think of when they see the Direct bucket.
2. A user was on your site, but kept the tab open. Hours or days later, they get back to the tab and engage again. That is a direct session since there was not a referrer.
3. A user is blocking the information of the referring site through their own computer settings. You can't control this.
4. A mistake happens on the referring site's side. You can't see this either or do anything about it. A company I worked for saw a spike in Direct traffic that ended up being Snapchat ads once. There wasn't much to be done.
5. A mistake is happening in your setup of Google Analytics. This is unlikely, but if you have a custom setup, talk to the person that is in charge of that on your site.

There are more instances here: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-direct-traffic-google-analytics and some tips on cleaning this up if you suspect some traffic isn't being tagged correctly.

If they are causing you to have duplicate content and there isn't much search traffic going to them, there should be no penalty for removing them. 404s don't ever cause penalties. You can tell Google to stop crawling them though, but it is a time intensive process that is probably not worth your time. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9689846?hl=en

If you are deleting and then remaking the tag pages in a different URL structure, I would note which ones are getting organic search traffic and are most used by site visitors. Then when you remake them, put in a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.

Same to you! Happy to help!

Yeah, that is actually what hreflang was intended to be. Just to differentiate content pages that had the same content just translated, even if in just dialect. Alas it is also used to show geo-targeting, but I try to not be mad about it

Change as much as needed to make the target market user comfortable. There is no hard and fast rule.

If the page is https://www.example.com/us/product/ then the hreflang on that page should be:

If it is on https://www.example.com/product/ then it is actually the same

The other two lines are not needed. x-default is for your homepage when there is no target and you are asking users to set their target. If you visit https://www.ikea.com/ in an incognito window, you'll see what I mean.

And general en is not needed here. You are using hreflang for helping the SEs understand the difference in the content across countries that use the same language. As much as I hate it for that purpose, they do use this as a signal. General "en" is if you had a business that didn't geo-target and rather just had translations. One page in English, one in Spanish, etc. But no localization.

Hi Katarina!

Your theories are right but let me explain a little more.

• US page versions have to be completely unique with content related to US search intent and be indexed separately - therefore no longer canonicalised to UK version.
  If you are going to create a US and UK version of your page, there needs to be a reason why. If there is no reason why other than "someone told us we should," then only do one page. If there is a reason like differing product information then the pages need to be distinct from each other.

• Ensure hreflang is enabled to point Google to correct local page versions
  This is blended with what you said above. If you use a canonical and hreflang, the engines will get confused. You are telling them with the canonical that they are the same page. Then the hreflang tells them that the pages are different because of localization. You can't have both. Remove the canonical and make sure the hreflang is right.

• Ensure local backlinks point to localised pages.
  Yes!

There are a number of factors here. of the 1000 external links, are they all relevant and followed? What about the links on site B? This is a numbers thing but also a quality thing. All else being equal, the site B will bring you more if you are just looking at numbers. However, I recommend you looking at links as first a way to introduce your site, brand, and content to a new audience. If that happens, the link equity won't mean as much.

The channel profile links I saw were not direct links. If you hover over them, not click, just hover, you will see they link to the YT domain first, then go through a very odd redirect that is not recognized by normal crawlers. That is why I think you see it as a followed link ... it's a followed link to them and then weirdly redirected to you. There will not be any passed link equity from this setup as far as I can tell.

Find me on twitter @katemorris and follow me. Tell me your name and I'll follow you and we can DM.

Depends on where that link is. Is it inside a video summary, in your profile? YT uses their own redirect system that can confuse some tools. Also going to flag this to Product help in case someone at Moz can help out.

These are two companies with two different crawlers. I did a test a while back and saw a major difference in what each backlink tracking tool reported. None are perfect and they will definitely not match each other. Sorry.

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.

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.

The traffic clicking on a link has nothing to do with ranking.

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?

Ah, I might know your problem. What is your site? We had this issue at my last company, had to do with crawling using JS. If you will send me the site, I can take a look.

Think about it less about using the exact phrase and more about writing content for that topic. You need to research who is ranking for this term and ask yourself: is the content there answering the question the user has and can I do better?

If you can do better, research and write an article about the best gaming mouse and keyboard for the PS4. It isn't about the exact word order, more the needs of the person search for that.

Who is no one else? What tools are you referring to? I assume you mean other backlink checking tools are not listing this link. Is that correct?

There isn't a tool per se that can tell you why, but I can tell you that different location searches in travel are .. different. There are many more people searching for Las Vegas than Austin. The competition is different as well. There are many factors that go into ranking, you will have to identify what the user wants when they search for the term you want to rank for and then give that to them AND promote that page. And that is just one page. You will have to do this differently for different pages.

The quick and dirty answer is yes, but only if they are of use to users. I saw pages on a former employers site do very well even though they were not a part of the main site. It all depends on what the content is and why you are putting it up.

What do you mean by parent pages? Content that is necessary for users is of use to Google as well. You'd be surprised how much traffic "unimportant" pages bring you because your customers are looking for them!

If you can explain some more, I can try to help.

There are lots of things that could be going wrong here, but that requires asking more questions. I see you have Tag Manager loading the GA tracker, is that right?

Also, how do you have the settings for the two subdomains in GA? Direct only means that there is no referring information, so somehow, probably in Tag Manager or in your GA setup, there is data being lost.

And finally, how are you testing this?

Thanks!

