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Hi Alick,

I should explain that we're a landing page platform so the /clkn/ tracking links that are getting indexed are getting indexed on our customer domains, not ours. Therefore we'd have no access to Google Search Console to make any tweaks.

i.e.  http://customerdomain.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com

Secondly, this URL ^ does not contain any parameters, so the fix you mentioned above doesn't apply.

Any other ideas?

I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this:

http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/

The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com.

Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding   Disallow: /clkn/   in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page.

How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?

Hi Jake,

As mentioned above, the subdirectory structure is not an option at this point. The options are to go with subdomains or ccTLD's. Thoughts?

Hi Jake,

I realize my options are to go with subdomains or ccTLD's. My question is which one is better in this case (and why)?

Cheers, Cody

I’m currently working with my team to sort out the best way to build out the international versions of our website. Any advice on how to move forward is greatly appreciated!

Current Setup: Subdirectories to target languages - i.e. domain.com/es/.

We chose this because…

1. We are targeting languages not countries

2. Our product offering does not change from country to country

3. Translated site content is almost identical to the english version

Current Problem: Our site is built on WordPress and our database can’t handle the build out of 4 more international versions of the site. The database is slowing down and our site speed is being affected for multiple reasons (WordPress multilingual plugin being one of them).

**What to do next? **My developers have said that we cannot continue with our current subdirectory structure due to the technical infrastructure issues I’ve mentioned above (as well as others I’m yet to get full details on). Now I’m left with a decision:

1. Change to a subdomain structure

2. Change to a ccTLD structure

3. Is there an option 3?

From what I’ve read it does not make sense to build out language targeted sites on a ccTLD structure because that limits the ability for people outside of the targeted country to find the content organically. I.e. a website at www.domain.es is targeted to searchers in Spain so someone in Columbia is less likely to find that content through the engines. Is this correct? If so, how much can it hurt organic discovery?

What’s the optimal setup to move forward with in this case?

Thanks!

I realize it's important to use hreflang tags when your site is translated into multiple languages and that content is very similar if not identical to the original language.

However, is there value in having hreflang tags implemented for every blog post that gets translated? Does the same value hold true? In my case, the blog posts which get translated into different languages can somewhat vary from the original. By no means are they a direct translation. They are often adapted to meet the needs of that language and audience.