International Subdomain Headache
-
My client set up a separate domain for their international clients, then set up separate subdomains for each country where they're active (so, for example, the original site is xx.com and the global is xxworldwide.com, with subdomains like mx.xxxworldwide.com).
They auto-translated a large amount of content and put the translations on those international sites. The idea was to draw in native speakers.
Now, I don't think this is a great practice, obviously, and I'm worried that it could hurt their original site (the xxx.com in the example above). My concern is that Google will see through the translated text, since it was handled with Google Translate, and penalize both sites. I don't think the canonical tag applies here, since Google recommends a no-follow for autotranslated text, but I've also never dealt with this type of situation before.
Anyways, if you made it through all of that, congratulations. My question is whether xxx.com is getting any negative effects other than a potential loss of link juice -- and whether there's any legitimate way to present auto-translated text with a few minor changes without incurring a penalty.
-
@Martijn told you the key, is not a good idea, use the flow in
https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/choose-your-international-strategy-tool/
and the resources of @Patrick
Also take a look to these tools:
http://www.internationalseomap.com/hreflang-tags-generator/
http://www.themediaflow.com/tool_hreflang.php
To not make a mistake with the hreflangs
Hope it helps
-
Hey there John
I would advise you to take a look a the following resources:
Use hreflang for language and regional URLs (Google)
International SEO Guide (Moz)
The International SEO Checklist (Moz)
How to Build Links for International SEO - Webinar (Moz)All of the above can get you headed in the right direction and lay a great foundation. Hope this answers your question! Good luck!
-
Auto-translated can never be a good idea, but what you could do is add just the rel canonical for hreflang on the site. Then it would make sure that you can target these specific languages.
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
-
Unrelated subdomain hurts domain rankins?
Hi All, One of our subdomains has lot of content created by different users and mostly they are outgoing links from landing pages. Moreover the top ranking content is about "cigarettes" which is nowhere related to our niche. Will this hurt our domain rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Rankings rise after improving internal linking - then drop again
I'm working on a large scale publishing site. I can increase search rankings almost immediately by improving internal linking to targeted pages, sometimes by 40 positions but after a day or two these same rankings drop down again, not always as low as before but significantly lower than their highest position. My theory is that the uplift generated by the internal linking is subsequently mitigated by other algorithmic factors relating to content quality or site performance or is this unlikely? Does anyone else have experience of this phenomenon or any theories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hjsand1 -
Google Is Indexing My Internal Search Results - What should i do?
Hello, We are using a CMS/E-Commerce platform which isn't really built with SEO in mind, this has led us to the following problem.... a large number of internal (product search) search result pages, which aren't "search engine friendly" or "user friendly", are being indexed by google and are driving traffic to the site, generating our client revenue. We want to remove these pages and stop them from being indexed, replacing them with static category pages - essentially moving the traffic from the search results to static pages. We feel this is necessary as our current situation is a short-term (accidental) win and later down the line as more pages become indexed we don't want to incur a penalty . We're hesitant to do a blanket de-indexation of all ?search results pages because we would lose revenue and traffic in the short term, while trying to improve the rankings of our optimised static pages. The idea is to really move up our static pages in Google's index, and when their performance is strong enough, to de-index all of the internal search results pages. Our main focus is to improve user experience and not have customers enter the site through unexpected pages. All thoughts or recommendations are welcome. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iThinkMedia0 -
Varying Internal Link Anchor Text with Each New Page Load
I'm asking for people's opinions on varying internal anchor text. Before you jump in and say, "Oh yes, varying your anchor text is always a good idea", let me explain. I'm not talking about varying anchor text on different links scattered throughout a site. We all know that is a wise thing to do for a variety of reasons that have been covered in many places. What I'm talking about is including semi-useful links below the fold and then varying the anchor text with each page load. Each time Googlebot crawls a page, it sees different anchor text for each link. That way, Googlebot is seeing, for example, 'san diego bars', 'taverns in san diego', 'san diego clubs', and 'pubs in san diego' all pointing to a San Diego bar/tavern/club/pub page. I'm wondering if there is value in this approach. Will it help a site rank well for multiple search queries? Could it potentially be better than static anchor text as it may help Google better understand the targeted page? Is it a good way to protect a large site with a huge number of internal links from Penguin? To summarize, we're talking about the impact of varying the anchor text on a single page with each page load as opposed to varying the anchor text on different pages. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanOD0 -
Subdomain Blog Sitemap link - Add it to regular domain?
Example of setup:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EEE3
www.fancydomain.com
blog.fancydomain.com Because of certain limitations, I'm told we can't put our blogs at the subdirectory level, so we are hosting our blogs at the subdomain level (blog.fancydomain.com). I've been asked to incorporate the blog's sitemap link on the regular domain, or even in the regular domain's sitemap. 1. Putting the a link to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml in the www.fancydomain.com/sitemap.xml -- isn't this against sitemap.org protocol? 2. Is there even a reason to do this? We do have a link to the blog's home page from the www.fancydomain.com navigation, and the blog is set up with its sitemap and link to the sitemap in the footer. 3. What about just including a text link "Blog Sitemap" (linking to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.html) in the footer of the www.fancydomain.com (adjacent to the text link "Sitemap" which already exists for the www.fancydomain.com's sitemap. Just trying to make sense of this, and figure out why or if it should be done. Thanks!0 -
What's the best internal linking strategy for articles and on-site resources?
We recently added an education center to our site with articles and information about our products and industry. What is the best way to link to and from that content? There are two options I'm considering: Link to articles from category and subcategory pages under a section called "related articles" and link back to these category and subcategory pages from the articles: category page <<--------->> education center article education center article <<---------->> subcategory page Only link from the articles to the category and subcategory pages: education center article ---------->> category page education center article ---------->> subcategory page Would #1 dilute the SEO value of the category and subcategory pages? I want to offer shoppers links to more information if they need it, but this may also take them away from the products. Has anyone tested this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0 -
Do I have to tell WBT site moved to a subdirectory on another internal site?
I am moving content from one site to another and redirecting the DNS from www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com/old-site. I have put the 301 in place but I wanted to make sure I have to also tell Webmaster Tools to change the old site to the new domain? We still want the old domain name to answer and redirect to www.newsite.com/old-site. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeorgeLaRochelle0 -
Will links to a subdomain help it rank?
I have an affiliate subdomain on a larger company's domain. (For example I have: www.victor.company.com on www.company.com). Would working to attain backlinks to the subdomain help it rank or will I just be putting forth my effort and helping the domain rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VictorVC0