Will creating sub folders for foreign versions of the website, remove rank juice from the main site?
-
Hi,
We plan to create sub-folders for our german, spanish and italian language versions. If we do will this pass rank juice to the new sites, but at the same time badly effect our main site, regards link juice/serp?
Or is this not such a huge factor in people's experience?
Many thanks.
James.
-
No. We are just telling the search engine that the German version of the website (www.example.com) is located at www.example.com/de/
So all the pages/folders originating from that directory become the part of this process. (www.example.com/de/2ndpage OR www.example.com/de/another-page.html )
-
Do I need to create a new <loc>for each separate page (eg www.example/de and example/de/2ndpage) or just for each separate URL or Folder?</loc>
-
As far as I'm aware James, using sub-folders will mean that authority is passed to your domain as a whole but you will still need to build authority separately for each of your subfolders for them to rank in each country SERPs that you have targeted in webmaster tools and using the hreflang tag.
-
Create all the language lines in a single XML file. Don't create multiple XML files for this. And follow the same instructions mentioned in the above Google link
-
That was very helpful, thanks a lot, i did not realise there was a sitemap annotation available, so I just need to add the code indicating each different version + href lang to each language pages' site map?
-
Hi James
Hope you are planing to target users for different languages or countries. You can achieve this by adding rel="alternate" hreflang="x" annotations in sitemap
Using rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
Using rel="alternate" hreflang="x" anotations in sitemap to tell Google that there is different versions of same website exist on the web. Otherwise Google will consider it as duplicate content and block it from SERP
Example Steps
- For your German version of your website create a sub-folder like www.example.com/de/
_- Now you need to create a XML sitemap for this and you can name it as _languages.xml
_- Upload the sitemap and tell Google where it is located _through Google Web Master Tools
Useful links for this process
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865
Hope this will help you
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What should go in a "Link Juice" cocktail?
The office just got some of those fancy Google Partner bottles, and I want to fill them up with a tasty cocktail that is link juice themed. Any ideas on how to tie Google and/or SEO into a fancy cocktail?
Search Behavior | | WilliamKammer1 -
Google PageRank and google keyword ranks
Hi, I manage around 13 Clients for SEO and this last two weeks i have been having problems with google keyword ranking some of my clients went down almost 40 positions for some keywords other 15 other stayed the same and some just went down 1 or 5 positions. Somebody know what is happening with google? is it shuffling around positions of people? Any advice or how you do your SEO I'm willing to work together and share experiences and tactics on SEO to people that also share with me in order to build more strategies on this amazing market. Thanks.
Search Behavior | | computernc0 -
Is putting/removing Adsense ads on the site affects crawling for seo?
Because I noticed when we totally remove Adsense ads on our site, the pages crawled per day on the google webmastertools suddenly dropped into noticable amount and we tested again to turn it on for a singe day, it jumped up again. So if Adsense affects crawling then, if we have adsense ad on all pages of the site the more chances it gets crawled by the bot? WS76R8w
Search Behavior | | CruiseControl0 -
Bounce Rate and Time on Site
What would be the best way to decrease bounce rate and increase time on site for a Real Estate Website?
Search Behavior | | bronxpad0 -
Massive Google Drop on two sites!
Hi All, We have experienced a massive Google drop on Two of our eCommerce websites in the past week. From Feb - July we were ranked 2 for various key words In Aug we dropped to 8 In September to 96 if not lower. We pay for monthly link building and add unique product info each week (but not much new content such as articles or blogs). My SEO guys has not been that helpful and just sent me a link to the Panda update blog, which doesn't mean a great deal to me. Obviously this has had a massive effect on business, and ideally i need to diagnose the problem and find a new startegy on moving forward, so most likely looking for a for a new SEO guy/company as well. I need someone is proactive, communicates well and make constant suggestions about moving forward not just link building. One thing I would like to add is these two site have a different homepage, category and range structure, but do share some if the 2000 product database. Can anyone help? Any advice on sorting this would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks M
Search Behavior | | etsgroup0 -
Best way to remove worthless/thin content?
I have a Wordpress site with about 3,000 pages and 1,000 of those are no value/duplicate content and drive no traffic. They are blog posts each with a single image and permalinks like example.com/post1, example.com/post2 etc. I've started by deleting pages and 301 redirecting to relevant pages that actually have content. Is deleting and 301 redirecting the best route? Is 1,000 to many 301 redirects? Should I just delete the pages that aren't really relevant to anything else? Anything else I should know about deleting all of these pages? Any help would be great!
Search Behavior | | gfreeman230 -
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to our website
Hi, We have been using SEOmoz for a good few months now and have found it incredibly useful. Unfortunately however I think we may have slipped up a little bit as we have just received the following message in our Google Webmaster Tools: Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/ I have a funny feeling I might know what the problem is but I'd like a confirmation before I potentially go off on a wild goose chase. We also own the domain name www.computerarticles.co.uk and recently started introducing the author at the bottom of the post along with both a link to the website homepage and a link to a deep, popular page on our website. For example, check out http://www.computerarticles.co.uk/twitter-time-saving-tools/ We genuinely didn't realise this was a bad thing and thought it would just provide Google with a way of deep linking straight in to popular areas of our site. I would really appreciate advice as to whether you think it might be these links that are causing the problem or whether there is something else that could be causing the problem. In the event it is these links that are causing the issue would you recommend removing the entire 'about the author' page (as we have published around 500 pages on that site) and simply put a link in the blog roll or simplify it to just link to the homepage. I appreciate in advance any help you could give. Regards Chris
Search Behavior | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Drastic Fluctuation in Site Rankings
All, Hope you are having a good day! Recently I had a strange issue with one of my site and I am not sure what might have caused it. I am sure this would be a good place to discuss about it and get some feedback from the elite people in the industry. Here is the problem. Last weekend (On sunday noon) my site which was ranking on Page 1 suddenly dropped its ranking for its main keywords to nowhere, I was panicked to see what was happening and by the end of the day it was slowly coming back and by next morning everything was back. Again on Wednesday noon, the same thing happened. However, this time it din't come up by the next morning. Making it worse, all of my keyword rankings went down from good spots to no where and there was a point when I could no longer see my site. I was worried something might have happened this time and was not sure what could the reason be. On Friday afternoon all the ranking came up better than the previous (which is a very good news for me). At the moment, my site is doing very well and I am really happy about it. I did realize that Google was updating their Algorithm, but this behavior is the strangest I have seen over years. Can someone enlighten me on this peculiar behavior. Is there something wrong with my site or is it a common thing that I have never noticed? I have never done anything blackhat for the site. To be honest, all I have done is some low level link building on the site and the site had some advantage of a re-direct from one my previous site which was doing very well in search engines (I changed it to take advantage of the new domain I had). Your opinions/suggestions are a appreciated.
Search Behavior | | frostmill0