Rel=alternate to help localize sites
-
I am wondering about the efficiency of the rel=alternate tag and how well it works at specifically localizing content.
Example:
I have a website on a few ccTLD's but for some reason my .com shows up on Google.co.uk before my .co.uk version of my page. Some people have mentioned using rel=alternate but in my research this only seems to be applicable for duplicate content in another language. If I am wrong here can somebody please help me better understand this application of the rel=alternate tag. All my research leads me to rel=alternate hreflang= and I am not sure that is what I want.
Thanks,
Chris Birkholm -
Not really so. In fact you need to use also the rel="canonical".
In order to not get you confused, I really suggest you to follow the implementations steps presented by Tim Grice in this post published on SEOWizz:
-
Gianluca,
Really appreciate the feedback here. So the one thing I have a question of then is how this rel=alternate tag would look on my .com as this is where I am apparently getting a little confused. I would basically list my other English versions there correct and the same for my co.uk, etc...?
-
Hi Thomas,
actually the rel="alternate" "hreflang" can be used also to define the region, apart the language.
That means that in your specific case you could use en-US (English version for USA users) - en-GB (English version for British users) - en-AU (English version for Australian users) and so on.
Then, in order to not have the .com site I suggest you to use the rel="alternate". More over, if the .com site is meant specifically for USA market, it would be also better to specify to Google that USA is the market in Google Webmaster Tools, because the contrary will mean that you are asking to it rank also in every regional Google, the .co.uk one too.
Others things that help search engines understand what site to present first in case like yours are the use of the local currency, address and phone numbers, but I don't know if it's your case. Also, your UK site maybe need a stronger link profile, especially rich in links by local authoritative sites.
Another "add on" is sometimes the use of the rel="canonical", but your doesn't seem the case where to use it
Finally, I give you a few links that could be helpful for you:
http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/advanced-international-seo-rel-alternate-hreflang-x/13122011/ << A post by Adam Audette, of which I suggest you read also the comments;
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2137882/Newest-International-SEO-Challenge-Hreflang-Canonical-Tags << An interesting overview done in Search Engine Watch
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
-
HELP! How do I stop scraper sites - is there any recourse?
Our site has lots of unique content and photos and it is constantly being scraped and posted on other websites. Most of these are no-name sites that pop up and exist for adwords revenue. Aside from the fact that we don't want our content being copied, this is an SEO nightmare because they often link back to us from pages that are stuffed with keywords and have very low domain authority (it's a form of negative SEO). My question is: Does anyone have experience with fighting this phenonmenon? What have you done that is effective? Does anyone have experience with a service such as http://www.dmca.com/ProtectionPro.aspx ? Does it work/is it worth it? Any input is appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Redirecting non www site
Hello Ladies and Gentlemen. I 100% agree with the redirecting of the non www domain name. After all we see so many times, especially in MOZ how the two different domains contain different links, different DA and of course different PA. So I have posed the question to our IT company, "How would we go about redirecting our non www domain to the www version?", "Where would we do that?", " we cant do the redirect on our webserver because the website is listed as an IP address, not a domain name, so would we do the redirect somewhere at GoDaddy?" who is currently maintain our DNS record So here is the response from IT: " I would setup a CNAME record in DNS (GoDaddy), such that no matter if you go to the bare domain, or the www, you end up in the same place. As for SEO, having a 301 redirect for your bare domain isn't necessary, because both the bare domain and the www are the same domain. 301 is a redirect for "permanently moved" and is common when you change domain names. Using the bare domain or the www are NOT DIFFERENT DOMAINS, so the 301 would not be accurate, and you'd be telling engines you've moved, when you haven't - which may negatively impact your rank. It sounds to me that IT is NOT recommending the redirect. How can this be? Or are we talking about two different things? Will the redirect cause the melt down as the IT company suggests? Or do they nut understand SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davenport-Tractor0 -
301s from previous site
Hi! Got quite a tricky problem regarding a client, http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/ and their previous site, http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/ Here's the background: We have approx 1500 'listing' pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/listing/view/1925/the-barre-des-ecrins-or-the-dome-des-ecrins-mountaineering-trip They bring in min 2k hits/month, and also add to the overall site authority I suspect. They will eventually all have a home on main domain. When they do, they will also each have been rewritten to be unique, so the value of them will increase (many are currently not). We also have landing pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/view/559/volunteering-holidays- which despite being hideous are ranked fairly well (page 1 for key terms). We cannot currently fulfil all these on main domain, but do not want to shut them down and lose positioning. Choices as I see it: Make a landing page e.g. muchbetteradventures.com/volunteering and a) redirect from old landing page, b) redirect all related 'listings' to this page. May help preserve rankings of main landing page (the most important), but not of any listings? Import all listings to have a home on main domain, (probably as children of a landing page, but not rewritten to be unique just yet). Make them not accessible from homepage, and change functionality of them so that new visitors from google are told we cannot currently help them with this trip. This is more work to complete so will take longer to do and is a distraction from our core focus so needs good justification! Stay running largely as we are, slowly redirecting 1 page at a time as we carry over more and more options to main domain. This will take over 12 months min.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Local Competition Analysis
Hi Mozzers, I've been mainly B2B focused, and am used to estimating the amount of work necessary to best competition for organic results, but now I have a local client. I need a method to estimate the amount of work necessary to get listed in the one-box for my chosen queries. Can someone point me in the right direction? Any help appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
How To Remve Rel Canonical Error from site
Hello friends, I have a site there I install all in one SEO plugin when I add my site at seomoz.org after the crawling results it so there are a penalty of Rel Conanical tag error but when I see my editor code there I see that all in one seo automatically giving rel conanical tag. Now I don’t understand that why seomoz giving these errors. Please help me to resolve this problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KLLC0 -
Any SEO suggestions for my site?
Site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp Does anyone have any suggestions for any on-site SEO that would benefit my website? Any recommendations, big or small are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor1 -
Help choosing titles
Good evening guys, I changed my titles last month, in preparation for the over optimisation penalty and the result was an instant and quite dramatic loss in traffic. I believe the reason is, the change resulted in a lot of duplicate titles. My website is similar to deviant art, but for mobile phones. So the titles include the brand of mobile phone for example. The titles were: Upload name + Brand + Content type - 3 tags - FILEID So an example would be Black Nokia wallpaper - black, abstract, grey - 12345 I changed them to Black Nokia wallpaper by artist name on domain name. But this resulted in thousands of duplicate titles and a dramatic loss in traffic. For example a user could upload 20 black wallpapers. With this in mind, I need to change my titles and fast. But I don't want to make another mistake. The one I am quite keen to try is: Black Nokia Wallpaper - Tag1, tag2 wallpapers - on domain name. So the main variable would be the name of the upload and then the 2 tags, to mix things up a little. Another option would be to throw the file ID in there somewhere? As that will always be unique. Perhaps the file ID could be in the place of the "wallpapers" after the two tags? I'd like to keep the domain name, for branding reasons. Any other suggestions are warmly welcomed. Thanks a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0 -
Rel Canonical Syntax
My IT department is getting ready to setup the rel canonical tag, finally. I took a look at the code on our test server and see that they are using a single quote in the tag syntax (see code block below). Should I be concerned? Will Google read those lines the same? <link rel='canonical' href='[http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits](view-source:http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits)' />VS. **versus** <link rel="canonical" href="[http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits](view-source:http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits)" />
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | costume0