Correct site internationalization strategy
-
Hi,
I'm working on the internationalization of a large website; the company wants to reach around 100 countries. I read this Google doc: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en in order to design the strategy.
The strategy is the following:
For each market, I'll define a domain or subdomain with the next settings:
- Leave the mysitename.com for the biggest market in which it has been working for years, and define the geographic target in Google search console.
- Reserve the ccTLD domains for other markets
- In the markets where I'm not able to reserve the ccTLD domains, I'll use subdomains for the .com site, for example us.mysitename.com, and I'll define in Google search console the geographic target for this domain.
Each domain will only be in the preferred language of each country (but the user will be able to change the language via cookies).
The content will be similar in all markets of the same language, for example, in the .co.uk and in .us the texts will be the same, but the product selections will be specific for each market.
Each URL will link to the same link in other countries via direct link and also via hreflang. The point of this is that all the link relevance that any of them gets, will be transmitted to all other sites.
My questions are:
- Do you think that there are any possible problems with this strategy?
- Is it possible that I'll have problems with duplicate content? (like I said before, all domains will be assigned to a specific geographic target)
- Each site will have around 2.000.000 of URLs. Do you think that this could generate problems? It's possible that only primary and other important locations will have URLs with high quality external links and a decent TrustRank.
- Any other consideration or related experience with a similar process will be very appreciated as well.
Sorry for all these questions, but I want to be really sure with this plan, since the company's growth is linked to this internationalization process.
Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks so much Gianluca, I'll take all your ideas into account.
-
You wrote this, and I'd like you to explain it better:
Each domain will only be in the preferred language of each country (but the user will be able to change the language via cookies).
Why people - for instance Italians - should be even feeling the need to switch the language from Italian to English?
Sincerely, I find it useless.
What you should do is doing like Amazon does: let people visit whatever version they want. For instance (I live in Spain), when I am in the UK and I want to buy something in Amazon, I visit amazon.es. Even if Amazon knows that I'm in the UK, and advices me that maybe I may prefer to shop in the .co.uk website, it lets me stay, navigate and buy from the .es one.
You, then, say this:
Each URL will link to the same link in other countries via direct link and also via hreflang. The point of this is that all the link relevance that any of them gets, will be transmitted to all other sites.
This is not that true. At least, not literally. In fact, the PageRank any page of yours will earn via internal and external links will just partly be passed to the other country versions corresponding pages. This because the PageRank flows through every link present in a page, both internal and external links, and "evaporates" in case of nofollow links.
About your questions:
- Do you think that there are any possible problems with this strategy?
Overall it is correct (being the only doubt the "cookie" thing you talked about)
Is it possible that I'll have problems with duplicate content? (like I said before, all domains will be assigned to a specific geographic target)
If you use the hreflang, you should not have issues related to duplicated content.
Each site will have around 2.000.000 of URLs. Do you think that this could generate problems? It's possible that only primary and other important locations will have URLs with high quality external links and a decent TrustRank.
Having millions of URLs should not be a problem... if it was so sites like Etsy, Home Depot or Amazon would be suffering it, wouldn't they? When it comes to Big Sites, the most important thing is having a very solid architecture and work very well everything internal linking.
Any other consideration or related experience with a similar process will be very appreciated as well.
When implementing the hreflang annotations, try not using as many hreflang as country versions are present.
In other words, apart the home page (for obvious localized brand visibility and for avoiding having, for instance, the .com version outranking the local one for being more authoritative), in the internal pages use only the hreflang annotation in order to suggest Google what version to show in case of countries sharing the same language.
For instance, let's take that www.dominio.com/page-a is in English and targeting the USA, then the hreflang annotation would be only relative to all the others URLs of pages in English and targeting others English speaking countries, but you should not add the annotation for the spanish speaking versions or italian.
Why? Because the languages are different and such a strong signal that you don't need to explain to Google that it should present to Spanish speaking users in Spain the URL of the spanish country version instead of the American English one.
-
Thanks Dmitrii.
Any other opinions will be appreciated aswell, this process is really important for this webpage.
-
Hi there.
Everything seems good to me. Just make sure that you use proper hreflangs or canonicals for content, which can potentially be duplicate, make sure that you have proper/correct sitemap and there are no problems with crawlability and accessability.
Good luck
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
-
International SEO : Redirecting spanish visitors to spanish site
Hi There, I have a problem I need an advice for. I run an e-commerce site in French. Things are going well. I also run the Spanish version of this site. We are starting to sell. But nothing like French site. I have traffic coming to the French site from Spain from visitors with Spanish language and they don't buy anything. That is strange as the conversion rate is good. Si I want to redirect them to the Spanish site. We sell phone parts. Our SEO is mainly based on brands, make, and reference numbers. So keywords are almost the same in both languages. Of course, site.es is aiming at google.es, and site.fr at google.fr So I am wondering. If I redirect these visitors to the Spanish site, Will it affect french site's SEO? Thanks
International SEO | | Kepass0 -
For My International Sites only Homepage in other Language rest Pages are in English. Hreflang required here?
