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You don't, it's not the same content. Unless you make a general pebbles page for /be/, the hreflang won't make sense, it's not the same content. Those subfolders should be claimed in GSC and geo-targeted to those countries.

1. Is the latter correct? Am I guessing correctly re "sub-folders" authority (if such thing exists) or am I simply wrong?

Your two points are valid ones. I don't want to say correct as in that is the cause for sure, but the age of content in my experience does play a role in duplicate content picking.

2. Can I solve this using canonical tags?
Canonicals can go wrong with hreflang, but it isn't a bad idea if you get it right. However, you know your content and your users better than us.

Another possible solution to help everything is to detect the user's location and ASK (Don't redirect on IP alone) if they prefer to see that location's content. This will encourage the sharing of all of your content over time.

But if I am completely realistic, nothing is going to show up perfectly if you are trying to geo-target without actual geo-targeted content. Sometimes you just need to tell the business owners who made this decision that opening a shop in another country, trying to act like a local business with zero changes to the content, just isn't going to work out in every business in every country.

Huh. You have a really good head on your shoulders. They are both good options. Unless there is something that makes the .lu/fr imperative to have for the users, I think I prefer option 1. Your logic sounds good there and is customer first.

Good luck!

Very welcome! Let me know what happens!

Who is they? I assume that means you are hearing this from your local distributor in France or customers there?

I can confirm that you have hreflang set up correctly. I've always personally had an issue with setting up HREFLANG when you mean regional geolocation, but the rest of the international SEO field disagrees with me.

But in the light of geotargeting, to double check, have you claimed domain.com/fr in Search Console and targeted it at France?

The UK website has been assigned to target the United Kingdom in Search Console and the US website has been assigned to target the United States. We also do not have access to robots.txt file, unfortunately.

So you have claimed www.domain.com and targeted it to the UK. And you have claimed us.domain.com and targeted it to the US in Search Console?

And for the two URLs below are these tags all on each page exactly as I have them below?

https://www.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet

• • is the canonical tag
• <link rel="alternate" href="https: www.example.com="" products="" pac-man-arcade-cabinet" hreflang="en-gb">- UK hreflang tag</link rel="alternate" href="https:>
• <link rel="alternate" href="https: us.example.com="" products="" pac-man-arcade-cabinet" hreflang="en-us">- US Hreflang tag</link rel="alternate" href="https:>

https://us.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet

• • is the canonical tag
• <link rel="alternate" href="https: www.example.com="" products="" pac-man-arcade-cabinet" hreflang="en-gb">- UK hreflang tag</link rel="alternate" href="https:>
• <link rel="alternate" href="https: us.example.com="" products="" pac-man-arcade-cabinet" hreflang="en-us">- US Hreflang tag</link rel="alternate" href="https:>

Where are you searching from? What are you searching? And is there anything different between those two pages other than targeting? Do you redirect users based on IP?

What search term are you using when checking what page is showing for France based contact information?

I know we are way too late for this, but why did your company decide to internationalize the site structure if you can't get localization resources. I would have suggested using cookies and JS to set the currency, etc.

Anyway to your questions:

Or am I chasing ghost and this rule won't change much in the eyes of Google and my ranking? You can implement the title rule above, but I don't think it is going to help much.

**I don't care so much if US content shows up in the UK in term of content though are eCommerce experts would be quite pissed off as it would biased reporting. **

I recommend setting up IP location detection. If the user SEEMS to be in a different country, ask them if they are from the other country and if they say yes, then redirect them there. Don't assume they are in a specific country though.

Focus on getting those resources, you won't make a big impact without them in a high competition area.

1. Can I create a rule for page titles to be "Product A - country - company name" or similar? Would that be enough to make the page titles unique? Is there any value doing so?
I think this depends on a few things.

**First, what is the competition like in the SERPs? if you are in a super competitive space in any of those countries, this is probably not going to be enough. But it is possible it would be in some but not others. Competitive markets are game changers. **

**Second, how much do you care if the US content shows up in the UK? I worry about the similarities of the content in your examples. A title tag can get stupid "duplicate title" warnings to disappear, but I can't promise it'll make a difference in the SERPs. **

There is no harm in trying, however.

2. Can I "localize" duplicate MD by simply naming the country? I assume it is not enough in this case as all the rest would be copy/pasted.

**Duplicate MDs are less of a worry from my perspective. What I'd worry about more is the duplication of the actual pages. The content on the page is infinitely more important than what is in the MD. **

Sorry to say that without an in-depth look, there isn't going to be a way to tell. Unless you changed something, it is most likely testing or an update from Google. I've seen rankings go up and down over the years on multiple sites for a variety of reasons and sometimes what seems like no reason.

