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Hi

I have a few questions about href lang implementation and I was hoping for some guidance / opinions.

An international website is using mostly a folder structure, but for some locations it might have standalone sub-domains. Some folders are there to target locations and languages, with others just targeting languages. See the list below:

domain.com/es-mx [Language: Spanish - Location: Mexico]
domain.com/pt-br [Language: Portuguese - Location: Brazil]
domain.com/ja-jp [Language: Japanese - Location: Japan]
domain.com/en-jp [Language: English - Location: Japan]
domain.com/fr-ca [Language: French - Location: Canada]
domain.com/en-ca [Language: English - Location: Canada]
domain.com/en-ie [Language: English - Location: Ireland]
domain.com/ar [Language: Arabic]
domain.com/ph [Language: Tagalog]
domain.com/it [Language: Italian]
domain.com/tr [Language: Turkish]
domain.com/kr [Language: Korean]
domain.com/fr [Language: French]
domain.com/ru [Language: Russian]
domain.com/vn [Language: Vietnamese]

domain.in/en [Language: English - Location Indian]
domain.in/hi [Language: Hindi - Location Indian]

My questions are:

1. Is href lang sitemap equally as good as the href lang meta tag in terms of effectiveness. I know that the sitemap is easier to maintain and upkeep but i don't know which one is better as google recommends both.

2. How do you mix your listings when some are targeting language and country and others are just targeting language speakers (not tied to any specific country). So take for example in the list above: there would be a general site for french speakers and then one for french speakers in Canada.

Thanks for your advise in advance.

@George_Inoriseo hi george, i submitted a previous reply on here but can't see it anywhere.

Firstly thank you for your feedback. I have some extra questions.

Lets assume we have a Canadian version of the website and a US human visitor tries to visit that site or any page on the site. They should be able to browse to the site but an overlay would appear meaning they cannot use the site or proceed any further. The overlap would say te site is restricted in their location. I see other companies doing this. What way would google handle this:

1. Could they proceed to crawl the website or would the javascript overlap prevent Googlebot from crawling and indexeing?
2. If googlebot where to look at the hash information of the page companred to the hash of what a user sees would they be the same? I believe if their is a big difference in the hash this is a signal for cloaking - because it shows the information / page size is substantially different.
3. Would it be wise to avoid user agent lookups in the code? Again i believe this can signal to Google to Googl that manipulation is taking place.

I heard from a google offical that paywall schema might not be a great method.
"Paywall markup would not be suited here since there's no log-in or paymeny that can be done to get access when in the wrong country".

Thanks

@George_Inoriseo thanks very much George.

The website will have a .com domain and then subfolders will branch off that for different countries / languages. So the structure would be like this:

domain.com
doman.com/en-ca (english Canada}
domain.com/fr-ca (french Canada)

The company have licenses for certain countries and in countries where they don't have a license to operate (e.g. USA) users visiting our sites from those countries, should not be able to play. So on our Canadian website, if we detect a user is from USA (where we don't have a license) the user should get a message telling them they can't play. They should be able to visit the site ok, but the website would sniff the location and tell them that they can't play with the website blacked out.

As you suggested we could have a javascript overlay that loads if the user is from the USA. I assume this would only look at the geolocation and not the user agent? Looking up the user agent would be a clear sign we are doing something different for users and Googlebot would it not? Would an overlay restrict Googlebot from crawling the site and because the user is seeing something different to Googlebot could this be perceived as cloaking?

I spoke to someone at Google regarding paywall schema and the feeling was this: "paywall markup would not be suited since there is no log-in or payment that can be done to get access when in the wrong country".

Thanks again George.

Hi,

I am working on the SEO of an online gaming platform - a platform that can only be accessed by people in certain countries, where the games and content are legally allowed.
Example: The games are not allowed in the USA, but they are allowed in Canada.

Present Situation:
Presently when a user from the USA visits the site they get directed to a restricted location page with the following message:

RESTRICTED LOCATION
Due to licensing restrictions, we can't currently offer our services in your location. We're working hard to expand our reach, so stay tuned for updates!

Because USA visitors are blocked Google which primarily (but not always) crawls from the USA is also blocked, so the company webpages are not being crawled and indexed.

Objective / What we want to achieve:

The website will have multiple region and language locations. Some of these will exist as standalone websites and others will exist as folders on the domain. Examples below:
domain.com/en-ca [English Canada]
domain.com/fr-ca [french Canada]
domain.com/es-mx [spanish mexico]
domain.com/pt-br [portugese brazil]
domain.co.in/hi [hindi India]

If a user from USA or another restricted location tries to access our site they should not have access but should get a restricted access message.
However we still want google to be able to access, crawl and index our pages.

Can i suggest how do we do this without getting done for cloaking etc?

Would this approach be ok? (please see below)

We continue to work as the present situation is presently doing, showing visitors from the USA a restricted message.
However rather than redirecting these visitors to a restricted location page, we just black out the page and show them a floating message as if it were a model window.
While Googlebot would be allowed to visit and crawl the website.

I have also read that it would be good to put paywall schema on each webpage to let Google know that we are not cloaking and its a restricted paid page. All public pages are accessible but only if the visitor is from a location that is not restricted

Any feedback and direction that can be given would be greatly appreciated as i am new to this angle of SEO.

Sincere thanks,