TLD Conflicts in WMT
-
Hi
I'm running into some top level domain conflicts in Google's webmaster tools. I hope you can help me out. Thanks in advance.
Website example.com has sub folders for each language. There's no content at the root example.com. The root 301 redirects to English at example.com/en/.
In Google Webmaster Tools the root site is added because the web developer can't find a Joomla plugin to put the sitemap and robots file in each sub folder. It's all mixed in the root. So only 1 sitemap and robots exists for all the sub folder languages in the root of the site.
As a results Google shows the root site in search results where it should show the appropriate sub folder (in this case Dutch). I see these conflicts occur everywhere.
Soon Chinese, Romanian and other languages will be added. I'm afraid this problem will only get worse.
What can I do to make sure Google treats every sub folder as a distinctive site and doesn't treat the root as a site?
-
Google can be very stubborn about wanting to see content at the root level. The other common problem, though, is that the crawler just may not see the other language variants. Are you auto-redirecting by IP (i.e. geo-location)? One major issue is that Google crawls from the US, so you'll need crawl paths to all of the variants.
The first thing to check is that Google is actually reading/honoring the 301. You'll need to see what the crawler is seeing.
Google has added some new tags for sites in multiple languages (especially if the same language is shared across regions/countries). I don't have a lot of good data on them, but Google reps are encouraging their use:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html
You may find life is easier, long-term, if you put the dominant language at the root level, along with navigation options for other languages, and then use geo-location to send visitors to other pages. It also saves you a 301-hop for the primary market and will strengthen your SEO a bit for that language.
-
Hi István
Thanks for the suggestion.
Do you mean by:
_"_I would go for a canonical in the index page"...you would create a webpage in the root of the site with a canonical to the default redirect /en/?
-
Hi Jacob,
I would go for a canonical in the index page. This should remove the .com version from index and tell search engines which is the "main" language.
I hope that solves this issue.
Greetings,
Istvan
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
-
Google WMT/search console: Thousands of "Links to your site" even only one back-link from a website.
Hi, I can see in my search console that a website giving thousands of links to my site where hardly only one back-link from one of their page to our page. Why this is happening? Here is screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/VleUf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Are TLD and numbers in subdomain ranking factors?
Several years ago my firm migrated our domain from a very lengthy 3point7designs.com to 3.7designs.co (we couldn't get 7designs.com at the time) thinking this would be a clever way to brand the name 3.7 Designs. Ever since that change we've had a dramatic reduction in search rankings which has lasted years. https://monosnap.com/file/adJUdkX9YCXQaODcXype4qza70pMCE You can see the drop in early 2011, we made the switch in February. I've read some discussion about Google changing weights based on having numbers in the subdomain as it appears spammy. I've also herd speculation about .co vs .com. Further evidence is being outranked by a competitor for a term we previously dominated despite having higher domain authority, inbound links, exact match keyword in our title and content. We now own 37designs.com and 7designs.com and are contemplating a switch. Any insight into these being ranking factors or is the site being penalized for other reasons?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 3PointRoss0 -
Ajax Module Crawability vs. WMT Fetch & Render
Recently a module was built into the homepage to pull in content from an outside source via Ajax and I'm curious about the overall crawability of the content. In WMT, if I fetch & render the content it displays correctly, but if I view source all I am seeing is the empty container. Should I take additional steps so that the actual AJAX content displays in my source code, or am I "good" since the content does display correctly when I fetch & render?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemarieReed0 -
New g(TLD) advice needed
Hey all, I'm a bit confused by conflicting advice, need some direct input. We're quite experienced in SEO but that doesn't mean we can't get better 🙂 I manage a very old, well established, very generic TLD portal that ranks very highly in MANY keywords. (If you know our domain, I'd appreciate not naming it here) (145 1-3 ranks, 342 1-20 ranks) but there are also many topics we want to improve upon. Lets say, for example, I own gold.com, but I've failed to rank for 'gold events' and I acquired gold.events. What is the thought as to using some of the g(TLD)s versus the original .com? In the example events.gold.com or gold.events or gold.com/events/? I really can't find a consensus on which would bemost effective for SEO purposes. In a more general aspect of the same question, we own MANY "gold.newg(TLD)" domains and are conflicted as to best use of all of them. All advice greatly appreciated. Nat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WorldWideWebLabs0 -
What's the best way to deal with deleted .php files showing as 404s in WMT?
Disclaimer: I am not a developer During a recent site migration I have seen a bit of an increase in WMT of 404 errors on pages ending .php. Click on the link in WMT and it just shows as File Not Found - no 404 page. There are about 20 in total showing in webmaster tools and I want to advise the IT department what to do. What is the best way to deal with this for on-page best practice? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blaze-Communication0 -
Using standard title and description tags with rich snippets are there potential conflicts
Recently I've employing rich snippets using the guides from schema.org I find them a great way to let the search engines understand the content of my web pages, also author and publisher tags are all thrown into the migreat great love it. My question however is what to do with the existing title and description tags? Should they be left in? Do they cause conflicts with the search engines? Should I just ignore this gut feeling and leave them in. Any insights into the use of schema and a standard tags appreciated. Best David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
HEADS UP - Did Google Grant WMT and GA admin access to your past employees or contractors?
Check your users and permissions in WMT and GA. I noticed that two Gmail accounts from a while back were given admin access to our accounts! That means someone that used to work for you could go in and remove your site from Googles index. Check your accounts folks just a heads up 😉 Here is an article talking about this potentially dangerous issue. http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/11/28/serious-google-security-glitch-gives-webmaster-tools-possibly-analytics-access-to-revoked-accounts
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw1 -
Wordpress site architecture conflicts and how to go about fixing them
I am attempting to figure something out with a site I'm trying to fix. So the problem is that I've got two categories that are basically related keywords. I set this up when I first started doing this work and didn't know what I was doing. So that site at one time was ranking on the first page for a specific term (example: 'project manager salary' and posted in the category 'project manager salary'. But they we added 'project manager salary in Vermont' and all other 50 posts for all states in a different category called, 'project manager salaries and benefits'. So my question is this: Would this cause some kind of keyword rank cannibalization? How do I fix this properly? Thanks! Michael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtking.us_gmail.com0