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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?