How to make Google consider my international subdomain relevant?
-
We have recently started to look deeper into international SEO. We have search engine optimized our international landing pages, title tags and meta descriptions with keywords etc. so each of the international language we support is SEO'ed for the local market.
We support 12 languages, and each of them are located on a subdomain. That means if we say our site is helloworld.com, a person from Germany that lands on this site can switch to German and will then be redirected to de.helloworld.com and all content will be in German.
Our problem is that we develop cloud-based software, we have a significant amount of traffic, but whenever we get media coverage or people link to us from anywhere in the world they always link to the root domain which in this case then would be helloworld.com. That means if I go to google.de and type in the exact meta description or title tag we use in German, the Google search engine can't even find us because "I assume" Google don't consider our de.helloworld.com relevant because nobody has ever linked to this site.
I would appreciate very much if anyone can give me some advice on how I can address this issue.
Thanks a lot!
Allan
-
Yes I did, already replied last week. Sent my PM again to make sure you've got it.
-
Hi Martijn,
Did you receive the PM I sent you?
Best wishes,
Allan
-
Can you PM me the site we're talking about in this case? Quite hard otherwise to give you other initiatives for your specific case.
-
Hi Martijn,
It has now been a few months, unfortunately these actions didn't solve the problem, we're still not being indexed on the international Google sites such as Google.fr, .de, .es etc. Any suggestions to other initiatives we can take to change that?
Thanks for your help.
Best wishes,
Allan
-
Hi Martijn,
Thanks a lot for the prompt response to my question. We'll look into these changes, the only thing I don't really understand is her suggestions about when not to use geotargeting in the video. She gives an example when you don't want to use geotargeting on your website and that is when you want to target a particular language versus region. I understand that we might miss out on the French speaking leads that live in Canada if we geotarget our site for France, but if that's the trade-off compared to not reaching anyone who speaks French which is the case with our current international SEO structure I'm fine with that!
However, I assume your first suggestion to look into Rel="alternate" v.s. href lang deals with that situation where you target language and not region.
Thanks again Martijn, I appreciate your help very much, and I promise I'll drop you a line when we "hopefully" can see the impact.
-Allan
-
Hi Allan,
They're several options which could provide you with a possible solution. But of course I can't guarantee that any of these options will actually solve your problem.
- Rel="alternate" v.s. href lang: these tags will tell Google on which pages the relevant pages in that language can be found.
- Google Webmaster Tools geotargeting: with the geotargeting you're able to target your sub domain on a specific country.
I would give both a try and hopefully you can drop a comment here in a couple of weeks with hopefully positive progress.
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
-
What are the SEO implications of having a website hosted in Singapore (as a subdomain of the global website) when the website is targeting the UK audience?
What are the SEO implications of having a website hosted in Singapore (as a subdomain of the global website) when the website is targeting the UK audience? Will it be hard to get it to rank? Will there be problems with search console?
International SEO | | ToniFarrington-Allthingsweb0 -
Subdomain competition
Hi there, I have an issue with some subdomain rankings, my client sell all over the world and has divide countries with subdomain like this : fr.xxxx.com for France,be.xxxx.com for Belgium, ca.xxxx.com for Canada,..... The issue is that pages are all in french and some keywords on Google.fr are referenced with be.xxxx.com so it count "not in top 50" on moz report. The code looks correct to me (for example belgiums's pages : "fr-BE">"). Anybody have an idea where to look at to resolve this ? Many thx in advance.
International SEO | | EnjinFrance1 -
How well does Google's "Locale-aware crawling by Googlebot" work?
Hello, In January of this year Google introduced "Locale-aware crawling by Googlebot." https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=e Google uses different crawl settings for sites that cannot have separate URLs for each locale. ......... This is basically for sites that dynamically render contend on the same URL depending on the locale and language (IP) of the visitor. If e.g. a visitor was coming from France, the targeted page would load in french. If a visitor was coming from the US the same page would load in English on the same URL. Does anyone have any experience with this setup and how well it works? How well do the different versions of a page get indexed, and how well do those pages rank? In the example above, does the french content get indexed correctly? Many thanks!
International SEO | | Veva0 -
How to best set up international XML site map?
Hi everyone, I've been searching about a problem, but haven't been able to find an answer. We would like to generate a XML site map for an international web shop. This shop has one domain for Dutch visitors (.nl) and another domain for visitors of other countries (Germany, France, Belgium etc.) (.com). The website on the 2 domains looks the same, has the same template and same pages, but as it is targeted to other countries, the pages are in different languages and the urls are also in different languages (see example below for a category bags). Example Netherlands:
International SEO | | DocdataCommerce
Dutch domain: www.client.nl
Example Dutch bags category page: www.client.nl/tassen Example France:
International domain: www.client.com
Example French bags category page: www.client.com/sacs When a visitor is on the Dutch domain (.nl) which shows the Dutch content, he can switch country to for example France in the country switch and then gets redirected to the other, international .com domain. Also the other way round. Now we want to generate a XML sitemap for these 2 domains. As it is the same site, but on 2 domains, development wants to make 1 sitemap, where we take the Dutch version with Dutch domain as basis and in the alternates we specify the other language versions on the other domain (see example below). <loc>http://www.client.nl/tassen</loc>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="fr"
href="http://www.client.com/sacs"
/></xhtml:link<br> Is this the best way to do this? Or would we need to make 2 site maps, as it are 2 domains?0 -
Different urls for the homepage on an international website
Hi! I was wondering what would be the best strategy to solve duplicated content generated by the homepage and its differents URLS This is an international website. Now it only has one language working: Spanish, but the url structure is already ready to work with the language approach So we have now www.brand.com -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es)
International SEO | | teconsite
www.brand.com/es -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es)
www.brand.com/index.php -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es) I would like to know if this is the correct approach of if we should add 301 redirects instead of canonical. Let's image that they want to active the /en language, so they will have www.brand.com
www.brand.com/index.php
www.brand.com/es
www.brand.com/en now what? I image they have to use hreflang, but I am a little lost with how this should work. 301? canonical? hreflang? Could you help me? Thank you! Victoria0 -
Human Translation versus Google Translate for Ecommerce Products
Hi all, We want to put our products on our ecommerce site into another language. I have always been under the impression that running text through Google Translate is a no no, not only for the user experience, but also it is a Google tool and I am assuming that Google would notice that it is not translated by a human. I don't know if it would incur a penalty as such but it most likely would not be favoured as a human translation Can anyone confirm their experience or impression on this? Thanks!
International SEO | | bjs20100 -
Country Specific Google Results
Does anyone have any stats (preferred) on users selecting Google results segmented to their country? For instance, users in the UK (France, Japan, etc.) selecting the "Pages from the UK" option to limit results to country based sites? Or if not hard stats, at least any international users care to comment? Cheers, Brian ~identity
International SEO | | identity0 -
International targeting
Hi I have a UK based website using a .com, we also own the .co.uk which points to the .com. We get IRO 40,000 UVs per month and we have good domain authority. I now want to launch the site in America however if I seperated the sites out and used the .co.uk for the UK and the .com for the US I would decimate my UK rankings. Am I able to target both the US and the UK under the one domain, or will the fact that I host in the UK ultimately impact on any rankings I may achieve in the US?
International SEO | | danielparry0