Ah, yes! If you have multiple locations, but the same content in each location you would want to submit a sitemap per country-specific area. However, is your domain on .co.uk? If you are trying to target other countries that are not the UK with that ccTLD, you are going to have a hard time as that is specific to the UK.

However, if you are on a gTLD (general domain), and have country-specific folders, you should have a sitemap per country.

Your HREFLANG setup is messing things up. Check that part out.

On your domain.com/au/ I see this

This for every site on the homepage should be:

In my opinion, unless you are translating the content to localized versions, you shouldn't need HREFLANG, but rather use geo-location settings in Search Console. However, the code for HREFLANG is why the new subsites are probably not being indexed properly.

Hi!

I have similar questions. It sounds like you are posting articles in the main language it was written in and not doing any geo-targeting. Is that right? I'm not sure because you mention "the correct homepage shows up in the appropriate geography."

If an article is written in Portuguese, you aren't translating it?

Let us know some more details and we are happy to help!

Let them land there (you don't really have a choice in that from search). But if the page really isn't relevant and there is no equivalent, think about popping a message to them telling them that you think they are in the US and that the area for the US users is here and link them there. Also give them a way to contact some sort of help. Either a Help area or an email address.

1. Nope. What you put in the URL is not relevant to SEs, just users. Whatever you think is best there will work.

2. There is a difference between recognized countries and languages.

For the English language, there are different dialects. US, GB, AU, etc. The HREFLANG tag uses the code for the region of the dialect. So it is en-gb for that region.

For the geo-targeting portion, the UK is a recognized country. Great Britan is not. The United Kingdom is made up of Great Britain ( which is made up of the "countries" of England, Scotland, Wales) and Northern Ireland.

Is your content in Dutch? If it is and / and /nl are the same, why not redirect /nl to /?

What do you mean by "primary domain"? Are you talking Google Search Console or something else? I assume you are not using the other domains other than to redirect?

Let me know if the above is true. You can move to yet another domain, but it is advised against as EffectDigital said because everything has to be reindexed again. It's possible to do and they'll be fine in the future, but it is going to hurt for some time.

Few warnings to start with:

1. Automated translation is a horrible user experience. I highly recommend you wait on translation until you are in a financial place to get human translators.

2. Geo-targeting country=language is a false association. For languages like English, Spanish, French, and Portugese, there are multiple countries that use that language as their primary language.

I recommend using HREFLANG markup to tell search engines that there are different language versions of your content. That is all that is necessary here. https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

1. Yes, usually the "best" is a matter of preference. You always should start with the country and then language if you go down that route so that the first subfolder is the geotargeted folder. But other than that, there is no real "right" answer.

2. UK vs GB is because GB is a part of the UK. The recognized country is the UK so that is used for geo-location. GB is the region in the UK that speaks a recognized version of English. Make sense?

3. Yes, companies use languages when they are going to geo-target their company or material for specific countries and then offer translations within those countries. If you are only operating in the US in English, then you don't really need all of this. However, it won't hurt to set it up for future structuring.

Sorry Lisa, this got lost in my email box. You are looking for tips for how to set things up for an international site? Can you tell me more about your site and what you are looking to get out of your Moz account when it comes to international search?

1. Good!

2. You are confused for good reason. There has not been clear direction for here for some time. If you used HREFLANG between the two, it seems for the last number of years the content would not be seen as duplicative. You are telling Google that the content is the same but in different languages inherently.

3. There is so much that goes into this, but I can tell you with years of experience under my belt that the numbers don't ever tell the whole story.

This is a tough one because there are reasons on both sides of the street to give reasons why this duplicate content should and should not be allowed. Think about an ERP SAAS company that needs to change their content just a bit between countries. They might build what looks to be duplicate but doesn't have some pages in one country vs another.

In your example, it seems to be not a great experience, but as a logged in user, they might be getting different content depending on their location.

To my second point: Those outside tools are shit. Total shit. Don't trust those numbers. Do your numbers line up to theirs?

Final point: Do not build and maintain duplicate content in hopes of getting links. It won't work over time. Anything can work for a short period of time, but in the end, they will figure it out. Trust me.

That only goes back to 2017, any data before then? Is there any information before the 2017 changes? I doubt they tracked it, but here is to hoping.

I truthfully don't like the average position metric site-wide, at least for my business. It doesn't tell a complete story. What does the average rank look like over time for 1) the homepage and 2) a product page like https://www.castleford.com.au/amplify/social-media/

Also, I tried to find blog/article content and came across a 404. Resources >> Content Marketing Library >> Under Ads "Read 25 tips for better Google Ads campaigns."

https://www.castleford.com.au/whitepaper-adwords-campaign-download - broken

Are there articles still?

Did they ever see good rankings and traffic in Australia? Do you have a date that things went south or has it always been like this?

When did you change the URLs on your site? A crawl is showing some older URLs so I'm curious.

Huh. Okay, we are going to figure this out.

Did you change the domain recently? Within the last year? When was that footer link removed?

Huh. Let me be clear, this seems odd. Here are some questions to see if we can narrow a few things down.

1. What's the demand like for these terms US vs AU vs NZ? Do you have a set list to compare the three countries?

2. What is the competition in each country? About the same or are there new players in each one?

3. What are the local packs in each country for each term? Strong, weak, or non-existent?

I'm trying to get down to if this is a competition and market problem or a technical problem bc it sounds okay technically.

And to be 100% clear, none of your content exists on another domain right?