Wrong country sites being shown in google

[tidybooks]

Hi,

I am having some issues with country targeting of our sites.

Just to give a brief background of our setup and web domains

We use magento and have 7 connected ecommerce sites on that magento installation

1.www.tidy-books.co.uk  (UK) - main site

2. www.tidy-books.com (US) - variations in copy but basically a duplicate of UK

3.www.tidy-books.it (Italy) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created

4.www.tidy-books.fr  (France) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created

5.www.tidy-books.de (Germany) - fully translated by a native speaker - uits' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created

6.www.tidy-books.com.au (Australia) - duplicate of UK

7.www.tidy-books.eu (rest of Europe) - duplicate of UK

I’ve added the country and language href tags to all sites.

We use cross domain canonical URLS

I’ve targeted in the international targeting in Google webmaster the correct country where appropriate

So we are getting number issues which are driving me crazy trying to work out why

The major one is for example

If you search with an Italian IP in google.it  for our brand name Tidy Books the .com site is shown  first then .co.uk and then all other sites followed on page 3 the correct site  www.tidy-books.it

The Italian site is most extreme example but the French and German site still appear below the .com site.

This surely shouldn’t be the case?

Again this problem happens with the co.uk and .com sites with when searching google.co.uk for our keywords the .com often comes up before the .co.uk so it seems we have are sites competing against each other which again can’t be right or good.

The next problem lies in the errors we are getting on google webmaster on all sites is having no return tags in the international targeting section.

Any advice or help would be very much appreciated. I’ve added some screen shots to help illustrate and happy to provide extra details.

Thanks

UK%20hreflang%20errors.png de%20search.png fr%20search.png it%20search.png

[Entertainment]

We are having the same issues.  We have already implemented hreflang. Is there anything else that might help solve this problem?

[Keszi]

Hi Geraldine,

So, meanwhile just jumped in what would be most cost efficient implementation for the HREFLANG on your website.

Give the following article to your developer: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en

Basically he will create a sitemap for each of the websites, which will indicate what is the alternate version of every single page in other languages.

You will then submit this sitemap to EACH of the Google Webmaster Tools accounts for the websites (.fr, .de, .com, etc.)

This should be the fastest and most cost efficient in your case.

Reminder: Remove the Hreflang link from current versions. It is the best to indicate alternate via only once channel.

Gr., Keszi

[Keszi]

Could you write me Private Message with your email address? I need to ask a few questions to your developer in order to search for a good implementation.

[tidybooks]

Hi Keszi,

Thank you for the response.  I've added the general Hreflang tags So just the top level part of the domain. ie

and so forth

We use Magento, it's likely I will have to get our developers to do it so I'm seeking some advice to hopefully minimise cost or do it ourselves.

Thanks again

[Keszi]

Hi Geraldine,

I checked it quickly but I do not see the implementation done.

Regarding of how you could do it fast, what Content Management System are you using?

Gr., Keszi

[tidybooks]

Hi so we need to have the hreflang tags setup so they show the url of that page?

like this?

http://www.tidy-books.eu**/bookcases-storage**" />http://www.tidy-books.co.uk//bookcases-storage" />
http://www.tidy-books.com/bookcases-storage" />
http://www.tidy-books.com.au**/bookcases-storage**" />
http://www.tidy-books.it//mobili-librerie-contenitori-libri" />http://www.tidy-books.fr/bibliotheques" />
http://www.tidy-books.de/http://www.tidy-books.de/kinderbuecher-regal-buecheraufbewahrung-33" />Any ideas of how to do this with oout spending hours manually adding the different urls etc?Cheers

[tidybooks]

Thanks for the answers I'm going to look into this further with you suggestions

[Keszi]

Hi!

Like Jamie has mentioned it, you have a HREFLANG issue on the site.

Try implementing for each of the domains the following code:

<- default for international
                  <- default for US
              <- default for Aus
                             <- default for italian language!
                             <- default for french language
                          <- default for german language!

I would implement it like this.

The difference is compared to Jamie's implementation idea, is that I wouldn't put the .com version as the x-default.

All of the hreflang markups have to appear on each of the pages! For example:

Read through the articles Jamie provided, they will be a huge help to kick-start the implementation.

Gr., Keszi

[Nobody1565908128979]

It appears that you do not have “link rel="alternate” for all locations, I'm not sure if that’s going to fix it completely but Google will not understand if you do not associate each alternate version.

It's a good idea to provide a generic URL for geographically unspecified users if you have several alternate URLs targeted at users with the different languages, but in different locales.

E.G each separate domain with a different language should be mentioned.

Also double check language code as incorrect language codes can cause issues. Also make sure you canonical them and add a language specific sitemap. You also want to add a default for example.com is default add the following.

So in the code it would look like this

http://www.internationalseomap.com/hreflang-tags-generator/

http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Hope that makes sense.