It can be the negation of the value of backlinks, or an entrant to the market, or Google trying other sites out to see if they perform better in the eyes of the searcher.

In this industry, there is only so much you can control. Focus on creating top quality content, focus on the searcher, and you'll come out on top.

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!

You can geo-target the AU and US subdomain to the respective countries, but you can't target the EU as it isn't a country. HREFLANG can help as well, it depends on the differences in the content. You can do both, but in terms of what you should do:

HREFLANG = regional language changes (US English vs AU English)

Geo-Targeting = content changed to target that specific country (ex. products sold in the US but not AU, or extra regulatory content due to a country's laws OR (and a better example) the content needs to be different because selling your product in AU vs US is different like Christmas cards in each country, one has Christmas in summer and the other in winter).

Cool, that rules out one issue. My guess is that since there are mixed signals, that the information through the sitemaps are being ignored. I would work on cleaning that up and resubmit. In the meantime, consider detecting the user's location and if it is different than the page they landed on, asking them if they want to go to that country's content.

Example: US user lands on UK content, popup asks if they want to see US content, user clicks yes and cookie is set for that user so that they always see the US content, regardless. Don't set this automatically as Google still just crawls from the US, you want them to see all the content not just the US content.

As for removing the nofollows, you should be good. Google is good at understanding country/language specific content. Make sure that location selector page has the x-default hreflang indicator.

Hi Tom,

Is there any difference in the US page to the UK page?

The importance is based on how important it is for you to have your Canadian users see the "Canadian" content in search results. If you are in a highly competitive search space in which price markup in SERPs is important, this might be worth your time.

BUT if you don't mind that the US page shows in search results and the IP redirect takes care of things once the user is on the site, you are fine with your setup. Like you said at the end, this isn't the "preferred" route, but if the content isn't really changing, then it shouldn't be an issue.

The issue really lies in when the users need to see very different content.

Additionally, consider IP detection, but using a cookie after confirming with the user that they are in the US or Canada to show the right content to that specific user.

The x-default is just what the link you provided says it is:

From Google: The reserved value hreflang="x-default" is used when no other language/region matches the user's browser setting. This value is optional, but recommended, as a way for you to control the page when no languages match. A good use is to target your site's homepage where there is a clickable map that enables the user to select their country.

If you use it for just one language, the issue comes when you have more than one language. The setup for x-default is for when there is no language detected, not that a general, non-regional language is detected.

Actually, the x-default is meant to be for a page that allows users to select a country/language combination.

Alexis, in theory, what you are proposing should work. However, it is not always perfect. There is so much that goes into how Google serves content to each user. You might not see it working perfectly every time, but you can use the non-country with two country-specific hreflang tags together.

In fact, the country coded hreflang tags were meant to be dialect-specific. So a site could have US English content and UK English content, but also more general English content for the rest of the English speaking people.

In fact, it sounds like if the only thing changing is the currency, you might try geo-targeting subfolders. You can do hreflang in addition to that, but geotargeting is what is meant to be used here.

1. Content for CA: https://www.domain.com/ca/content
2. Content for GB: https://www.domain.com/gb/content
3. General Content: https://www.domain.com/content

Claim the subfolders in Google Search Console as different properties and then target each one to those countries in the International Targeting area.

Then add hreflang the way you mentioned with those URLs. However, this setup won't work if you are doing things with another language mixed in. If you are planning on that, let me know.

Hreflang will help guide Google to understand the association of the pages. Rather than add another sitemap for the English pages, I recommend updating your current sitemap to include hreflang tags to the english content.

Guide here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en

If you are targeting the .com at English speaking countries, then why start targeting other sites at specific countries rather than languages? If you targeted the French language (in which you should not use .fr), you'd target more people than targeting France.

Based on your situation, I would have one site with translated content, rather than country-specific content. This would allow you to use the strength of one domain while giving your users the right content in their language.

Using hreflang tags between translated content is how you alert the search engines that the content is the same, just translated.

Hi Paris,

First, can you clarify if you are just translating the content or if you are targeting specific countries? It sounds like you are geo-targeting, but I am not sure.

Second, any page, no matter it's geo-targeting can show up in any Google search, regardless of the country of the user and content. If that is the best content for the user's query, Google will show it. This is why we see .co.uk results here in the US all the time.

Can you share what URL was redirected to what URL?

I see https://www.rejuvenated.com.au in Google's index.

Hi!

First, it sounds like you are targeting countries, not languages. Can you confirm that? Meaning, someday you might want to target Canada, which will need French language content that is in the Canadian dialect of French.

