Ranking problems with international website
-
Hey there,
we have some ranking issues with our international website. It would be great if any of you could share their thoughts on that. The website uses subfolders for country and language (i.e. .com/uk/en) for the website of the UK branch in English. As the company has branches all over the world and also offers their content in many languages the url structure is quite complex.
A recent problem we have seen is that in certain markets the website is not ranking with the correct country. Especially in the UK and the US, Google prefers the country subfolder for Ghana (.com/gh/en) over the .com/us/en and .com/uk/en versions. We have hreflang setup and should also have some local backlinks pointing to the correct subfolders as we switched from many ccTLDs to one gTLD.
What confuses me is that when I check for incoming links (Links to your site) with GWT, the subfolder (.com/gh/en) is listed quite high in the column (Your most linked content). However the listed linking domains are not linking at all to this folder as far as I am aware. If I check them with a redirect checker they all link to different subfolders. So I have now idea why Google gives such high authority to this subfolder over the specific country subfolders. The content is pretty much identical at this stage.
Has any of you experienced similar behaviour and could point me in a promising direction?
Thanks a lot.
Regards,
Jochen
-
Jochen, I can't say I've seen this particular issue, but you are right that it is odd. It sounds like you have everything set up technically correct, but Google WMT is crossing some wires.
I wish I could provide you with more, but I wouldn't know any potential issues without being able to look at your whole setup in GoogleWMT. I recommend having a consultant take a look. Typically, I hate recommending that (because I'm a consultant and that looks shady), but there really is no other way to know if everything is set up right and Google is just on crack, but I think that's it.
-
Thanks Patrick. I do use geo-targeting follow the best practices to the best of my knowledge. I am just very confused by those backlinks that show up in GWT for the wrong subfolder.
Thanks Patrick. I do use geo-targeting follow the best practices to the best of my knowledge. I am just very confused by those backlinks that show up in GWT for the wrong subfolder.
-
Hi there
Have you looked into setting up Webmaster Tools accounts for these specific directories and country targeting them?
I would ask look into these two resources from Moz:
International SEO
The International SEO ChecklistSeer Interactive always has some great tips here.
Also, Bing follows language meta tags, not hreflang, so you need to consider that as well.
Lastly, I would just make sure that you have country/location specific information on your site:
- Titles / meta descriptions
- Navigational elements (if different services/products for location)
- Headings
- Main body information
- Reviews
- Contact information
Just a few things to consider. Hope this all helps! Good luck!
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
-
Should I optimize the login page? Will it affect the website SEO ranking?
I'm trying to resolve the site crawl issues that we have on our website. One of the links that has different issue types together is our login page. Currently we have two login pages that have the same content but different sub domains. **However I'm wondering if optimizing SEO on our login pages affects our website SEO ranking and if it's something better to do or not. ** To point out the details of the issues, the issue types that the logins pages have are "duplicate title", "duplicate content", "missing H1", "missing description", "thin content", "missing canonical tag" I'd appreciate your help, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kaylie0 -
Internal Linking
Hi, I'm doing internal anchor text links. Relative path. if I use /destination-page instead of https://website.com/destination-page will I still receive a transfer of internal Google trust to the destination page? Does google treat just the / url the same as full url??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scotty_Wilson0 -
Desktop vs. Mobile Website - ranking impact
Working on develop mobile pages using dynamic serving method, we are planing on only develop number of important pages (not the whole site) to be mobile friendly. To keep the consistency of the user experience, the new mobile site will only have internal links to pages that are mobile friend. Questions: If an existing non-mobile page ranking #1 on mobile SERP today, this page will not have a mobile friendly version, and will not link in the mobilefriendly site. will there be any impact to the ranking. Assuming: When Google mobile/Smartphone bots will not see a link to this page. The page will still accessible to Google desktop bots.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomchu0 -
Website losing rank positions after https
Hi there.. we were having a good increase in rankings since using Moz and then we purchased an ssl certificate so our website would run under https... to make sure our website is only accessed through https, we have used a method on .htaccess (appache) to make sure the website is only reached through https, using: RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mszeer
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R,QSA] after doing this, from our last crawl perspective, we lost several positions that we were increasing.. what have we done wrong ? we have to fix this asap, please help us...0 -
Redesigned Website
Hi, I have redesigned my website in html whereas it was in .asp earlier. I have resubmitted my google sitemap but it still showing me old site pages in search except home page. My question is how i can immediately change my web presence. How i can get the benefit of my .asp page ranks? In addition my website still alive with .asp. What should be the strategy, should i remove this websites or have to redirect all pages to new. If i make 301 redirection then will it cause any issue in SEO, ranking etc ? Thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 1akal0 -
Want to merge high ranking niche websites into a new mega site, but don't want to lose authority from old top level pages
I have a few older websites that SERP well, and I am considering merging some or all of them into a new related website that I will be launching regardless. My old websites display real estate listings and not much else. Each website is devoted to showing homes for sale in a specific neighborhood. The domains are all in the form of Neighborhood1CityHomes.com, Neighborhood2CityHomes.com, etc. These sites SERP well for searches like "Neighborhood1 City homes for sale" and also "Neighborhood1 City real estate" where some or all of the query is in the domain name. Google simply points to the top of the domain although each site has a few interior pages that are rarely used. There is next to zero backlinking to the old domains, but each links to the other with anchor text like "Neighborhood1 Cityname real estate". That's pretty much the extent of the link profile. The new website will be a more comprehensive search portal where many neighborhoods and cities can be searched. The domain name is a nonsense word .com not related to actual key words. The structure will be like newdomain.com/cityname/neighborhood-name/ where the neighborhood real estate listings are that would replace the old websites, and I'd 301 the old sites to the appropriate internal directories of the new site. The content on the old websites is all on the home page of each, at least the content for searches that matter to me and rank well, and I read an article suggesting that Google assigns additional authority for top level pages (can I link to that here?). I'd be 301-ing each old domain from a top level to a 3rd level interior page like www. newdomain/cityname/neighborhood1/. The new site is better than the old sites by a wide margin, especially on mobile, but I don't want to lose all my top positions for some tough phrases. I'm not running analytics on the old sites in question, but each of the old sites has extensive past history with AdWords (which I don't run any more). So in theory Google knows these old sites are good quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gogogomez0 -
Author rank
Can anyone tellme how to know my author rank. Is better to gain authority on my author rank +dariopropdental And if it is better to gain authority as author or as page +propdental And if a do a new post on my web every day should i place every link to the post on my profile and my page. Doenst it look spammy. Should all post have a link from my profile.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Domains for regional websites
Please take a look at 7city.com This landing page contains links to: www.7city.co.uk www.7city.ae www.7city.com.sg and our US website which is also www.7city.com It is programmed so: If you are a first time user and type www.7city.com you go to the landing page above. If you then click on AMERICAS, it sets a cookie and directs you to http://www.7city.com/home . When you revisit www.7city.com in the future as the cookie is set you will be automatically sent to the AMERICAS website i.e http://www.7city.com/home. Our US websites is nor performing well on organic ranking compared to other regional website. Is the above technique hindering our organic ranking in the US. Also, I have been led to believe that you get a higher ranking if the domain is specific to a country. Is this true? Does 7city.com receive higher ranking than if I created it as 7city.us for example? Many Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markc-1971830