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.
-
Hi Enjin! If Martijn's response answered your question, mind marking it a "Good Answer?" Otherwise, how can we help more?
-
No that should be OK. It's ok to mention the language on the page but it wouldn't always help for Google without using HREF lang to take any conclusions based on that.
-
Hi Martjin,
Thank you for your answer. In addition in the code ther is also the meta content-language" content="<a class="attribute-value" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;">fr</a>"/> for all the pages with french language on it. Do you think this is an issue ?
-
Hi,
In addition to the page language tag that you directly add to your HTML as you've done already. Are you also using the href language tags to make sure that Google will know that some pages have an equivalent on another subdomain with the same content but then translated. This usually will work even better then putting the actual content language in the HTML as it's completely invented for your use case.
You can check out more information regarding HREF lang here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
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
-
International SEO Two Subdomains Showing Up in Google Search Results
Hi I have a client that is having two subdomains showing up SERP when you Google their name. Here are the details. They have two subdomains us.companyname.com and en.companyname.com us.companyname.com is for the US and has completely different products and content than en.companyname.com en.companyname.com is the site designed for Europe and it is in English. How can I make it so that only the us. version shows up in the search results? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | JohnWeb120 -
Are Subdomains better or SubDirectories better for an international website ?
Can anyone explain why the structure of your website: yourbrand.com/es/category is better than es.yourbrand.com for multi language and multi country website.
International SEO | | Tushar_P0 -
Subdomains or subfolders for language specific sites?
We're launching an .org.hk site with English and Traditional Chinese variants. As the local population speaks both languages we would prefer not to have separate domains and are deciding between subdomains and subfolders. We're aware of the reasons behind generally preferring folders, but many people, including moz.com, suggest preferring subfolders to subdomains with the notable exception of language-specific sites. Does this mean subdomains should be preferred for language specific sites, or just that they are okay? I can't find any rationale to this other than administrative simplification (e.g. easier to set up different analytics / hosting), which in our case is not an issue. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
International SEO | | SOS_Children0 -
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
International SEO | | Todoist0 -
Subdomains vs ccTLD in International SEO
I'm interested to see if anyone has any additional thoughts or recent experience on subdomains vs ccTLD for International SEO. An article I found on this site is from March 2011, so just wanted to check if this is still relevant? http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview
International SEO | | edwardlewis0 -
Subdomain vs subdomain with ccTLD
Hi, We are about to launch a subdomain and I am not sure about which subdomain will benefit us the most: location.brand.com location.brand.co.uk Before I continue I must point out that unfortunately subfolders are not an option (sorry, hard to explain). Things to consider: Brand.com is a global site with very high domain authority, DA = 95+ Brand.co.uk has no content and simply redirects to brand.com Our product is hotels so local search is important and the local (national) market accounts for a good majority of the market. According to the following post if we were to go for location.brand.com we would benefit from ‘some’ amount of inherited domain authority but would loose out on Geo target bonus. If we went for location.brand.co.uk we would benefit significantly from Geo target bonus but would loose out completely on inherited domain authority http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview I was more inclined to go for location.brand.co.uk as our SEO agency advised that we will not benefit from the domain authority as we will be considered a new domain. However, after looking into it further I am finding it hard to decide because if we could capitalize on brand.com and inheriting part of its domain authority then it could help our seo efforts significantly. Thanks!!
International SEO | | jay.raman0 -
Subdomain vs folder vs TLD
We are launching in a number of international markets and I am trying to figure out if I should be launching them as folders, e.g.: /es (spanish), /br (brazil), /in (india) or whether they should be subdomains, e.g. es.mysite.com, br.mysite.com, etc. In brazil we managed to secure the tld (.com.br) but not in other regions. Whats the best strategy for us? I was thinking of doing folders as I understand that this strengthens the main domain, while subdomains are considered as separate sites. For Brazil, should we also use a folder, or launch on the .com.br? I assume that using the .com.br means we will have to build up authority from scratch, and in addition, the authority we build up on the .com.br will not help to grow the .com In addition, is there value in interlinking between verions (the versions will have the same content but in different languages)? Thanks!
International SEO | | medico0 -
Internationally targetted subdomains and Duplicate content
A client has a site they'd like to translated into French, not for the french market but for french speaking countries. My research tells me the best way to implement this for this particular client is to create subfolders for each country. For ease of implementation I’ve decided against ccTLD’s and Sub Domains. So for example… I'll create www.website.com/mr/ for Mauritania and in GWT set this to target Mauritania. Excellent so far. But then I need to build another sub folder for Morocco. I'll then create www.website.com/ma/ for Morocco and in GWT set this to target Morocco. Now the content on these two sub folders will be exactly the same and I’m thinking about doing this for all French speaking African countries. It would be nice to use www.website.com/fr/ but in GWT you can only set one Target country. Duplicate content issues arise and my fear of perturbing the almighty Google becomes a possibility. My research indicates that I should simply canonical back to the page I want indexed. But I want them both to be indexed surely!? I therefore decided to share my situation with my fellow SEO’s to see if I’m being stupid or missing something simple both a distinct possibility!
International SEO | | eazytiger0