Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Gianluca,

Is that only if your site utilizes sub-domains or would it be the same if you utilize a sub-folder structure?

Kayleigh,

I would love to.  I have 2 languages that are spoken in numerous countries around the world, on the same domain so I will definitely let you know what I am able to find out.

I will also take @Gianluca's advise and implement on the home page for the brand.

The teams in China have been able to see the website and use it without any problem so from everything I can tell the site is visible in the country.

Howdy,

I have not implemented the href tags and I am having similar results, however I have started to see that change a little in traffic so I am going to start the implementation of the tags across the sites.

My situation might be a little different though because I have 30 sites in different countries but there is this article from Gianluca that I have found extremely helpful: https://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

It is an older post but I still find it very helpful as to the best practices and things to consider when running international websites.

Hope this helps. - Brooke

I am setting up a Chinese domain and I was wondering if anyone has experience with using Google Analytics for tracking in the country and if it really works or if Baidu is the better solution for the website.  The website will be hosted in the US so I don't know if that makes any difference with getting around "The Great Firewall".

I would prefer to us GA if possible because I am extremely familiar with the platform but I am more concerned with getting accurate tracking data for the site.

Thank you in advance and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Brooke

Hi Kelly,

I agree with Bethany below that you should start to look at how to optimize pages of your website instead of trying to optimize the whole thing at once.

I would really start by looking at the pages on your site that receive the most traffic from organic search.  Make sure your title tags, meta description and content contain the keywords you would like to appear for in SERPs while also insuring that the optimizations add value to the user experience (I am not telling you to keyword stuff by any means!)

I would then start to build content around these keywords and topics that add value to your brand.  This will help to regain some of the lost position in SERPs and also help to ensure that you are not penalized by another Google Update.  I will let you know that this isn't a solution that is going to work over night, but will help your website to build strength for those topics.

After you have built your content I would start to focus on off-site optimization to help get links regardless of what anyone else says.

Sorry this is a really broad recommendation.  Let me know if you need anymore detail.

Has anyone looked into a page not ranking as well because the URL is in English when the subdomain is geared for a different country and different language?

I can defiantly see this taking away from the user experience, but didn't know if there was any concrete evidence or case studies that would show if it is a big deal or not for rankability?

I know this is a backwards question to begin with because the priority over rankability is always UX, but there may not be a way to fix it unless I can prove it is a big deal.

I would have to say that one of the best resources for conversion optimization would be Unbounce's Conversion Optimization Blog http://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/

They have tons of information here for conversions as well as usability and landing page optimization.

Hope this helps!

With my experience with tracking URLs I have never had an instance of duplicate content.  Although I was working solely with Google Analytics tracking URLs I think you should be safe.

To double check yourself you can run a report in Screaming Frog or check SEOMoz to see if you are getting any duplciate errors or show multiple versions of the same URL in your Screaming Frog report.

I have been using tracking URLs for close to two years now and that is how I always double check myself.

Google Analytics allows you to setup what are called tracking URLs.  They can be used when you "tag" your URLs with tracking code that allows for GA to translate which medium is generating what traffic.

http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033867 This is a tool that Google offers to help you generate your URLs.  There are also spreadsheets available online that allow you to create the URLs in Excel but they aren't always 100% accurate.  What you are doing is ultimately creating parameters that allow for custom campaigns to be setup within Analytics.  This allows you to monitor more than just the clicks, but allows you to generate custom reports that are more insightful and provide better data.

Once your URLs and Campaigns are created and running smoothly, you will be able to look at the data of the multi-channel funnels.  This feature allows for attribution to be given to the digital and non-digital channels that don't always get the credit for the conversion.  There is a lot of data can be pulled from these models and they really help to better allocate resources if needed.

I hope this all makes sense and Google actually did a very good job of explaining these resources on their analytics guide.  I would take a look there as well to get a better understanding before diving right in.

In my opinion no.  The canonical is telling search engines that there are pages with similar content that do exist, but one of them is the one you want to be crawled for the information and content.

Best practices suggest that you only have one canonical per page, but I am unsure as to the penalties associated with having more.

I am still confused as to why you couldn't use tracking URLs to achieve your goals because it allows you to see which site is referring the traffic without having to create multiple URLs.  Tracking URLs are different from analytics tracking that you have installed on your sites.

David,

Something else you may want to try are tracking URLs.  If you are utilizing Google Analytics, you can setup tracking URLs that allow you to know which website the clicks are coming from, but also allows you to point users to the same URL/content on the website.

There are a lot of templates out there that can help you to get started using them, but once you do, it makes it a lot easier to track what mediums are driving what traffic.  If you want to get really spiffy, you can start tracking what traffic drivers are creating the most conversions and also start to utlize multi-channel funnels.

If you are interested I would be more than happy to help you get started.

Hope this helps!