It is most likely the names of campaigns you might have set up. It's best to discussion with your marketing and advertising departments.

Buying the exact match domain just to rank should be treated as that only if that is what you want to do. It needs to have its own content and own marketing plan as it's a separate domain. I'd recommend one page that then pushes people to conversion, whatever that is, or to your main domain.

I think that's what you had in mind. But this is a new site totally, so it really needs the support of your own content linking to it and some marketing around it to gain links.

Don't duplicate your content and you'll be fine. See it as a microsite for that traffic in particular. Have fun with it!

hreflang and geo-targeting are in fact two different things.

If you have exactly the same content, no changes for the regional variations in the language, hreflang is not intended for that.

Why do you have two sets of pages that are the same? If you have the same content on .com with no geo-targeting, then Google is going to offer up the original content on .com rather than /lu because you never changed the content in any way to target Luxembourg. Had you changed the content to translate or really geo-targeted the content to that audience, I think the situation would be different.

Check my tool here, answer the questions and see what is right for your situation. Then follow the instructions at the end.

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

Ah, I think we are getting to the root of the problem here.

If we are talking about hreflang used correctly between two identical pages that are translated, everything Google has stated about hreflang is that it acts as a canonical. The alternate language pages would be treated as changes of each other. Ranking is more than just link equity though, so where you rank is more than that.

In your specific situation, I see a few problems outside the use of hreflang. Can you share the domain you are talking about? If you're not comfortable sharing it here, please message me with it. There might be other things at play confusing the Google algorithm. But I need to see for sure.

After spending the last five years looking into international expansion of websites, I can say for sure I don't recommend subdomains for language translations. It's due to the fact that using subdomains isn't very clean and doesn't work well if you want to expand to country specific content in the future.

The way I read the original Moz post on subdomains is that the use of hreflang helps some of the assumed negatives of using subdomains, but subdomains are not the recommended solution. Mind you, the "negatives" of subdomains have not been proven in all cases either.

Let me know about your specific case and I'll see what might be happening.

Gianaluca was speaking of multiple "sites" but this is translation. Google does say it in fact:

"By specifying these alternate URLs, our goal is to be able to consolidate signals for these pages, and to serve the appropriate URL to users in search. "

https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

I actually disagree with the subdomain exception for languages. You can use a subdomain for languages, but it doesn't look right in my opinion. The reason that text is in there though is because if you use translated content (which is different from regional or country targeted content), you should use hreflang and that acts like a canonical. The possible downsides of a subdomain are negated with that tagging.

The writer of this text you are referencing is not saying subdomains are preferred, merely that with languages the downsides of a subdomain are not applicable.

Even though you don't have any geo-targeted sections, there are other indications on your site that let them know you are targeting Ireland and Google might be optimizing for that.

With that said, how are you checking these rankings? Do these keywords send you large amounts of traffic? Check Search Console. Are you having an issue getting UK traffic (North Ireland)? Are you worried about UK traffic due to North Ireland?

I am worried that what you are seeing is due to your own search history and settings and/or Google seeing the same search a few times and testing out different results. There might also be different competition in the Northern Ireland market. There is a ton that could explain this, but alas, as with most things SEO, it's hard to pinpoint.

I am hesitant to saying you just need one as I don't know the layout of your page. As long as the ads are clearly marked as ads and are in no way deceptive, you should be fine. If there is too much space between them, you'd need to mark each one. But if they are all in a marked box together, you should be fine with one.

Rules of AdSense

For organic traffic sake, the same thing goes. Make sure there is no confusion as to what is an ad and what isn't. Use your gut,

Do you mean you are serving ads on your own site from the Google Ad Network? And you want to know how to mark those as ads on your own site?

So good to hear!

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.

You're sending a few mixed signals via hreflang. I need to ask a few questions.

• Are you geotargeting www.allsaints.com to the UK?
• Where are you located?
• How did you do the search attached? From what country? Incognito?

As Claudio said, there are many things behind the scenes we can't always know. The sheer number of links, PA, DA, etc, those are from a third party, Moz. As much as it is the best external look at link equity, domain strength and more, it's still not from Google.

There is more to ranking than just links and strength though. On page factors are important of course, but there are so many other pieces of the puzzle.

In this instance it looks like a language preference issue. Your screenshot shows that the first result is in English. The others are not, as they offer translation inside the SERP. The first result is the best result for this particular search for this particular user. It might not be across the board, but that is why you are seeing this result right now. It's a relevance to the user issue.

Brand Name - do you have a turkish ccTLD or subdomain or subfolder you can look at Search Console for? This is to check that the top brand name search is what you mentioned. You can confirm that in the search queries area of search console. Once you've confirmed that is what people use, use that. Don't add Turkey if the name is different enough.

I would hyphenate a name like that. People don't type in FB urls and the hyphenation makes it more understandable.

No apologies needed, happy to help!

Hi Dan,

Long Description: Naturally having something written for FB would be best, but I don't think it's going to hurt if it's the same. The Facebook page and Homepage are two very different pages, so there shouldn't be a duplicate content issue. Is there any way to have someone at the client rewrite it for you? An assistant, etc?

As for Mission and General About, leave those alone until you need them. It's best to have everything filled out of course as it gives the room to add different ways to describe the company, but it's not going to make a big difference.

Vanity URL: Always the brand name. Always. If the customers in Turkey called it something different (translated words) use that. If they call it the English name, then you'll want to keep that plus Turkey if the focus market is in Turkey

Hope this helps!

Hmmm, then this is most likely a Bing over-optimization issue. Like I said before, they are infinitely pickier and they don't communicate as much.

Your URLs stayed the same, but did you add any content in the redesign? Are you willing to share the site with us?

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.

Have you claimed the site in Bing Webmaster Tools? How's the indexation in there?

Did this ever get resolved?

I would focus on the goals that historically lead to revenue. If they all do, calculate that. None of these things should be a page visit though, that's not a strong engagement metric. If I were you, I'd do:

1. Visit duration threshold (objective:people explore the online catalog)

2. This might help, it talks about support sites, which isn;t you, but if you implement it correctly, it can help you, just don't copy this implementation https://blog.kissmetrics.com/pageviews-time-on-site/

3. Click on a distributors website, track each individually (objective: people visit the distributor page)

4. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068?vid=1-635779271421213638-3696063864

5. Click on top social sites share buttons (objective: people share the pictures and info in social media)

6. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068?vid=1-635779271421213638-3696063864

7. After 30 seconds of video watch, it registers the goal (objective: people watch videos)

8. analytics.js and Tag Manager: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2015/05/11/updated-youtube-tracking-google-analytics-gtm/

9. ga.js: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/11/09/video-tracking-google-analytics-introduction/

10. Contact form completion (objective: new distributors contact them to be a new distributor)

The articles above are sometime ga.js, the old version of analytics. If you are running analytics.js, you'll need to work with Tag Manager. Hope that makes sense and helps.

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.