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
-
URL structure - Page Path vs No Page Path
We are currently re building our URL structure for eccomerce websites. We have seen a lot of site removing the page path on product pages e.g. https://www.theiconic.co.nz/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html versus what would normally be https://www.theiconic.co.nz/womens-clothing-tops/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html Should we be removing the site page path for a product page to keep the url shorter or should we keep it? I can see that we would loose the hierarchy juice to a product page but not sure what is the right thing to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ashcastle0 -
HREF LANG: Different navigation/structure per country: is that a problem?
Hi all, One question about the href lang tag. Our webshop sells to 4 different countries (the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium & Spain). The navigation is a little bit different for these countries, depending on how popular certain product categories are in certain countries. So, for example: Netherlands --> Category A and B are in the top navigation
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMAGARD
Germany --> Category B is a subcategory of product A. We want to implement the Hreflang tag, would it be a problem that the navigation/site structure (and therefore the URL structure for certain categories) are a bit different? So: The url for category B in the Netherlands is: https://www.website.com/nl/category-B/
The url for category B in Germany is: https://www.website.com/de/category-A/category-B/ Thanks in advance! Best!0 -
Setting up the right Geo targeting/language targeting settings and not to brake the SEO
Hello the great Moz Community! Gev here from BetConstruct, a leading gaming and betting software provider in the world. Our company website is performing great on SERP. We have 20+ different dedicated pages for our 20+ softwares, event section, different landing pages for different purposes. We also run a blog section, Press section, and more... Our website's default language is EN. 4 months ago we opened the /ru and /es versions of the website! I have set the correct hreflang tags, redirects, etc.. generated correct sitemaps, so the translated versions started to rank normally! Now our marketing team is requesting different stuff to be done on the website and I would love to discuss this with you before implementing! There are different cases! For example: They have created a landing page under a url betconstruct.com/usa-home and want me to set that page as the default website page(ie homepage), if the user visits our website from a US based IP. This can be done in 2 different ways: I can set the /usa-home page as default in my CMS, in case the visitor is from US and the address will be just betconstruct.com(without /use-home). In this case the same URL (betconstruct.com) will serve different content for only homepage. I can check the visitor IP, if he is from US, I can redirect him to betconstruct.com/usa-home. In this case user can click on the logo and go to the homepage betconstruct.com and see the original homepage. Both of the cases seems to be dangerous, because in the 1st case I am not sure what google will think when he sees different homepage from different IPs. And in the 2nd case I am not sure what should be that redirection. Is it 301 or 303, 302, etc... Because Google will think I don't have a homepage and my homepage redirects to a secondary page like /usa-home After digging a lot I realised that my team is requesting from me a strange case. Because the want both language targeting(/es, /ru) and country targeting (should ideally be like /us), but instead of creating /us, they want it to be instead of /en(only for USA) Please let me know what will be the best way to implement this? Should we create a separate version of our website for USA under a /us/* URLs? In this case, is it ok to have /en as a language version and /us as a country targeting? What hreflangs to use? I know this is a rare case and it will be difficult for you to understand this case, but any help will be much appreciated! Thank you! Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | betconstruct
Gev0 -
301 Redirect / Canonical loop on home page?
Hi there, My client just launched a new site and the CMS requires that the home page goes to a subfolder - clientsite.com/store. Currently there is a redirect in place such that clientsite.com -> clientsite.com/store. However, I want clientsite.com to be the canonical version of the URL. What should I do in this case, given that there is now a loop between the redirected page and the canonical page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
What do you do with the page of a product that has been deleted?
As anyone know with an ecommerce website, products are constantly being added and removed. Once products are removed, the corresponding product pages are not reachable. Currently, I am redirecting to the Search page, if a product page is reached, whose corresponding product has been deleted. I am not sure if that is the correct, recommended technique from a SEO perspective. Should I try to show related products on the redirected page? Does anyone here know what is the best thing to do with this product page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amitramani0 -
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 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Doubt of multi country/language site
Hi ! We are building a site that is going to be available in some countrys with the same language (spanish), and we have some doubts about whih is the best way to do it. Option 1) Subdomains: Example; españa.mydomain.com , mexico.mydomain.com (the problem here is that there are some problems with linkbuilding with subdomains) Option 2) Language folders: Example; mydomain.com/es/es mydomain.com/es/mx (the problem here is that the prestige of the category in the url is going to be in 3rd position, example: mydomain.com/es/es/category and is not recommended for SEO) Option 3) Country domains Example; mydomain.es<a></a> mydomain.mx (the link building is going to be much more, cause we have to multipliate the links that we need ffor being in a good position with the diferent domains of each country) I am not sure of which one is the best option, what do you think? The only thing I am sure is to use te TAG: rel="alternate" hreflang="x" for not having duplicate content, because index and categories are going to be the same, the only thing that is going to change is the products of each country. Looking forward to your suggestions! Thanks, Regards Exequiel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoExpertos0