International Targeting for Australia Problem
-
Hello Moz Community!
I'm reaching out since I recently launched a UK and Australia version of my website. Now, each page on the website has 4 versions:
4. www.example.com/en <-- this is a by-product of the plugin we're using, CMS is WP
each page has the following 4 targeting tags on it:
I looked in Webmaster Tools and we're getting an error on what appears to be every Australia page. The error states, ""au"- unknown language code. URLs for your site that have an unknown language code 'au' and their alternate URLs." In Google's own example, they have the language for Australia set as en-au [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en}
Has anyone run into this issue before? We had the alternate tag set to "au" at first, but edited the plugin so the alternate tag now says "en-au", but this still hasn't remedied the problem. Any insights into resolving this error are greatly appreciated!
-
Thank you for the responses! It does appear that the number of errors for "au" is decreasing and the tool showed me that things are set up properly. I will update if I see the decreasing errors trend reverse.
-
You should test your actual page out with Flang
If it shows as working in there, it's just WMT being slow. If it's not right in there hopefully you can see why from the message.
-
Hi there
How long has it been since your fixed the language targeting? WMT is pretty slow with report updates and it can take weeks for Google to update them.
Check the cache date of the AU pages. Has Google crawled and indexed these pages since the update? If not, try using the Fetch function in WMT.
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 corporate SEO - menu and preferences
Hi all, for internationalization we have used subfolders structure (e.g. domain.com/us/) and since we have approx 150 countries to cover, then country selector is quite a link-base, especially if pages itself can have even several hundreds of internal links as well. Currently, all links to other countries are set as rel="nofollow" and I'm planning to change them to "follow" to distribute a juice. Do you please have an experience with such internal links voluminous websites and this follow/nofollow settings? Also we are having and issue with other countries outperforming local search. So for example in US, searching for kind of "Brand America" keyword, our UK branch outperforms US. Hreflangs are set in the sitemaps and each branch (country) is set in search console correctly as well. Since there are some issues with sitemaps (e.g. not actual links, or links returning 404), I assume that google is not using these sitemaps therefore hreflang information is lost as well. Am I correct ? thank you in advance, Tom
International SEO | | execom990 -
International Sites - Sitemaps, Robots & Geolocating in WMT
Hi Guys, I have a site that has now been launched in the US having originally just been UK. In order to accommodate this, the website has been set-up using directories for each country. Example: domain.com/en-gb domain.com/en-us As the site was originally set-up for UK, the sitemap, robots file & Webmaster Tools account were added to the main domain. Example: domain.com/sitemap.xml domain.com/robots.txt The question is does this now need changing to make it specific for each country. Example: The sitemap and robots.txt for the UK would move to: domain.com/en-gb/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-gb/robots.txt and the US would have its own separate sitemap and robots.txt. Example : domain.com/en-us/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-us/robots.txt Also in order to Geolocate this in WMT would this need to be done for each directory version instead of the main domain? Currently the WMT account for the UK site is verified at www.domain.com, would this need reverifying at domain.com/en-gb? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
International SEO | | CarlWint0 -
Geo Targeting & Geo Keywords
Kindly clarify the below scenario. I have set Geo Targeting for my Website to 'India' in Webmaster tools. So Google should give preference for the searches happening from India. Is there any preference given for the Geo keywords? Like 'SEO Services in India' or Web Design Companies India' while searching from USA. Thanks
International SEO | | FlavoursMedia0 -
Is there a list of most important international web directories ?
Would like to submit the different language versions of our site to some non-english web directories worth submitting to. Does anybody know about a good list as a starting point? To get an idea what may be the 3-5 most important web directories in different countries/languages. Thanks
International SEO | | lcourse0 -
International SEO Subfolders / user journey etc
Hi According to all the resources i can find on Moz and elsewhere re int seo, say in the context of having duplicate versions of US & UK site, its best to have subfolders i.e. domain.com/en-gb/ & domain.com/en-us/ however when it comes to the user journey and promoting web address seems a bit weird to say visit us at: domain.com/en-us/ !? And what happens if someone just enters in domain.com from the US or UK ? My client wants to use an IP sniffer but i've read thats bad practice and should employ above style country/language code instead, but i'm confused about both the user journey and experience in the case of multiple sub folders. Any advice much appreciated ? Cheers Dan
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
International Landing Page Strategy
Hello, I'm looking for some insight in an area that I don't have much experience in - hoping the community can help! We are a healthcare staffing company serving clients in the U.S. (www.bartonassociates.com). We are interested in attracting clients in Australia and New Zealand. I'm wondering if anyone as experience with best practices for doing so (both from an SEO and PPC perspective). Would it be best to purchase .au and .nz domains for these landing pages and link back to our US site for more information (or even recreate a modified version of our US site for .au and .nz). My concern here is duplicate content issues, among other things. Or, would it be better to create Australia and New Zealand focused landing pages on our US site and drive PPC there? My concern here is that we would never get organic traffic from Australia and New Zealand to our US site, in light of the competition. Also, the messaging would be a bit mixed if targeting all three countries. Our core term is "locums" and "locum tenens". Greatly appreciate any insight from you guys. Thanks, Jason
International SEO | | ba_seomoz0 -
International (foreign language) URL's best practices
I'm curious if there is a benefit or best practice with regards to using the localized language on international sites (with specific ccTLDs). For example, should my french site (site.fr) use the french language as keywords within the URLs or should they be in english? e.g. www.site.fr/nourriture vs. www.site.fr/food Is that considered best practice for SEO (or just for brand perception those markets?). Is there a tangible loss in SEO if we do not use the correct language for those URLs and just stick with English around the world? I recall seeing a Matt Cutts video on the topic and he said that google does support i18n URL's but other SE's might not support them as gracefully but he didn't come down with a hard recommendation to go with i18n URL's or just English. Would love a strong ruling in favor one direction based on best practices.
International SEO | | mongillo0 -
Google Webmaster Tools - International SEO Geo-Targeting site with Worldwide rankings
I have a client who already has rankings in the US & internationally. The site is broken down like this: url.com (main site with USA & International Rankings) url.com/de url.com/de-english url.com/ng url.com/au url.com/ch url.com/ch-french url.com/etc Each folder has it's own sitmap & relative content for it's respective country. I am reading in google webmaster tools > site config > settings, the option under 'Learn More': "If you don't want your site associated with any location, select Unlisted." If I want to keep my client's international rankings the way it currently is on url.com, do NOT geo target to United States? So I select unlisted, right? Would I use geo targeting on the url.com/de, url.com/de-english, url.com/ng, url.com/au and so on?
International SEO | | Francisco_Meza0