If you are targeting countries, this is the right setup. The key is to treat each site like it's own site. Don't just make a copy and translate to general French. If you want to go about targeting languages, not countries, then I suggest using one domain and having a subfolder per language. In that case, you would use hreflang tags to show the SEs that the content is the same just translated.

It all depends on what you want to do in the future. It sounds more like you want to do language translation, not geo-targeting. But again, I'll need you to confirm that to give the right answer.

Hi!

If you are doing translations, ccTLDs are not recommended. Those are geo-targeted a specific country, not language.

I prefer language as either a subdomain or subfolder. If I had to pick, it is subfolder, so option 3 in your set.

That is a long URL, but I don't think shortening it will help in terms of SEO. Google is generally good at understanding the structure of your site without the structure of URLs. They are also good at determining the topic without the use of the URL. In my experience, the work from changing the URL is more than it would help.

If you find a reason to change the URL structure in the future that is very necessary (new CMS as an example), update the structure then. Until then, unless you are getting feedback from your users that it is annoying them, I'd leave them as is.

Hi!

First, I never recommend doing something just because another site does and it looks like they are getting what they want without doing the work. You never know what is going on behind the scenes.

Second, for your client, if there is nothing that needs to change on a per country basis, why make different sites for different countries? Or does something change across the countries they want to target?

Third, never use IP based redirects for geo-targeting if that is the route you go. It creates a bad user experience for travelers and search engine bots.

I recommend (without knowing much about them) that they make one site in English, it should work just fine in all of the target countries. However, if there are other reasons for being country specific, do let me know.

Hi!

It's actually all going to depend on your company/industry/audience. Apple does it the way they do as they need to do it that way as a global retailer that has the resources to market to different country markets.

https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-international-seo

Try that and let me know what questions you have. Inside that article is a link to a tool to help you figure out how best to set up your site structure.

Is there some reason they only want to target the US and UK and not Australia or Canada for instance?

If it is alright with them, I would just have one site. Targeted at western-type English speaking travelers. If you can't produce a different site for the US AND the UK separately, then just create one.

Unless there is another reason it is just the US and UK. Please share if so!

You need to either provide the translations or you need to remove the hreflang for that translation that isn't translated at the moment. As Andrew mentioned, you can noindex the pages that aren't actually translations, but that would be up there with removing the hreflang mention.

Hi Speedy,

I am not sure I understand. Let me rephrase to see if I have the situation right.

For page domain.com/page1, you have multiple language possibilities. So something like domain.com/de/page1 and domain.com/fr/page1

However, not all pages have the same translations available.

I assume you have hreflang tagging across the board for every language? Even if it doesn't exist? So if that "translated" page is accessed, it is a duplicate page because it hasn't been translated yet. Is that right?

Hey Mike

Have you considered using a canonical to the unlogged-in homepage?

www.domain.com - canonical is to www.domain.com

www.domain.com/loggedin - canonical is to www.domain.com

As long as the page can be loaded and the canonical in the head seen by bots, that link equity should go to the homepage.

You have the instance that is the reason I took a liking to international SEO. In your instance, because of the annoyances of commonly used languages that are also countries ... I suggest ccTLDs or subdomains.

• Subdomains - You will have to claim each subdomain in Search Console and target them to their specific countries and then use hreflang between the languages within the country subsites.

• www.domain.com (main)

• www.domain.com/fr (french)

• www.domain.com/es (spanish)

• ca.domain.com/en (Canadian, english)

• ca.domain.com/fr (Canadian, french)

• fr.domain.com (France)

• ccTLDs - This does the geo-targeting for you. You will need to put the hreflang between the languages within the country sites.

• www.domain.com (main)

• www.domain.com/fr (french)

• www.domain.com/es (spanish)

• www.domain.ca/en (Canadian, english)

• www.domain.ca/fr  (Canadian, french)

• www.domain.fr (France)

It does not matter which you use. But if you wanted to use the same root domain, the subdomains are a good way to go about that!

You only need the HREFLANG for the pages that you have translations for.

Actually, geo-basedIP redirects are still a very bad idea from a user and bot perspective.

1. While Google has said it is testing crawling from other areas, they still primarilycrawl from the US. If you do Geo-basedredirects, they will only ever see the US content.
2. Users travel. People travel. Assuming a user should only see a certain set of content based on their physical location is assuming too much.

• Use case in the consumer field: While attending a friend's wedding in London, I could not get to the US version of a site where I wanted to buy furniture to be delivered in a few weeks.
• Use case in business: Users travel for business all the time. If they are visiting a headquarters in another country but researching a topic for use in their home country, they might be seeing the "wrong content."

Rather than assuming, use IP detection to ask the user to set their location. "We see you are in the UK, do you want to set that as your preferred location?" Once they choose their location, a cookie is set and that is all that user sees from then on out, until they change that setting in the footer or in their account.

