Which will rank higher: Non-mobile friendly site in native language vs. mobile friendly global site in English?
-
Hi, we are currently implementing a mobile site, e.g. m.company.com. The global mobile site will only be available in English.
We have local subsites of the desktop site, e.g. company.com/fr. The local subsites are not mobile friendly.
If a user does a search for a brand term in France, **which site will rank higher in SERPs? **If it will be the global site, is there anything we can do (other than making them mobile friendly) to make the local sites rank higher?
Would it be the mobile-friendly site, even though it is only in English, because the local site would be penalized for not being mobile friendly? Or would it be the local site, because Google will give priority to the fact that it's in French, which matches the language of the person searching?
-
No, it doesn't change my answer, but it's a good distinction to make. It sounds like the international expansion is in process. If the client needs geo-targeted content (sounds like they might), the countries need to be treated differently. Each subfolder as it's own site really. But it sounds like the translation is a good place to start for the time being.
For the mobile, my answer remains the same. There isn't anything other than making the translated content mobile or responsive that will help the traffic.
-
Thanks Kate. The content is very similar between countries, to the degree where I thought it was translated verbatim at first. Looking deeper, I see that there is some slight variation between offerings.
The client is only using language codes: en, it, fr - except in China, where they have two versions of the site (zh-hans and zh-en. The second code, zh-en, is incorrect).
All the content is set up under subdirectories, e.g. site.com/en rather than microsites en.site.com.
Does this change your judgment?
-
Lots going on here. First, let me clarify, your client's desktop content is only translated? They don't change the content and the offerings don't change by country? There is a very important distinction here. Language and country are two different things.
Regardless, if the mobile site is only in English, because of mobilegeddon, if they think they are penalized, it's because they lost mobile traffic or are seeing declines. This is only because there is not good mobile content in the users language. Once that is available, I expect the traffic will rise. It's not a penalty like duplicate content isn't a penalty, it is just not optimal.
For anyone doing brand searches, I think the answer is it depends. If Google thinks the user is okay with the English mobile site, they will show that. If the user has only ever searched in their particular language, and that's not available on mobile, they might show the desktop local site (better but not perfect) or they might test showing the English mobile site. I think you'll see both over time until the mobile issue is fixed.
-
In the Abercrombie case, the site that comes up in the search results is the EU mobile site, with German language. When I click on it, it seems that they are automatically redirecting me to abercrombie.com; not the English version of m.eu.abercrombie.com. I find automatic redirects annoying - in this case, I'm intentionally trying to hit the German site and I can't.
We are in development of the new global mobile site. The existing desktop site is being "punished" for not being mobile-friendly. Hence why we are creating a mobile site in the age of responsive design
-
Hi Jennifer,
How can you still be in development and in the same time be "punished" for not having a mobile version?
To answer your question - Abercrombie is doing something similar as your client is doing. On the desktop version they have 5 languages - the mobile version is only English. If you search on Google.de (desktop) - you get the German version. If you search Google.de on mobile - the titles in the search results are German - however the site which is displayed when you click on the links is the one that is optimised for mobile (= English version)
I guess this will be similar in your case - desktop searches will go to the translated version - the mobile searches will go to the mobile version (even if it's not in the language of the searcher).
Dirk
-
According to the client, the site is being penalized for not being mobile friendly; but there could be other reasons. The desktop site has 10-12 versions, set up as subdirectories.
If the native language site will come up first, the client is fine with doing nothing. If not, they want us to redirect the users as you described. But since we're still in development, we're not sure what the answer is.
Do you think it's most likely that the native language site would come up first?
The long-term plan is to create responsive sites, for better SEO and UX, so this is just a temporary interim solution.
-
Your site will in no way become penalized for not being mobile friendly. "mobilgeddon" was an effort to get more people to switch to mobile friendly designs and is still only a factor within Google's algorithm. You should be thinking about switching to mobile (responsive ideally) for a better user experience - not because of Google.
You mentioned that the global mobile version will only be available in English. Does this mean you have other languages on the desktop site? If so I would rely exclusively on the non-mobile pages utilizing the hreflang tag (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en) and then when you eventually make the other language pages mobile friendly switch the hreflang to point to those page.
