Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Have you checked out that tool yet and answered the questions? I can help you with the technical implementation, but need to know what's best for your business first.

First, please don't ignore UX. That is a big part of how the search engines operate today.

As Charles said, an IP based 301 redirect is a very bad idea. Please, please don't do it. It will only hurt you. Google only crawls from the US, so they will never see the redirect. And as Charles said, US people traveling in the UK would not be able to get to the US site.

Also, like Charles, I am confused. You have 2 domains, but want one. I think that is what you mean. You have .co.uk and .com, but would prefer to have everything on .com. That's possible, in my testings, having a .co.uk is not a guarantee for ranking. It can help search engines understand your target market, but regional TLDs (ccTOLDs) are meant for businesses that only operate in that country, or have content/products/information that is specific to that region.

.com on the other hand is a generic TLD, it is not focused to one country.

If you want the .com to rank better in the UK, there are a few questions I need you to answer. In fact, go here: http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/ and let me know what result you get from those questions. Then I can help you with the technical setup.

You need to still "own" that domain in WMT if memory serves correctly. But it could help. Do the URLs 404 right now?

Interesting question. You only transferred the domain to someone else? Do they understand the content is not coming with the domain?

What is your expectation of moving the content to another domain? What are you trying to accomplish?

As long as the content is not showing for the old domain, I'd wait until the other site's content is either removed or updated to the new owner's content, and then move the content to a new domain. It shouldn't cause any issues.

It is my opinion that this kind of "duplicated content" is not hurting you. There is no need to put this kind of content into an image. Duplicated content like this is largely ignored. There are bigger fish to fry. If you are looking for things to do, work on ensuring your product content is 100% unique, engaging and do some conversion testing. It's a much better use of time.

Hi Batchbook,

I am going to give you a slightly different answer than seowoody.

The issue you are looking at is geography based, not language based from what I can tell right now. That means you don't need hreflang (maybe). This might be different for the actual situation though. Your customers needs determine what route you should go down for international, and I can't tell you what to do without knowing more (Like SEOWoody said).

With all of that being said, use this tool and report back to me your end result (it's something I built). Then I can help you figure out how to deal with this:

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

Your Spain site is most likely getting Latin American traffic because it's in Spanish. Does your offering(s) change in Spain vs Mexico? If so, you should have a Mexico focused site. If your offerings don't change based on the location of the customer, then you probably just need one site in different languages.

For the sake of my example let's use 4 URLs, 2 homepages, 2 internal pages (one for each language).

• www.domain.com
• www.domainjp.com
• www.domain.com/page.html
• www.domainjp.com/pagejp.html

I am suggesting that in the of www.domain.com:

In the of www.domainjp.com:

In the of www.domain.com/page.html:

In the of www.domain.com/pagejp.html:

Using hreflang will just tell the search engines that they are the same pages, only in different languages. If that is true of the pages on each site, then you should implement a structure like the above. You would want a language change option on the sites just in case someone wants to change languages, but it's not necessary.

I would highly recommend hreflang between the two pages. It needs to be implemented on both sides. Each one referencing itself and the translation. Please let me know if you need code examples!

I see the ads have been removed, but as I crawl the site, in just 5 minutes I see 26k pages, but your initial navigation doesn't mention the brands I am seeing in the crawl. It might be that Bing thinks you are hiding content. For anyone to full assess your site, they would need access to your webmaster tools accounts and analytics.

The sheer amount of content on your site stands out to me considering the navigation. But that is all I can find on first pass. You links might still be another but that would take more analysis.

Oh just saw this as well, you have a potential duplicate content issue:

• http://servicemanualrepairs.com/book/2008-mazda-cx-9-owners-manual/
• http://servicemanualrepairs.com/book/tag/2008-mazda-cx9-owners-manual/

I would disallow all tag pages and get your navigation figured out, that might help some.

I actually think it has less to do with schema and more to do with things like Freebase. It's the same as the one box showing up in branded searches in Google. I don't know the threshold or metrics for how to get that, but I know you at least need to have the same consistent information across the web about your brand.

As Bob said, I'm really curious if anyone has insight as to metrics or thresholds.

It sounds like you might be using an automatic redirect based on IP. Is that true? If so, that's why Google is only showing the US numbers. They don't prefer one over the other, but you are inherently only showing them the US numbers if you are doing that redirect.

My suggestion is to let people set their location with a javascript based popup that sets a cookie. That will then modify the numbers. If you prefer Google sees the metric numbers, show that to any user that doesn't have a cookie set.

