HREFLANG setup for Europe (in English) + .eu domain
-
We have been struggling to find answers since we launched our European website.
We have the following structure:
WEBSITE HUB
https://ecosmartfire.comThis works as a hub for our users. We show the url printed in our marketing materials. When someone lands in this URL, we check if we have a local store in the user's location and prompt the user to go to the right destination.
The default hreflang is:
LOCAL VERSIONS
https://ecosmartfire.com/us/en/ (United States)
https://ecosmartfire.com.au (Australia)
https://ecosmartfire.eu (Europe)
https://ecosmartfire.fr (France)We have no problems with United States, Australia and France.
The hreflang tags look like this:
EUROPE
https://ecosmartfire.euWe have two problems in Europe:
1. Language: the European store is available just in English
2. No hreflang: Europe doesn't have a hreflang that covers all the countries so we had to create lots of hrelangs pointing to the same location.The hreflang tags look like this:
... and the list goes on.
Do you think this is the right approach? Or should I just remove these European hreflang tags from the website code?
Thanks,
-
We used this same approach (except we are not using TLD, but instead are using directory paths for the regions). We have storefronts in US, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, and EU. The hreflang tags are working very well for all the storefronts except EU.
In these other regions, for all of our key tracked search terms, our ranking page is one within the right region for, when checked by the Moz Rank Tracker using the corresponding Google search engine. And, none of the pages from these other regions are ranking in a Google US search. So far so good.
But, for Europe, only our US pages are ranking when I check with any of the EU country Google engines. And, The EU home page is ranking for some searches in the US, including right now it is showing as one of our organic sitelinks for our brand name search.
We also geo-targeted all of our properties except for two, on Google Search Console. Originally. That would be EU (because Google doesn't allow to target for EU, only for specific countries) and our US site (because we use our www domain in US with no directory path, and in Google Search Console if we geo-target that, it applies to all of our regional directory paths).
So, we changed our geo targeting recently, and targeted our EU property to Germany. We chose that because Germany is our largest market in EU. But this hasn't helped either.
Basically, all the available tools we know of (hreflang tags, GSC geo-targeting) seem to fail at targeting EU. It is a shame, because many brands have an EU site (rather than individual sites for each country). But we have not yet found an approach which works well.
-
Hi, this is something i'm looking to apply in the near future too - i was wondering whether you'd seen any positive/negative implications from using the above hreflang structure?
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
-
Domain name in URL
Hi we are targeting local cities across the UK with landing pages for our website. We have built up a few links for https://www.caffeienmarketing.co.uk/bristol/ and recently advised that I should change the URL to https://www.caffeienmarketing.co.uk/marketing-agency-bristol/ and 301 directing the old one 2 questions really: 1. is there any benefit in doing this these days in that this is the main keyword target we have for this page? 2. Do I get 100% benefit for all the links built up on the old page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Domain Level Redirects - HTTP and HTTPS
About 2 years ago (well before I started with the company), we did an http=>https migration. It was not done correctly. The http=>https redirect was never inserted into the .htaccess file. In essence, we have 2 websites. According to Google search console, we have 19,000 HTTP URLs indexed and 9,500 HTTPS URLs indexed. I've done a larger scale http=>https migration (60,000 SKUs), and our rankings dropped significantly for 6-8 weeks. We did this the right way, using sitemaps, and http and https GSC properties. Google came out recently and said that this type of rankings drop is normal for large sites. I need to set the appropriate expectations for management. Questions: How badly is the domain split affecting our rankings, if at all? Our rankings aren't bad, but I believe we are underperforming our backlink profile. Can we expect a net rankings gain when the smoke clears? There are a number of other technical SEO issues going on as well. How badly will our rankings drop (temporarily) and for how long when we add the redirect to the .htaccess file? Is there a way to mitigate the rankings impact? For example, only submitting partial sitemaps to our GSC http property? Has anyone gone through this before?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Satans_Apprentice0 -
How to switch brand domain and address previous use of domain
We recently acquired a new domain to replace existing as it better fits our brand. We have little/no organic value on existing domain so switching is not an issue. However the newly acquired domain was previously used in a different industry and has inbound links with significant spam scores. How can we let Google know that these links are not valid for our business and start rebuilding reputation of the domain? Disavow tool?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marlette0 -
Domain forward or 301 redirect
My company recently acquired another company including their web presence. We are soon ending their website and will be either 301 redirecting their domain to our domain or pointing their domain to our nameservers. Their domain authority is only 25 while our domain authority is 32. Their domain was created in 1998 while ours was created in 1999. So to keep our domain authority up or enhance it, should we do a 301 redirect or a domain forward. And that is if there is any difference? Thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | topsailislander0 -
Content on New Domain or Sub Directory of Existing Domain?
