In the U.S., how can I stop the European version of my site from outranking the U.S. version?

[matt-14567]

I've got a site with two versions – a U.S. version and a European version. Users are directed to the appropriate version through a landing page that asks where they're located; both sites are on the same domain, except one is .com/us and the other is .com/eu.

My issue is that for some keywords, the European version is outranking the U.S. version in Google's U.S. SERPs. Not only that, but when Google displays sitelinks in the U.S. SERPs, it's a combination of pages on the European site and the U.S. site.

Does anyone know how I can stop the European site from outranking the U.S. site in the U.S.? Or how I can get Google to only display sitelinks for pages on the U.S. site in the U.S. SERPs? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this topic!

[matt-14567]

Hi Gianluca.

Thanks so much for the detailed explanation! I appreciate your taking the time to provide all that great info.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what to do here. I understand the client made a mistake in launching one site for all of Europe, but I know they'll never pay to build out separate sites for each target country (at least not right now).

At the risk of sounding like an annoying client, what if I was to use the "en-us" hreflang tag on the U.S. site and just "en" on the English version of the European site as a temporary fix? (Then once we launch the translated versions of the European site – in Spanish, French, and Italian – we'd tag them as "es," "fr," and "it.")

Would that help at all with my issue of having the European site outrank the U.S. site in the U.S. SERPs?

Thanks again for taking the time to try to steer me in the right direction. From your answers, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on what we should do in an ideal world. Unfortunately, this situation is not ideal, so I'm looking for a relatively quick band-aid fix... but I'm getting the sinking feeling that there's no such thing.

[gfiorelli1]

Hi  Alan!

yes, I was saying exactly that. If you're going for an international multi-country SEO and you have to deal with countries that share language, like in the case of Ireland and Uk, it is better to target them with two different "sites" (being a site in a ccTld or subfolder or sibdomain, depending on business convenience).

if you're doing multi-cointry SEO and one of your targeted counties has 2+ official languages, then the ideal solution is having a ccTld for that country and creating as many subfolder translated versions as are the official languages of that country.

For instance:

www.domain.be, with the French version appended from the root,

www.domain.be/nl/, with the Flemish translated version.

As alternatives be you can redirect 302 via user agent from domain.com to /fr/ or /nl/, while always letting users to eventually choose the alternate version via language selector.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Gianluca

Thanks for jumping in on this one.  So if I'm reading your answer correctly, the bottom line here that there really should be one site per country, regardless of language spoken, correct?

[gfiorelli1]

Hi Alan and Matt,

I am sorry to tell you that if you set up the hreflang for "Europe" as hreflang="en-GB", that won't work.

That annotation, in fact, tells Google to show the URLs having it only to users searching in English from Great Britain.

It would be better to use only "en" in European website.

Said that, this is not the best solution either, because it is telling Google: "show this to users searching in English globally (but not if they are in the USA).

If the European web site is meant to reach users who not necessarily are using English as default language (eg: Spanish, French, Italians, Germans et al), than a solution could be tagging the European website with the "x-default" hreflang.

Note, though, that this a quite extreme use of the x-default.

The big mistake, anyway, is creating an European website itself:

1. Google does not consider political regions like European Community nor continents and geographical areas like "Asia", "Middle East", "Europe";
2. Because of 1, you cannot geotarget a website but for Political States (Spain, UK, Russia...)
3. To think that not-English speaking users will use English for searching something it is not realistic, therefore it is correct what Matt says in his answer re: translated versions served in whatever format (ccTld, sudomain, subfolder) better fits your business needs.

Finally, personally I would not suggest to a ccTld for targeting European users, because that ccTld would geotarget the site to its country (eg: .es to Spain). Better a generic domain name (.net or even .eu, which is a generic domain name and does not have any geotargeting power), or even a subfolder/subdomain.

Finally, when creating the different country sites, I remind you that in certain countries is spoken the same language. For instance Ireland and UK share English, but they have different currencies, obviously different postal system and phone numbers and, especially, a different culture, so that you should not think in having an European EN version serving all the English speaking countries, but localizing each one of them.

To not talk, and I really end my answer, countries like Switzerland (French, German, Italian and Romance), Spain (Spanish and Catalan), Belgium (French and Flemish), Ukraine (Russian and Ukranian).

[AlanBleiweiss]

Yeah inheriting previous work can be a challenge.

Since you are already planning on rolling out content in different languages, you will have not only the opportunity to set the hreflang tags for each, but also it will be important to ensure all of the content within each section is actually in that section's primary language for consistency. That too will help address the confusion Google has.

[matt-14567]

Thanks, Alan! That's great info. Yes, we do have only one set of content for all of Europe at this point – but we'll be pushing out translated versions in several different languages soon so we will definitely take your advice on the hreflang tags. I wish we had set up separate domains for the U.S. and European sites, but I wasn't involved in that decision unfortunately. Still good to hear your insight on that topic though.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Have you set the different hreflang tags appropriately across your content?

You said "US" and "European" - so does that mean you have just one set of content for all of Europe? If so, that can be more difficult to deal with, however if you set all of the US pages with an hreflang of "en-us" and the European pages with an hreflang of en-gb, you can at least help Google understand "this set is for the U.S. and this set is not".

What I always recommend if you're not targeting individual countries with your content (the "Europe" reference you made says you are not for that content), is to at the very least, split out content to two different domains.  Have a .com domain for US content, and a separate .eu or .co.uk or .de or whatever other domain for your European content.  That, while also setting up hreflang tagging, is really more helpful in communicating what should show up in which search results higher up.

You'll also need to accumulate inbound geo-relevant links to point to the appropriate content set to help reinforce this.

And if you split out domains, you can set country targeting more readily in Google Search Console.

For more info:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

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