Migrating to a tag-driven global website - Need opinions!
-
We currently have a global site that is set up this way:
- Subfolders to designate countries.
- Content in same language is re-published on other country websites.
Since we are re-launching at the end of the year, we are doing away with re-publishing content on different country sites and will just maintain a single copy of our content (to be populated on different pages using content tags). We are planning on doing this so that there is no need to apply href-lang tags on our content.
My questions:
- Is maintaining just a single instance of an article good for a global website?
- What are the possible complications that may come up from this approach?
- Since there is only one version of the article that is being indexed, is a rel-canonical tag even needed?
- Should href-lang tag still be applied to high level pages (homepage, etc) to ensure that the correct homepage shows up in the appropriate geography?
This question is quite long, so any feedback will be helpful. Thanks!
-
Hi!
I have similar questions. It sounds like you are posting articles in the main language it was written in and not doing any geo-targeting. Is that right? I'm not sure because you mention "the correct homepage shows up in the appropriate geography."
If an article is written in Portuguese, you aren't translating it?
Let us know some more details and we are happy to help!
-
Hi
Am a little unclear on your query but it seems you are moving to a single page - per article platform and trying to rank internationally. So for one unique page you wish or expect that same page to rank for example in the USA as well as Ukraine.. is that correct? Assume if they find the page from Ukraine they use google translate... etc.
To be clear is that what you are asking?
If that is the case it will not work. Effect digital sums it up pretty well. T
Regards
-
If you are talking about having a single URL which generates differently translated content based upon where the user is from, it's a terrible idea and god-awful for SEO. Have seen so many sites with single-URL multi-content builds perform erratically and terribly. Usually the 'quick and easy way' to 'get out of doing proper SEO' is the path to absolute ruin
Google only crawls from one data centre at once, so if they crawl from Spain and see the Spanish content, they will assume that's all there is there and you have just changed it. So your rankings will fly around like a pinwheel and never really amount to anything
Hreflangs and site build out is the best way, anything quick and dirty is usually destined to kill your multi-regional rankings (dead)
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
-
Is it worth maintaining multiple international websites
Hi I work for a British company which has two well established websites - a .co.Uk for the UK, and a .com for the US and rest of the world (in language directories). The Uk site is hosted in the Uk, the .com in US. The websites do reasonable well in Google on both sides of the Atlantic. The company is a small but quite well known brand. The company is now thinking of redirecting the .co.Uk to the .com as it would be cheaper to maintain. What would you advise? Thanks.
International SEO | | fdl4712_aol.com2 -
Traffic drop after hreflang tags added
We operate one company with two websites each serving a different location, one targeting EU customers and the other targeting US customers. thespacecollective.com (EU customers) thespacecollective.com/us/ (US customers) We have always had canonical tags in place, but we added the following hreflang tags two weeks ago (apparently this is best practice); EU site (thespacecollective.com) US site (thespacecollective.com/us/) Literally the same day we added the above hreflang tags our traffic dropped off a cliff (we have lost around 70-80% on the EU site, and after a minor recovery, 50% on the US site). Now, my first instinct is to remove the tags entirely and go back to just using canonical, but if this is truly best practice, that could do more damage than good. This is the only change that has been made in recent weeks regarding SEO. Is there something obvious that I am missing because it looks correct to me?
International SEO | | moon-boots0 -
How do you optimise a website for European traffic?
I have a design portfolio website here https://www.nicholsoncreative.com/ which uses a .com but is currently configured through the Search Console to appear in results for Google.co.uk. I am going to be restructuring the website and optimisation and I want to bring in more traffic/enquiries/business from around Europe. As there's no Google.eu, and as Google also serves results based on the searchers geographic location it would seem difficult to structure and optimise content so that results can be found across all of Europe. I assume simply switching to a .eu domain extension for my own website wouldn't solve the problem? I also assume that creating content in different languages would be a logical (if time consuming) option? Are there any other tried and trusted techniques that can be used to target traffic throughout Europe? I'd appreciate any advice.
International SEO | | JCN-SBWD0 -
Href lang tag - do I need it?
