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Thanks very much for your advice, Andy. Very good point about brand searches!

Yes we've fetched as Google again and the tags seem to be working fine. We'll just have to be patient in this case.

Hi there,

From an SEO perspective, I think it is definitely worth implementing hreflang. If it were one of our clients, I would tell them that it was vital that they implement these.

We have had issues with clients where their web agency didn't correctly implement hreflang and the wrong international website was ranking. These tags are a strong signal to search engines, such as Google, of which country your websites are targeting. Some SEOs would even argue that the tags will help your ranking for those countries.

I would also be worried about duplicate content in this case, but I would strongly advise that the tags are added if possible.

Just make sure that they are properly implemented! Here are a couple of resources for further reading:

https://mza.bundledseo.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag 

https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool 

Best regards,

James

Hi Jazee,

I would say that, while there are advantages of having the two lines of business on the same domain (such as having to build domain authority for one website instead of two), from an SEO perspective your optimisation tactics will differ between the two business services.

For example, your link building for the Wedding Planners side of the business will likely require different strategies to Convention Logistics. For this reason, if it were my company, I would keep them on separate domains. There would also be other considerations, such as your content strategy and whether you will have a blog for both, one for each, or no blog at all.

This does depend on factors such as your SEO plans for the businesses, how closely linked the two sides are, how much you can invest in SEO, whether your domains are both starting from scratch (i.e. no domain authority).

In the long run you'll have one website optimised for Wedding Planners and another optimised for Convention Logistics, which in my opinion is better than one website that is split between two different industries.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

James

Hi Moz Community,

I'd appreciate any advice you can offer on this. We have a client with international offices, and we manage the website and SEO for some of these offices, including UK. Others, such as their US office, are managed by another agency.

All websites have the same domain name, but differ in their sub domains depending on their targeted country, e.g. uk.domainname for UK, us.domainname for US. All are .com.

The US office's agency re-desgined their us.domainname website earlier this year. We noticed a couple of months ago that the US website started to outrank the uk.domainname website for branded searches on Google from the UK.

After some investigation, we found that their agency had incorrectly implemented hreflang tags and set the us sub-domain as the hreflang="x-default" instead of www.domainname. They corrected this and uk.domainname is now the first organic result on Google. However, us.domainname has remained in 2nd place for organic brand searches (from Google UK) for the past two months, when we were hoping that this would have dropped out of the rankings by now.

We have asked the US office to ensure that their International Targeting is set to United States in Google Search Console, but have no way of knowing if this has actually been done.

Does anyone have experience of this? Is there anything else we could try to stop the US site ranking for Google UK, or is it just a matter of waiting?

Many thanks,

James

Hi there,

From an SEO perspective, I think it is definitely worth implementing hreflang. If it were one of our clients, I would tell them that it was vital that they implement these.

We have had issues with clients where their web agency didn't correctly implement hreflang and the wrong international website was ranking. These tags are a strong signal to search engines, such as Google, of which country your websites are targeting. Some SEOs would even argue that the tags will help your ranking for those countries.

I would also be worried about duplicate content in this case, but I would strongly advise that the tags are added if possible.

Just make sure that they are properly implemented! Here are a couple of resources for further reading:

https://mza.bundledseo.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag 

https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool 

Best regards,

James