Hello All, For my ecommerce site at my homepage there is an Language option of 9 different countries. My main site - abcd.co.uk and other sites are like this se.abcd.co.uk, fr.abcd.co.uk, es.abcd.co.uk etc From my main site if user clicks on fr.abcd.co.uk then France site will open but when he click on any link it will redirect to my UK site. On France site homepage if user hover the cursor then links are visible of UK site only. My query is ;- Do it required here to implement hreflang? As only homepage is in different language? Do it anything wrong in google point of view? Thanks!
International SEO | | wright3350 -
Internationalization guides for subfolder structure
I'm wondering if there are any guides out there that list how subfolders should be structured for Internationalization? The first language/location that I'm targeting is Portuguese in Brazil so should my folder structure be: www.example.com/br/pt/ or www.example.com/pt-br/ I did find the guide below but was wondering if there was perhaps anything from Google? http://www.lingoes.net/en/translator/langcode.htm
International SEO | | Brando160 -
Internationalization and 302 redirects
Hi, We're thinking in an internationalization process for a travel webpage. We'd like to use one domain (.com) in TV and press marketing and have several domains with each country ccTLD domain. We've shown that for example Tripadvisor makes a 302 redirect if you connect to tripadvisor.com and you are in another country. But we've detected aswell, that if you use the Browser Agent Google Bot, it didn't. It appears to be a cloaking, but really they're redirecting the users to the best places for them, and detecting Googlebot for not make the redirect, they ensures that it indexes well all the place. Booking.com makes something similar but with the same domain, detecting if you're Googlebot or not. Do you think that this is a danger thing if you're not as big as Tripadvisor? They makes this redirection by level server, could be safest to do with javascript? if we do with javascript, Google will take this path instead of read the page? Thanks!
International SEO | | robertorg0 -
Why has there been Massive increase in traffic to my clients .eu site after redirects were initiated?
Hi guys, This is a strange one thats really bugging me. I have a client that redirected their domain to a brand new domain that was already live for the previous two months. I have been trying analyse the data however I can't quite understand why there is a massive increase in visitors from the United States when the old site was redirected. The redirection took place at the beginning of July. It was badly managed in terms of the mapping of 301 redirects however thats not the issue here. The level of traffic is gradually decreasing I imagine due to the high level of bounces. The site in question is an EU funded website for education. The old site in the first 2 weeks of June received around 500 visits from the USA while the new site in the first 2 weeks of July (2 weeks into the redirects) received around 3,000 visits from the USA. The new site had previously received only 300 visits for the same period as the old site in the 1st 2 weeks of June. Any idea why this might be? Thanks Rob
International SEO | | daracreative0 -
Why is GoogleBot crawling our German site and rendering it in English.
We have a German website at (http://de.pa.com) and we can't get the search engines to index the site in German language. For some reason the GoogleBot, BingBot, etc are crawling de.pa.com and displaying English text on the SERP. I've tried testing via web-sniffer.net and Google Webmaster tools which both are crawling de.pa.com in English. We know the page titles/meta descriptions are in English which we are updating to German, but I'm curious to why search engines are indexing our German site and displaying on the SERP as English text when the entire content of the site is in German. Thank you, Brian
International SEO | | Liamis0 -
Keyphrase ranking a geo-redirected site in Google
Hi all This is the situation. I have a client who runs a number of ccTLD sites (all exact match brand name domains), including a .com which they use for the US. This is a hair care product and due to Advertising Standards Authority (UK) restrictions, they cannot use a certain phrase to promote their products - 'hair loss' on the domain.co.uk site. However, in the US, there is no such restriction and can use wording this on the site. A brand name search in google.co.uk brings up .co.uk as 1st result and .com as 2nd result, so the .com is indexed in google.co.uk. Any non-US user visiting domain.com will be redirected to their ccTLD site. Here's my question - could I feasibly get the domain.com site ranking in google.co.uk for certain 'hair loss' based keyphrases, considering the fact that I can mention it in the copy on there but not on the domain.co.uk site. Would I need to remove any Geographic Target in the WMT account for domain.com? Or is this a form of Google cloaking and could see the site penalised? Thanks
International SEO | | Coolpink0 -
What's the best strategy for checking international rankings?
Hi There- I am looking to optimize sites serving the UK and Austrailia markets. I feel like I have a good handle on how to go about doing that, but what I am fuzzy on is, what's the best way to monitor the SERPs for the keywords I am targeting. I know based on experience that if I just search google.com.au from here in the states, my results will be 'americanized' and may/probably won't accurately reflect what someone would see if they were search from Austrailia. Are there any good tools or tactics for seeing what searchers in the countries I am focusing on woudl see? Thanks! Jason
International SEO | | phantom0