Hey Guys! I have a multi-lingual site in Switzerland serving french and german content. URL structure looks like this: homepage (main) http://www.exmaple.ch/ German http://www.exmaple.ch/de/ French http://www.exmaple.ch/fr/ You can choose a drop down on every page to convert the page into french or german. So there are basically two seperate sites, URL's do not cross over i.e. I have no french pages linking to german pages, it is all pretty good. The default language is german. I have checked in Google.ch/ in both languages french and german for which pages are being served up and they seem all relevant, i.e. on french browser settings when I go to google.ch I see french pages being served and vice versa. My question....Do I need href lang tags? Cheers all!
International SEO | | eLab_London0 -
SEO Strategy for international website with similar content
Hello, If a company is in different countries and has same content in most of the countries does it hurt SEO? For Ex. fibaro.com is the website that I am researching and I have seen the indexed pages to be about 40,000 however there is not much content on it. On further inspection I noticed that for every country the sub folder is different. So for us it will be fibaro.com/us/motion-sensor and for Europe fibaro.com/en/motion-sensor. Now both of these pages have same content on it and the company is in 86 countries so imagine the amount of duplicate content it has. Does anybody have any ideas on what should be an ideal way to approach this? Thanks
International SEO | | Harveyspecter0 -
How To Rank A UK Website On Google.com (US)
Hi, I've done some research on this but couldn't find any definitive answer I can trust! We have a client who resides in the UK. They have '.com' domain, hosted on a UK server, using UK spelling. Their business objective for this year is to expand in the USA, including the opening of a warehouse over there. They are wanting us to rank their website on both Google.co.uk and Google.com (North America); besides changing the geolocation settings in GWT's, and building links from .com websites is there anything else we can do to increase their visibility on Google.com? Many thanks in advance, appreciated!
International SEO | | Webpresence
Lee.0 -
Are my hreflang and canonical link tags set correctly?
Currently we have a website in english but over time we will roll out parts of the whole site in different languages for different countries which will also result in country specific English versions of the website. The goal is that Google shows the country specific version of a page in a native language or English if available or falls back to the default English version of the same page otherwise. I listed below how we plan to use hreflang and canonical link tags to achieve this and was hoping to get some feedback from the Moz community if this will work as expected. (1) A page (www.mysite.com/page1) exists only in English as default. Users should be able to find it in every country unless there is an English version specifically for this country. We would use the following tags: (2) A page exists in English (www.mysite.com/id/en/page2) and Bahasa (www.mysite.com/id/id/page2) for a specific country (Indonesia in this case). Users in Indonesia searching in English should find the country specific English page. Indonesians searching in Bahasa should find the Bahasa version of that page. We would use the following tags on the English version: and therefor the following tags on the Bahasa version: In this case there wouldn't be a default English version available for the page. (3) If a page exists in English global, English for Indonesians and Bahasa for Indonesians we would use: on www.mysite.com/id/en/page3 on www.mysite.com/id/id/page3 on www.mysite.com/page3 If www.mysite.com/id/en/page3 and www.mysite.com/page3 are very similar we would risk google picking the page they want to rank for an english keyword searched in Indonesia, correct? (4) If a page in (1) and (2) can be reached with a different URL, we would only use a canonical and don't specify any hreflang tags e.g.: www.mysite.com/en/other-url-to-page1 or
International SEO | | ddspg
www.mysite.com/id/en/other-url-to-page2-english-indonesia (5) If a page that exists as global English page becomes available in English for a specific country as e.g. www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 we would use the following tags: and also add one more hreflang to www.mysite.com/page1: The assumption here is that Google would rank the localized page instead of the global page after crawling our site again. But since this will be a new page, are we going to lose traffic because www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 won't rank as well in the beginning (e.g. no offsite optimization)?0 -
Do we need to update our sitemaps each time our content changes?
Dear SEO experts! We have created sites maps to get our international sub-domains indexed, however we're unsure if we have to update our sitemaps each time our content changes on our many landing pages which are translated to 17 different languages? Obviously the goal is to make it dynamic so it updates itself. I hope you can help us with some advice. Thanks a lot! Allan
International SEO | | Todoist0