Pointing your users in a different company expecting their native language to the mobile english only version I suspect would create extremely high bounce rates. You would be best off (IMO) just sending them to the non-mobile but correct language desktop page regardless of search being desktop vs mobile.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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 do hreflang attributes affect ranking?
We have a site in English. We are considering translating the site into Dutch. If we use a hreflang attribute does that mean we have to create a duplicate page in Dutch for each English page, or does Google auto-translate? How would duplicate pages, even if they are in a different language, affect ranking?
International SEO | | Substance-create0 -
Need help with search results for US site for a compnay that has many international sites
I am tasked with optimizing a US site for a company that has many international sites. Currently, if you search for just the main company name and don't include "USA" in your search, it won't even give you the US site on the SERP. It displays the Italian, French, etc etc sites - even though I'm searching on Google in the US with a preferred language of Engilsh. Unfortunately I don't have any control over the other sites, only the US one. Is there anything I can add to the US site (aside from setting the country code in GSC) so that when someone searches from within the USA, they get the US site and not all of the other ones? thanks!
International SEO | | SEOIntouch0 -
Lost local organic rankings and international issues
Hi Everyone, Hoping we can get some help from our fellow Mozzers (Mozee's? Mozites?) We have 3 TLD's .com.au .co.uk & .com We noticed an issue a couple of weeks ago where we suddenly lost a lot of our search rankings for keywords on the .com.au site that we'd been top with for a long time. A lot of our Australian visitors were coming through our US site. US & UK sites got increased ranking results. We fixed up what we thought were the issues (Potentially HREF Lang issues and old sitemap issues). Google Search Console is still telling us we have some HREF Lang Errors, (but this could be waiting an updated crawl as the number is decreasing) Our main domain example.com is now showing up as first result in google.com.au search and the example.com.au doesn't show up until page 4 (prior to 2 weeks ago it was number 1) Any input would be appreciated...
International SEO | | tinyme0 -
Google does not index UK version of our site, and serves US version instead. Do I need to remove hreflanguage for US?
Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
International SEO | | lcourse
We have another US domain with identical content but USD prices which is indexed fine. When I search in google for site:mydomain I see that most of my pages seem to appear, but then in the rich snippets google shows USD prices instead of the GBP prices which we publish on this page (USD price is not published on the page and I tested with an US proxy and US price is nowhere in the source code). Then I clicked on the result in google to see cached version of page and google shows me as cached version of the UK product page the US product page. I use the following hreflang code: rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.domain.com/product" />
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.domain.co.uk/product" /> canonical of UK page is correctly referring to UK page. Any ideas? Do I need to remove the hreflang for en-US to get the UK domain properly indexed in google?0 -
Is it OK to change language by user IP?
Hello, I just read https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#1 about multilingual website. Google says "Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language". so Is it ok to redirect url by user IP instead of user language?
International SEO | | visaasancard0 -
Non-Unicode Fonts and SEO
For some reason we've translated part of our website into Burmese. The most common font in use in Myanmar (Burma) is called Zawgyi and is non-unicode. Which means that if you look at it in Chrome you get a bunch of squares. That's not a problem because firefox provides support and 9x% of Burmese use firefox. So two questions Will we get penalised for using non-unicode font? Can google understand the pages and will we rank? It's worth mentioning that this is 0.001% or less of our traffic and an experiment (and market research) to find out a bit about that market than having much real BL impact
International SEO | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
How to rank in Google for a specific country?
Hi, I've a relative good ranking for a specific keyword in google.com (english queries (hl=en)), but searching for the same keyword in google.com.br (Brazilian Portuguese (hl=pt-BR)), my rank for that keyword is far worst. The question is: I need to do something specific to rank in google.com.br (hl=pt-BR)? I'm doing the regular link building. Creating some blogs, blogging for 10 days before droping my links, and creating link wheels the same way. The blogs I create to make links are written in Brazilian Portuguese, also, the blog that I'm trying to rank higher, is also written in Brazilian Portuguese. Sorry for the english, it's not my native language. Thanks
International SEO | | izaiasalmeida0 -
Does hosting content for one country in another country negatively affect its SEO ranking?
Hi, my content is primarily for Australian audiences, however due to a general lack of competitive hosting infrastructure, I tend to host a lot of content in the US. A 2007 article I read implied that it's not a good idea - does anyone have a definitive 2011 answer? Cheers, Jez
International SEO | | jez0000