Change of language
-
Hi everyone,
We bought a domain which had content in German for over 8 years. So the rankings it had were in another search engine aswell.
So i've changed the language of the content + targetting in webmaster tools to Dutch. (i've created unique content, in case your wondering)
Now we don't rank in the targetted search engine, nor in the search engine the website was previously ranked.My question is how can we fix this so we are going to get indexed and ranked for the targetted search engine.
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Gianluca,
Thanks for your answer. And sorry for the delayed response.
I'll ask John Mueller for an answer.Thanks again.
-
If the links where totally unrelated to the actual site, what I would probably do should be to check in webmaster help forum a direct answer from John Mueller (or, better, asking him directly on Google+).
In fact, once there was an option for "disavowing" the links a domain just bought had, but since almost one year the link to that option has disappeared from GWT.
The use of the disavow tool usually is for site that have been penalized.
-
Hi Gianluca,
Thanks for yet another answer.
I did consider it, however i taught it wouldn't influence the rankings.
Which leads me to a follow up question, if you dont mind?
Should i disavow those old links to help rank for the correct Google.Thanks again for taking the time to answer the question.
-
HI and sorry for the delay...
haven't you considered that that domain is still ranking in Google.de because of its old link profile?
In fact, it can be possible that links it earned in its past existence as a German website may be the cause of its still good rankings in .de.
On the contrary, the percentage of links from dutch sites may be too small to allow the site to rank properly in google.nl.
That's all I can tell you, without knowing the site name.
-
Hi Gianluca,
Thank you for your response!
It is ranking but in the German index. That could be because it is an old domain?
-
Hi Stefan,
what I don't understand is if your site, now in dutch and targeting Netherlands, is actually indexed but not ranking, or if it also not indexed at all.
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
-
How to avoid getting penalized for having same website in 2 languages
Hi, I have a price comparison website in English with .com domain. Now as we are expanding, we want to localize our website and target different markets in their local languages. The first market we are targetting is France. For that purpose we have a different domain name in French .fr domain The website however, will have the exact same content & mostly translated in French. My question is what is the best way to avoid getting penalized by Google for having duplicate content? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kh-priyam0 -
Do I need to add the actual language for meta tags and description for different languages? cited for duplicate content for different language
Hi, I am fairly new to SEO and this community so pardon my questions. We recently launched on our drupal site mandarin language version for the entire site. And when i do the crawl site, i get duplicate content for the pages that are in mandarin. Is this a problem or can i ignore this? Should i make different page titles for the different languages? Also, for the metatag and descriptions, would it better in the native language for google to search for? thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lynetteboss0 -
My Site name changed. Why does sometimes new name, sometimes old name show in Google.
My website name has changed in the title, but only shows up sometimes in the SERPs. What can I do to ensure the new name is the name that always shows up? It's been a month since the change and we have submitted a new sitemap. Here's one example: http://www.building.govt.nz/blc-building-act. In Google (for New Zealand building code) it shows up as Building Act - Department of Building and Housing. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielleNZ0 -
404 Pages. Can I change it to do this without getting penalized ? I want to lower our bounce rate from these pages to encourage the user to continue on the site
Hi All, We have been streaming our site and got rid of thousands of pages for redundant locations (Basically these used to be virtual locations where we didn't have a depot although we did deliver there and most of them was duplicate/thin content etc ). Most of them have little if any link value and I didn't want to 301 all of them as we already have quite a few 301's already We currently display a 404 page but I want to improve on this. Current 404 page is - http://goo.gl/rFRNMt I can get my developer to change it, so it will still be a 404 page but the user will see the relevant category page instead ? So it will look like this - http://goo.gl/Rc8YP8 . We could also use Java script to show the location name etc... Would be be okay ? or would google see this as cheating. basically I want to lower our bounce rates from these pages but still be attractive enough for the user to continue in the site and not go away. If this is not a good idea, then any recommendations on improving our current 404 would be greatly appreciated. thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Looking into the future! Changing SEO for the trends.
Hi Mozzers, How is it going? I run a website called Orange Octopus that offers videogame tips from the best pro gamers in the world. We get plenty of long tail traffic but the keyword that is most important to the business is "FIFA 14 tips". Using Moz as a template, I tried to model my site's category pages after Moz. (http://moz.com/ugc/category/link-building) and OrangeOctop.us (orangeoctop.us/fifa14-tips/) With the new FIFA 15 videogame a few months away from being released, I wanted to start preparing for the keyword "FIFA 15 tips" and "FIFA 15 guide". Being proactive and aggressive with rankings for when the game first comes out. Would you recommend starting a new category? Or changing FIFA 14 tips to FIFA 15 tips by just changing the url and title of the category page? Really need some expert help. Play hard! Joey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | orangeoctop.us0 -
Has anyone else noticed a big change in SERPS in the past week or two
We've had a massive change in our position, we were pretty stable on certain keywords for quite some time, however in the past week we were bouncing around and then thrown completely off with some of our keywords dropping to page 4 and some to page 2. I've noticed a lot of changes on the google uk serps, and not sure if it is just a penguin refresh or if its a new one that hasn't been announced. anyone else notice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bassbuds1 -
Blog/Shop/Forum site structure - are we right to make these changes?
We run a fairly large online community with a popular blog and Europe's largest online shop for drift-specific motor sport parts and our website has been around since 2004 I believe. Since it was launched, the blog (or previous CMS system) has been at the domain root, the forums have been located at /forum and the shop at /shop (or similar) but we have decided to move things around a bit and would like some comments as to whether we are doing the right thing or if you would make any addition or different changes to us. Currently the entire website gets around 3m page views per month from 500,000 visitors, but this is split roughly 75% to the forums, 10% to the shop and 15% to the blog (but remember the blog is at the root so anyone who visits our homepage "visits" the blog). We plan to move the shop to the domain root (since the shop provides the income for the business - surely it should be the 1st thing visitors see?), the blog from root to /blog and the forums will stay where they are at /forum. We have read Steven Macdonald's post here, and have taken notes to help minimize traffic loss and disruption to our army of users and hopefully avoid too many penalties from Google and plan to: 301 redirect old URLs to new ones where they have changed. Submit new site maps to search engines. Update old links where we have control (such as forums where we are paid traders etc.). Send out a newsletter to our subscribers. Update our forum members. Fix errors via WMT before and after the re-structure. Should we be taking this opportunity to actually set each of the three sections of the site to it's own sub domain? Our thoughts are that if we are disrupting things, it's surely best to have lots of disruption once rather than a little bit of disruption several times over a 3-6 month period? OSE shows us to have roughly 1500 inbound links to /shop, 2100 to /forum and 4800 to the root / - if we proceed with our plan and put 301 redirects in place this seems to be the best plan to retain the value of these links but if we were to switch to sub domains would the 301s lose most of the link values due to them being on "different" domains? Any help, advise or suggestions are very welcome but comments from experience are what we are seeking ideally! Thanks Jay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DWJames0 -
Should I change wordpress urls?
Should I change my wordpress permalinks to include the keyword? For examples at the minute my url is http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. Is it better to be http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-bands/wedding-singer. 'home' is not relevant so surely 'live-bands' would be better? If I change the urls won't I lose 'link juice' as external links will all point to a url that no longer exists? Or will wordpress automatically redirect the old url to the new one? Finally, if I should change the url as described how do I do it on wordpress? I can only see how to edit the last bit of the url and not the middle bit.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0