Language/Country Specific Pages All in English
-
Hi Folks,
I have been checking how many pages our competitors have indexed in Google compared to our website and I noticed that one of our main competitors has over 2 million indexed pages and I have figured out that it is because they have language/country specific pages for every page on their website. That being said, these pages contain all of the same content and the language doesn't actually change, it remains in English.
Now my question is this. Will this not in fact hurt their rankings, in terms of duplicate content? Or am I missing something here?
The URL's essentially do something like www.competitor.com/fr/ for France for example but as I say the content is in English, and duplicates their main website.
Seems odd to me but would love your opinions on this. Thanks.
Gaz
-
Thanks Keszi,
Will send you a PM, appreciate your help and advice. Thanks.
Gareth
-
In general, they should have different texts for all of their targeted regions. But without having a closer look on this specific example, it is quite hard to tell what they are doing.
If you want, send me a private message (if you do not want to share it here) and we can take a look at the specific case. Ok?
Gr., Keszi
-
Thanks for the response keszi.
In terms of serving pages that are all in English though, how would this affect rankings? It seems as though this should be penalised as you're not providing content in the language targeted, so in fact it is duplicate.
Thanks
Gaz
-
Hi Gareth,
I personally do not like the sub-domain approach, so if I had to choose between sub-domain and sub-directory approach, I would go for the second one.
The company where I work is using sub-directories for each of the languages, we have content written in each of the languages and we have also implemented hreflang markup. And it works fine for us.
Each of the approaches in international targeting has their positive and negative aspects. It really depends on many factors which one to choose.
Gr., Keszi
-
After doing some research it appears that subdirectory language specific content is the least SEO friendly but it also seems that you should have the content written in the language of that specific country.
What are your thoughts on this? Would this be detrimental to rankings or would you recommend I implement a similar strategy but using subdomains like https://country.domain.com? Thanks.
Gaz
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
-
How to rank for a location/country without having a physical address in that location/country
How do I go about it if my physical address (office) is in Country A but I want to rank my website in Country B, C and D (without having an office or physical address in the countries B, C and D)? I am aware of people setting up virtual offices in other countries/cities and adding them to Google Places/Maps with toll free phone numbers, but I don't wish to do any of that. I know Google will catch up with this one day or the other and punish me hard for trying to play games with it. Is there a way rank a website in another country without actually having a physical location there? If yes, please guide me how to go about it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
Subdomain or subfolder for each country
Hi all I have a great .com domain but the cctlds are not available so I plan on using the .com for all the countries and languages. What is the best approach for SEO: subdomains like wikipedia does (de.greatdomain.com) or subfolders (greatdomain.com/de)? I know this question comes up frequently on other websites but I would like to hear the Moz forum.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndersDK0 -
Date of page first indexed or age of a page?
Hi does anyone know any ways, tools to find when a page was first indexed/cached by Google? I remember a while back, around 2009 i had a firefox plugin which could check this, and gave you a exact date. Maybe this has changed since. I don't remember the plugin. Or any recommendations on finding the age of a page (not domain) for a website? This is for competitor research not my own website. Cheers, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Merge content pages together to get one deep high quality content page - good or not !?
Hi, I manage the SEO of a brand poker website that provide ongoing very good content around specific poker tournaments, but all this content is split into dozens of pages in different sections of the website (blog section, news sections, tournament section, promotion section). It seems like today having one deep piece of content in one page has better chance to get mention / social signals / links and therefore get a higher authority / ranking / traffic than if this content was split into dozens of pages. But the poker website I work for and also many other website do generate naturally good content targeting long tail keywords around a specific topic into different section of the website on an ongoing basis. Do you we need once a while to merge those content pages into one page ? If yes, what technical implementation would you advice ? (copy and readjust/restructure all content into one page + 301 the URL into one). Thanks Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0 -
Should you use a canonical tag on translated content in a multi-language country?
A customer of ours has a website in Belgium. There two main languages in Belgium: Dutch and French.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
At first there was only a Dutch version with a .be extension. Right now they are implementing the French Belgium version on the URL website.be/fr. All of the content and comments will be translated. Also the URL’s will change from Dutch to French, so you've got two URL’s with the same content but in another language. Question: Should you use a canonical tag on translated content in a multi-language country? I think Google will understand this is just for the usability for a Multilanguage country. What do you guys think???0 -
My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
I have been optimizing this page for a few weeks now and and have seen our page for up from 23rd to 11th on the serp's. I come to work today and not only have I dropped to 15 but I've also had my relevant product page replaced by this page . Not to mention the second page is a pdf! I am not sure what happened here but any advice on how I could fix this would be great. My site is www.mynaturalmarket.com and the keyword I'm working on is Zyflamend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0 -
Additional Pages in SERP
Hi Mozers, Can anybody help me with this. For "keyword phrase" SERP looks like this: 1. keyword.com/page1 2. keyword.com/page2 3. Mysite.com/page1 4. mysite.com/page2 ... 13. Mysite.com/page3 14. Mysite.com/page4 Is it possible to include Mysite.com/page3-4 both to the top 4th-5th, or better merge this pages and promote only one? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | de4e0 -
How to deal with 1 product in 1 country and 3 languages?
After reading multiple posts on dealing with multilanguage sites (also checked http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=12a5507889c20461&hl=en), I still haven't got an answer to a very specific question I have. Please allow me to give some background:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TruvoDirectories
I'm working for the official Belgian Yellow Pages (part of Truvo), and as you might know in Belgium, we have to deal with 3 official languages (BE-nl, BE-fr, BE-de | the latter is out of scope for this question) and on top of that we also have a large international audience (BE-en). Furthermore, Belgium is very small, meaning that someone living in the French part of Belgium (ex. Liège) easily might look for information in the Dutch part of Belgium (ex. Antwerpen) without having to switch websites/language. Since 1968 (http://info.truvo.be/en/our-company/) we have established 3 different brands, each brand is adapted to a language, each has a clear language specific connotation:
for the BE-nl market: we have the brand "gouden gids"
for the BE-fr market: we have the brand "pages dor"
for the BE-en market we have the brand "golden pages" Logically, this results in 3 websites: www.goudengids.be, www.pagesdor.be, www.goldenpages.be each serving a specific language and containing specific language messages and functionalities, but, off course, serving a part of the content that is similar for all websites regardless of the language.
So we do have following links ex.
http://www.goudengids.be/united-consultants-nv-antwerpen-2000/
http://www.pagesdor.be/united-consultants-nv-antwerpen-2000/
http://www.goldenpages.be/united-consultants-nv-antwerpen-2000/ When I want to stick with the separate brands for the same content, how do I make sure that Google shows the desired url when searching in resp. google.be (dutch), google.be (french) google.be (english)? Kind Regards0