Google cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
-
Hi There,
When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
-
Hi,
I thought I would let people know that since we updated the href langs to the below format we are still yet to see the US homepage become visible in Google US and the UK homepage is still ranking
-
Hi Kate,
Thanks for your response I will amend the href lang area as follows:
Just for some background information we originally only had:
Having the above format we still occurred the homepage issue however maybe the removal of will help clear the issue.
Thanks for the feedback, we'll get this live asap and I'll resubmit the the homepages. Another contributing factor is that we do not have href lang site wide.
-
Alright, so this is going to be a long and involved answer.
You are geo-targeting the root domain to the UK, but you also have it double tagged in HREFLANG. One is general English (root domain) and other GB English to the same place. Then you have an x-default pointing to the same place.
Google officially thinks that www.allsaints.com is a general English landing page and are probably ignoring the UK geo-targeting. Due to that, the fact that your root domain homepage is stronger than any other version, and because the content is basically the same, it's seeing what you see as your UK homepage as the root domain homepage without any targeting.
In short, you are sending mixed signals and need to sort that out. This might not all make sense but right now you need to:
- Remove the "en" hreflang tag since you have english variations.
- Remove the x-default hreflang tag since that page is not a place for anyone to land and choose a location/language. (ex. fedex.com)
Doing those two things might help clear up some of the confusion, but I also think you have the wrong international technical strategy. That's a whole other thing. Please DM me if you would like to talk about that, but the above should solve your posted problem.
-
I would attempt to get the US site reindexed by whatever means necessary and then check it.
First, I would add unique content to the US page and fetch again. Also make sure the homepage is in the sitemap - I'm not sure it is.
If you can get the US homepage reindexed, cache should work but I think in this case the cache issue is much smaller. The main issue is that your US homepage has been completely deindexed.
-
Matt,
Thank you for taking the time out to look at this, I very much appreciate that. We have not requested any URL removals for the last six months looking within Google Webmaster Console.
There are no manual spam actions for the site and we checked the https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/change-address?hl=en&siteUrl=www.us.allsaints.com and that hasn't been touched either.
In terms of actions last Friday we changed the meta data for the US, UK, CA, IE domains so they are unique. We also changed the image filenames and alt text as well as some of the copy on the page. After that was done the homepages were submitted to Google index using fetch. I was hoping that those changes would have helped the US appear to be different.
Our other international domain FR, DE, ES, IT are not suffering which lead me to thinking this is a duplicate issue or some how Google is getting confused.
-
Well ... I gave this as thorough a check as I possibly can. Guess what?
It's happening because your www.us.allsaints.com homepage is NOT INDEXED.
- site:fr.allsaints.com (1st result)
- site:es.allsaints.com (1st result)
- site:www.allsaints.com (1st result)
site:www.us.allsaints.com - Nope. You have subpages indexed but not the homepage.
Now, whether that's duplicate content or the massive amount of IP-related spam links to the site is hard to say. But your homepage has been deindexed and because it's not indexed, doesn't show up in the cache.
If you have the site claimed in Search Console, check for penalties. Check that you haven't removed the URL through Google Index > Remove URLs. Check that you haven't done a site move on https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/change-address?hl=en&siteUrl=www.us.allsaints.com
Once the homepage gets indexed, you should be good to go.
-
Hi Matt,
The first red box highlights I am trying to find the cache from www.us.allsaints.com. The second box shows that Google is returning the UK site which is www.allsaints.com and the third box shows our pop up. The pop up is executed when a customer comes online to a one of our sites and we suggest there is a local version which is better for them e.g. If you are from Germany and come to the UK site the pop will come up suggesting going to the Germany site.
In terms of the x-default page would the override the EN-US hreg lang?
-
Hi Kate,
Yes we are geo targeting www.allsaints.com to the UK
I am based in the UK
I used a US proxy using Incognito
Thank you for getting in touch any help would be appreciated
-
The image you posted a link to doesn't say UK anywhere I can see? Google is returning the x-default from your hreflang tags.
Also, from here I see your .com in both the cache and the SERPs. You don't have an Australia language setting so it seems to be working right.
I'm not sure where you're seeing the issue, though. You have three things highlighted in that pic and they are right, right?