I have a client with a well aged, high DA site. They rank well for their wedding photography business in several cities. They are launching a new service which is related to photography (photobooths and flipbooks) which they built and developed content on a new domain. The existing domain has 0 links with a DA of 1. The site is brand new.. Is there any drawback to moving the existing content on the new domain to a sub directory of the high authority domain? EX: http://domain.com/newcompany The look, feel, and design of the new site / service is much different than the high DA site. My thoughts are that this will give them an automatic step up, especially since they will be marketing this in several major cities. Also, since the design will be different, if it is good to move to the subdir, should we put the new company name in the subdir folder or something keyword friendly like domain.com/photobooth as opposed to domain.com/newcompanyname. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | itrogers0 -
Sub domain versus separate domains, which is better for Search engine purposes?
We are pitching to a hotel client to build two new websites, a summer website and a winter website, two completely different looking websites. The client wants to automatically switch their domain name to point to one or the other, depending on the time of year. The customer does not want to use a landing page where you would choose which site to visit; they want the domain name to go directly to the relevant website. Our options: Set up two new domain names and optimise each website based on the holiday season and facilities offered at that time of year. Then change the exisiting domain name to point at the website that is in season. Or Use the existing domain name and setup two sub domains, switching the home page as necessary. We have been chewing this one over for a couple of days, the concern that we have with both options is loss of search visibility. The current website performs well in search engines, it has a home page rank of 4 and sub-pages ranking 2 and 3’s, when we point the domain at the summer site (the client only has a winter website at present) then we will lose all of the search engine benefits already gained. The new summer content will be significantly different to the winter content. We then work hard for six months optimising the summer site and switch back to the Winter site, the content will be wrong. Maybe because it's Friday afternoon we cannot see the light for the smoke of the cars leaving the car park for the weekend, or maybe there is no right or wrong approach. Is there another option? Are we not seeing the wood for the trees? Your comments highly welcome. Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bill-Duff0 -
Buying a banned domain
Hello all, I've found a exact match keyword domain that I'm able to buy. Problem is that I'm under the impression it might have been banned by google, currently it is only showing adsense without content. The site can't be found using the cache: or site: parameters in Google and the PR is 0. What are your experiences on buying a banned domain and how can I double check if the domain is banned? This blogpost suggests I should not buy it, any other opinions? Thanks. Hellemans
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hellemans0 -
New domain name for existing site
Hi all, Our business has aquired a new domain name because there are several organisations closely related to ours that use similar domain names to target a niche group of users. We would like to use this new domain name to link to an existing website with content targeted at this user group as we feel that they will be more comfortable getting to the content via this new URL. After a useful search in these forums the majority of SEOMOZ gurus suggest that the new URL should be redirected to our current site using a 301 and we are happy to do this. However do we have to link the URL to our homepage or is it acceptable to link to a subfolder within the domain and then targeting content on this page to the user niche? Thanks for any input. Kind regards. Edit 11:38 The old url is oldcommunity.charity.com (we know having a subdomain is bad) this is where we manage all community engagement. The new url is www.newparticularcommunity.com and we would redirect this to oldcommunity.charity.com. The reason we have bought www.oldparticularcommunity.com is because the url is used by other charities for community engagement and is recognised by the community we are targeting. We are redirecting to our old site because we do not want to engage with them on this new url as our old site oldcommunity.charity.com already does this and can cater for the new community and perhaps they haven't realised that we can.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tgraham0