Hi Ruchy,

I am not following as to why you want to add the nodollow. If you are doing business with him and there is no money in exchange, then there is no reason to nofollow.

If there is money changing hands in any way, add a nofollow. If there is not, there is no reason to add one.

Have a great day!

A nofollow is a good idea moving forward. That will stop it from happening again.

If you do the robots.txt, they can still index, just with no information on the page.

If I were you, I'd add the nofollow.

Be aware that a ccTLD is meant for people in that country, it does not mean it is targeting all people who speak a language of the same name. Spanish is spoken in more countries than Spain, so if you wish to reach all Spanish speakers, I would recommend a .com site (which is country agnostic) and having English and Spanish language content there.

If you wish to target Spain citizens, the .es domain is perfect.

The way you have it set up above though, what will most likely happen (but this depends on your industry, competition, etc) is that the English language queries coming from Spain will see the .com version of your site as they should be searching in English. If someone in the US or Mexico is looking in Spainsh, they might not see the .es site as it is targeted to Spain, not Spanish. That doesn't mean they won't see it at all - if there isn't much competition they will see the .es if it is the best result for their search, but .es is meant to Spain based businesses and you can't change the country targeting on a ccTLD like .es

You can try to help Google understand with HREFlang as Joe said, but do understand that you'll be sending mixed signals with a .es domain if you are trying to get Spanish speaking searchers from other countries.

Hope that makes sense!

Sorry to tell you, .ag is not a recognized generic TLD. If you put your site on a ccTLD (country specific TLD), you cannot change the targeting to something outside of that country.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

That link as a list of ccTLDs that they see as generic like .io, but .ag is not one of them. You will need to use a different TLD, a generic one, for your plan to work.

Hi! Can you give an example? The URL of the page, the old title tag, the new title tag, and the term in which you see the ranking drop.

If the content is the same, but translated, without the hreflang tag, it is duplicate content. The hreflang tag is there to serve as a signal that you know the content is the same but translated and you want Google to know that as well. This situation is exactly what hreflang is made for.

I'm not sure if this is a time issue, it is sure weird! I do see some of the pages as your competitors. But not all. And a search for your brand name from the US produces the English page. So everything looks okay there.

How is indexation at this point? My apologies for responding so late.

Was your site down for maintenance at all in the last month or so?

If there is something involved with link reclamation, then this is a very involved potential issue. Meaning, I am not sure someone can figure this out on a forum. If you need help, I recommend contacting Alan Bleiweiss, he is an awesome forensic SEO. http://alanbleiweiss.com/

I will leave you with one recommendation. Don't look so much to your competitors as to what is best for your market. I recommend doing your own audience research. While your major competitors might be the same in the US and India, the relevance and needs of your audience are different. This comes out subtly in many instances of SERPs as the results are a blend of over 200 factors and those factors are different in each country version of Google. They do their own testing based on that market not the world wide market.

Stick to your site and what might be causing the ranking changes on a per page/per topic basis in each country. Separate them and work at this problem from a technical and user perspective.

There are a number of reasons this could happen.

• Your content's relevance to the Indian market vs US market. Have you differentiated it? Do you need to?

• The competitive markets are different. Your set of competitors is different in each country.

• Google US and Google IN work separately from each other. Point: Google Germany and France recently updated their image search to match other Google properties, many years after the change in the US.

Ranking the same in the US and India is not an expected thing.

I personally have not seen this before, but that is due to being English speaking only. I don't see much else on the web about it either which lead me to wonder if it was due to account settings for some reason. I'll flag this up as a discussion, see if we can find someone that has dealt with this before.

Quick question: What language preference is your browser set to? What about the settings of the Google account you use?

Is your site performing well otherwise? Meaning is this just an issue with Search Console?

Welcome to International Site Expansion! This is the exact situation I worry about when people set up international structure.

The answer lies in what your users need, not what you want or what marketing wants. Do users in the US need to see different content than a user in the UK or Australia? All of those countries have English as the primary language. I am not talking about dialects (UK spellings/words vs US words), but do the users need to see different content due to product set changes, price changes, different marketing tactics, etc.?

There are a whole list of questions you need to go through. http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/ - Let me know what your end result is and we'll talk from there.

Another resource: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-international-seo (that will explain a lot)

I don't see an ad for "Key Industrial" - I'd look at the settings and budget. Are you targeting a different geography now? Cut the budget at all?

This one is tough.

1. Are there negatives on the brand campaign/ad group?

2. Did you check your brand term in the AdWords Keyword Planner? How does it look in there?

3. Have you checked your brand name in Google Trends?

And if you don't mind sharing, what is the brand name?