-
You're sending a few mixed signals via hreflang. I need to ask a few questions.
- Are you geotargeting www.allsaints.com to the UK?
- Where are you located?
- How did you do the search attached? From what country? Incognito?
-
Moz had a similar caching issue one week ago (/ugc/ content cached instead of /blog/ pages). They posted this question on Webmaster forum - may be the answers can help you find a solution (there was an answer from John Mu as well).
Dirk
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
-
Showing up in Bing and Yahoo, but not Google? - Spa Spot
Spa Spot Edmonton is a Client of ours and while it seems that they are performing very well in Bing and Yahoo search engines, the same can't be said about Google. 9 or 10 keywords are on the 1st page with another 9 or 10 on the second pages of Bing and Yahoo, whereas Google is only ranking 3 keywords and the rest do not show up even in the Top 50. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Web3Marketing870 -
Does including your site in Google News (and Google) Alerts helps with SEO?
Based on the following article http://homebusiness.about.com/od/yourbusinesswebsite/a/google-alerts.htm in order to check if you are included you need to run site:domain.com and click the news search tab. If you are not there then... I ran the test on MOZ and got no results which surprised me. Next step according to :https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en#ts=3179198 is to submit your site for inclusion. Should I? Will it help? P.S.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
This is a followup question to the following: http://moz.com/community/q/what-makes-a-site-appear-in-google-alerts-and-does-it-mean-anything0 -
Baffled why my site is not improving in rankings.
Site shows up in the Map results when ever Google shows them. But for all other organic terms site ranks way back. Have lots of unique content and one page grade of an A. The site is http://alexpadillabailbonds.com The main page is optimized for "sacramento bail bonds" with a Moz grade of A yet its not included in the search results. It was before. Any insight from any one will greatly help. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andreyzolnikov0 -
Google Crawl Rate and Cached version - not updated yet :(
Hi, Ive noticed that Google is not recognizing/crawling the latest changes on pages in my site - last update when viewing Cached version in Google Results is over 2 months ago. So, do I Fetch as Googlebot to force an update? Or do I remove the page's cached version in GWT remove urls? Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Google showing 10 million less links than October
I've received no messages from Google about 'iffy' links whatsoever, and the links they're reporting in Webmaster Toosl have declined by 10 MILLION since October. We did go through a CMS upgrade in December which I believe had some impact, and then I set a preferred domain at the end of last month, but we were bleeding links before then. Any idea what could have happened? We don't engage in any link building schemes whatsoever, and like I mentioned, I've received no messages at all from Google regarding a penalty.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aggie0 -
Site rankings dropped from ~15 to 500+ but Google says we were not penalized
2 months ago my site was ranking about 15 for my main KWs in the UK (my main market). On July 28 we dropped suddenly to ~500 or not in the top 500 at all in the UK for the 3 main keywords. However, these same terms are still ranking in other markets and we are doing okay in the UK for other terms targeted to the same pages. I cleaned up my links/content and sent a reconsideration request to Google. I then looked closer at my links and realized Google may be counting my affiliate links as if they were mine, so thought maybe that was the problem. I sent Google another reconsideration request and they wrote back the letter pasted below Any ideas about what happened or how I can get my rankings back? This definitely doesn't seem like it was just a simple algorithm change. There were no major changes done to our site, and we are still ranking in other markets. Dear site owner or webmaster
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider your site for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.
If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team0 -
My homepage doesn't rank anymore. It's been replaced by irrelevant subpages which rank around 100-200 instead of top 5.
Hey guys, I think I got some kind of penalty for my homepage. I was in top5 for my keywords. Then a few days ago, my homepage stopped ranking for anything except searching for my domain name in Google. sitename.com/widget-reviews/ previously ranked #3 for "widget reviews"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearetribe
but now....
sitename.com/widget-training-for-pet-cats/ is ranking #84 for widget reviews instead. Similarly across all my other keywords, irrelevant, wrong pages are ranking. Did I get some kind of penalty?0 -
Is it good to change an ecommerce site homepage everyday?
my website is www.theprinterdepo.com but now my boss says that it should change everyday, its en ecommerce site, that the products should change everyday, even some times more than day. Is it good for seo? taking into account that google does not crawl all sites every day I suppose.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | levalencia10