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.

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.

Let's remove all possible instances in which you might been seen as targeting Ireland. It sounds like the https caused a reclassification of the site.

Second question, did you add the https in Search Console? Do you have both there and both are geo-targeted to the US?

Sorry, one more. When did you add the address for the business at the bottom/footer? Any opposition to removing that and just keeping mailing/location information on a contact page?

Thanks! Clarification, you are geo-targeting this domain in search console to the US? When did you do that? Where is it hosted?

As Mike said, we need to know the site. It sounds like your international targeting is off, but I won't be able to tell how until I can see the site.

Are these issues caused by pagination? Page 1, Page 2, Page 3 things? A canonical is not exactly right. A noindex would be best, (noindex,follow) specifically, just make sure that tag isn't put on page 1. You want page 1 in the index.

I would no suggest disallowing the crawling of the pages (what Andy stated above, sorry Andy, that's a disallow, not a noindex).

I am not sure how to change this for just the paginated pages though. I'd look for a noindex module in the Prestashop Modules area.

Apologies!

You got Google France traffic in the past and now it has gone away. Is France a major market for you?

I've seen this happen before but I've never been able to identify where it came from. The only thing I can think of is checking your site's log files to identify the IP address and research that way. But that's very intensive work.

Just to clarify, you are still seeing the same amount of traffic from google.fr, just not from /imgres?

If that's it, there is one possibility that the information is being lumped into one large referrer. This happened a number of years ago with google.com. Images traffic was shown separately and then one day merged. Quite annoying to my images based client.

The one overall suggestion is to test your new layout for conversion. Content is good, but is not 100% needed in the amount you have on what seems to be ecommerce category pages. Focus on the conversion and having some content.

1. The new pages are only 180-300 words of text, simply because that is all that is needed to describe that category and provide some supporting information. the pages previously contained 600 words. Should I be looking to get more content on these pages?

No, I've seen categories with less content rank very well. Remember, names of products and other supporting text on the page is content as well. Don't worry about the length.

2. If i do need more content, It wont fit "above the fold" without pushing the products and sub categories below the fold, which isn't ideal. Should I be putting it there anyway or should I insert additional text below the products and below the fold or would this just be a waste.

Nope. Not unless the user needs it.

3. Keyword Structure. I have designed each page to target a selection of keywords, for example.
**a) The main widget pages targets all general "widget" terms and provides supporting **information
b) The sub-category blue widget page targets anything related and terms such as "Navy Widgets" because navy widgets are a type of blue widget etc"
Is this keyword structure over-optimised or exactly what I should be doing. I don't want to spread content to thin by being over selective in my categories

What you are doing sounds reasonable in theory. Stick with that and keep in mind that you only need to worry about specific terms like navy widgets if there is more than one navy widget and there is a high volume of demand for that. There is a lot that goes into this, but try to keep the category page focused to 1-2 terms.

You have no duplicate problems. The canonicals seem to be in place. I see no URLs like that without a canonical or redirect in my crawl.

Just as a heads up though, when I crawled, I got 107 total pages that would be indexed, does that sound right?

Could you give me your domain? I am not sure if Moz has fixed the canonical issue, but I know it didn't recognize those in the past. I am happy to check your code myself if you can give me the site.

Hahaha. I think you might have one of the few instances that I recommend something I generally don't recommend, which is a hreflang across domains. Now this is going to get complicated, so let me know if I miss something in my explanation.

First, I normally would recommend that the client just use the English translation of the main site if the content won't change at all. But you can't due to the trademarked name.

Second, it sounds like your client never intends on changing the content on the new site for the US audience and doesn't need to. I assume this means that there is no change in products/services and no reason for people to see different content between the France specific English version and this other English version. If there is any change in content, like imagery, messaging, adding, modifying or removing products or services, please let me know. That changes the answer.

If there is no actual changes in content, none at all, and no reason for them, you'll want to use a cross domain hreflang.

France-French bbb.com
France-English bbb.com/en 
English (separate brand) aaa.com

I would use hreflang to show that bbb.com is translated to en-fr at bbb.com/en and en-us at aaa.com.

That's how to deal with that situation, but if their site is a .com and there is some way to just offer their content in English, that will get results faster and be easier to maintain.

With the setup you are considering, you would still need to work on promoting the new domain and that will take time.

I hope this all made sense.

I can't say that I know for sure, but I know how to tell you to make sure.

If they are both listed there, you should have them both as profiles in Search Console. Which one do you use the most and what has the most information on indexation and sitemaps? Use that one.

But I don't think you can go wrong here. It should be the same site. If I were to make an educated guess, go with http://yourdomain.com.

DA is Moz's estimate of the importance of domains in relation to each other. Google does this themselves, so it's not that they "see" DA, but they have something similar.

As long as you don't expect the content from the vendor to bring you organic traffic, you should be okay. You said you have the canonical in place to them, so as long as that is there, there should be no impact from algorithm updates. You wouldn't be penalized for this.

There are few things that could be varying the data.

The first thing to remember is that Webmaster Tools is only showing data for the URLs in the index they associate with that account. This data is different if you are looking at domain.com or www.domain.com. If you had a few subdomains on the same root domain and on the same analytics tracker, but were looking at WMT for www.domain.com, you would be missing information from those subdomains.

In addition to that, there might be issues with your GA tracking code firing. It could be missing from some pages in the index. You could have a number of PDFs on your site that would incur clicks, but would not be tracked in GA.

The other issue is the difference in the data sets. WMT shows clicks only, not visits to your site. People can be clicking a result in Google and immediately changing their mind. That would result in a click but no visit. WMT also doesn't distinguish between returning and new clicks. It's just total.

The two data sets are completely off and each have their own drawbacks. To get the best data, you'll need to ensure there is a tracking code on every page. Then account for files like PDFs that can get clicks, but not visits in GA. That's a place to start. But it's still different data and not ever going to be the same.

These are some big differences and that does point to something being wrong, but there would need some in-depth analysis to point to exactly what is causing it.

This isn't actually an issue of Google hiding or not reporting accurately. Bing and Yahoo also have started not processing any keyword data to analytics sets. Google still shows some, but it's only for non-logged in users.

The reports for WMT are more accurate, but you should not try to report on a keyword basis. It's a losing battle. I wrote an article on how to change up reporting and analysis in today's world. https://moz.com/blog/stop-thinking-keywords-think-topics

This is highly confounding. I've crawled as Bingbot and nothing is in it's way.

There are a few other issues though. You are using the canonical on a large number of pages. In my crawl, I am seeing the crawler going through a large number of pages and only returning a fraction of them. At this moment my crawler is finding 31k things to crawl, has crawled 1044 and returned only 29 pages that might be indexed. 65% of those are without errors.

It is possible that the site structure is causing issues. I suggest taking time to review your site structure and making it easier for bots to find the pages they need to index, telling them what not to crawl (a canonical is a suggestion and should be used when pages are duplicated), and fixing all errors on the site.

Not seeing anything overtly wrong. I submitted your homepage to Bing for indexing, so we'll see what happens there.

2 other things though.

1. You advertise. Get a hold of the ads side and see if they know anything or if they can connect you with anyone. It's a long shot, but worth a try.
2. Have you verified your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submitted your sitemap manually?

Can you provide your domain please?

Hi S.

Good issue you have here. I agree with your sentiment below, if you can't maintain separate ccTLDs, they might not be right for you. I am not saying don't do it, as a ccTLD is a strong signal still, but if it doesn't work for you, the structure you mentioned works just fine.

Just to make sure you have the right structure though, can you visit my tool here, answer the questions, and let me know what the result is? It's the best way I have found for determining international site structure.

Once you have that, we can discuss what the right structure is for you.

Kate

Not saying that is it 100% but that could be a major part of the issue. I would talk with the agency running the PPC and let them know the issue and have them pair the AdWords and Analytics accounts.

They are not great at writing their own explanations for international. What they meant above is if you have geo-targeted correctly, you would not have to use a canonical between two pages that are the same. That they will figure it out on their own.

You aren't geo-targeting, so I still think the canonical would be needed.

Hmmm, is your adwords account hooked up to your analytics account?

Can you click into the results going to the homepage and set that secondary dimension to country? That should be a possibility, a location of some kind.

Jochen, I can't say I've seen this particular issue, but you are right that it is odd. It sounds like you have everything set up technically correct, but Google WMT is crossing some wires.

I wish I could provide you with more, but I wouldn't know any potential issues without being able to look at your whole setup in GoogleWMT. I recommend having a consultant take a look. Typically, I hate recommending that (because I'm a consultant and that looks shady), but there really is no other way to know if everything is set up right and Google is just on crack, but I think that's it.

Is there much traffic coming in this way? The above would suggest the referral is from the google.co.uk homepage, is not passing the referral page, or is from something internal as /url isn't a thing. I've seen all of this before, so you are not going nuts, but I don't have a concise answer. I can tell you that your search traffic should be going to organic and this should be something like news, images, or another google property. Most likely it's traffic that is blocking referral info.

So I am hoping it's not much traffic. Where is the traffic going? Set that secondary dimension to landing page and let me know.

HREFLANG is all you need to note the change in language between two pages. However, if the page has not been translated and is available under both language subfolders, make sure there isn't an HREFLANG and has a canonical. When the pages are identical and have 2 URLs, us a canonical and NOT HREFLANG.

I am not sure if Moz detects HREFLANG. If you know it's set up correctly, just ignore the warnings in Moz. And if you can, translate the title and description as well. That'll help get rid of the warnings.

Geo-tagging is not necessary if the content is just translated.

I had a whole answer and lost it due to a cookie faux pas.

It looks like there are about 2 million buff.ly URLs in the Google index, so as long as you are seeing the buff.ly URL as a referral and not a page on your site, this looks possible. It is weird indeed and I don't know if it's intentional on the part of Bufferly, but it is happening for sure.

The URLs could be being indexed and then dropped from the index after a few days. And it's a social URL, so the drop makes sense there as well.

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

My thought is that for some reason, with the Canadian and US proximity, the algo could see the US page as stronger. Do you see in Analytics for the few times this happens, the organic traffic to that page, is it border Canadian towns? It's definitely not perfect with bordering countries, but if you are geo-targeted correctly and the content is different, then overall you should not have major issues.

If you'd like, tell me a few terms and your domain and I'll check it out.

How long has the Canada section been up? Is it identical to the US section? What is your main domain? .com?

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.

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.

This is tough. Let me ask you one question: For a potential customer in South Africa, is there any different information they need to see than someone in the Congo, or somewhere else in the world that speaks English? If yes, what kind of different information would they need to see?

This is one of the instances that made me change the way I see the HREFLANG tag. So many people disagree but hear me out.

The HREFLANG tag is only for language differentiation. There are language and country codes because, as you point out, there are many countries that speak the same language and some have some major dialect changes. The biggest example being UK and US English. Therefore, if you have a site developed in US English that you want to "translate" to UK English, but not change the content of the site other than that, you would use HREFLANG tags to note the difference in the pages to Google. Since you changed nothing else (no currency changes, no legal changes, no product set changes), there is no reason for country targeting. You are just translating the same content ... aka changing a few words.

Now, let's say that you are operating a site that has a geo-targeted section to South Africa. Depending on the setup, you might not need HREFLANG tags at all. If you are changing the content other than through translation to target South Africa, that is geo-targeting. Targeting the country.

You can do both geo-target AND change language settings. For instance, if you are a Canadian company that legally has to have all of it's content in Canadian French (fr-ca) and Canadian English (en-ca), you would use HREFLANG between those two. But then you decide to move into the US. You might create a subfolder, subdomain, or ccTLD specific to the US market since you can't offer all of your products or services over there due to regulations. You would geo-target the new section/site to the United States, but not use HREFLANG since the content is targeted at a different country. You would want to make sure the content changed enough and the Canadian English pages might rank for a while but over time the US site/section would get stronger.

I hope that all makes sense.

In your instance where you have geo-targeted, I assume that is for a reason. However, because you have geo-targeted that section to South Africa, you cannot geo-target it to the Congo as well. You would either need to great a section for the Congo and geo-target that, or, if geo-targeting isn't really needed, use one big site and country specific translations. Only do this if your content is the same across the board and you are changing some of the wording to local dialects.

If you want to know more, check out my international search tool that might help you find what structure you should have: http://www.katemorris.com/issg/

There isn't anything different you should be doing for Bing on site. The page you mentioned is indexed in Bing (url:https://www.sitegeek.com/000webhost is indexed in Bing). So it's tough to understand what might be going on.

There are many potential issues here.

1. The language changes causing an issue. Bing's tag is different from Google's.

2. The site quality or content quality is not enough for Bing to want to index. I doubt that, but it's a potential issue.

3. Sitemap issues. Bing is not as good as Google at telling us what the issues are with sitemaps. Without doing a full analysis, there isn't much we can do to tell you the problem.

4. Sometimes it's just Bing. They are always behind ...