Hi Peter,

Both really good answers to your questions above but maybe it would be good to give you some further pointing in the right direction. Perhaps you could answer the questions below and I can give you my personal opinion on which method would be best:

• will you be putting an equal amount of marketing (content, PR, etc.) into the Spanish version for example compared with English?

• are you able to offer  fully localised service eg, Spanish customer service, Spanish sales team etc.?

• is your company well-known globally?

It's important not to also forget that another option is using ccTLDs (eg, .co.uk, .com.au). These give the highest signal to search engines about the country being targeted and also importantly make you look more "local" which can do wonders for increasing conversion rate in countries where your company is not well-known.

Ciao Emanuele!

If you seem to be experiencing ranking issues, the best way you can see if there is something to worry about or not is by seeing if there have been any drops in organic sessions on analytics. Has there been a drop?

If there is a pattern to the types of keywords which you seem to not be rankng for, you should check in analytics to see if the pages on your site which correspond to the keywords are losing organic traffic or not. Example: keyword A will be most relevant to example.com/page-a

Search results are different for different users, based on location, which version of Google you are using, whether you are signed in to Google not etc. so don't be too concerned unless traffic is also affected.

Additionally, the message in GWTs on 12/6 isn't something to worry about. I have also seen this message for many of the sites I manage and it is really just Google giving some tips such as defining a target country, giving access to other users, creating XML sitemaps etc.

Let us know if you are also experiencing drops in traffic!

Hi Becky,

The main reason I think it would be flagged up would be because the links to each sister site are located in the footer and therefore appear on every page of the websites! Perhaps you have thousands of links in total from each site to the other.

I recently had this same issue come up with one of my clients and we chose to build a separate page, linked to when users can select their country. Check out http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/ to see what I mean. That way there is just one link to each sister site rather than hundreds or thousands.

That should be a relatively simple, quick fix to implement.

Hope that helps

Daniel

Hi Becky,

Even if the links are within a drop down, it's not to say that Google can't crawl them.

Here's a video from Matt Cutts where advises against using cross-domain links in the footer and suggests using a country locator page as per my example from Apple's website - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FJNbVU2ihU0

Dan

Hi Kusanagi17,

If you really badly want to rank for the keyword, there's no need to create that extra page ie, /benefits-of-running-shoes. With your domain name being what it is, it's fine just to use that same keyword in the title of the home page.

With regards to why that page isn't being indexed, yes it's probably to do with Google deeming that there's no need for that page given the domain name, but also the fact that a new site's deeper pages will take time to be indexed. Given that it's a new site I wouldn't worry at all about adding a 301 redirect from the extra page to the home page.

Hope that helps!

Daniel

Hi Joshua,

I think I have the hassle-free solution for you!

If you're asking this question with regards to the site listed on your profile (which is in English), as a first step I would not get into translating your content at all.

The products on your site are relatively high-end which are more suited to the more affluent consumers in India who will commonly be searching in English, rather than Hindi, Urdu or one of the many other languages spoken there. Also, approximately 80% of the population in the UAE are expats (of which many are British or American) so again, no need to translate for the moment.

If you start to see good results in these countries with the English versions, that's the time to think about investing in the local languages. Particularly as it's not just the associated cost of translating the website; you should also have native speaker customer service reps for example.

Use the Google Keyword Planner to see how many searches there are in English in these countries. Testing like this is a crucial part of international SEO so you don't waste money on translation and localization which can be expensive.

My suggestions above are based on the assumption that you will have local domains for each country eg, example.co.in (for India). If you want to target these countries with your main .co.uk domain, start some Google AdWords campaigns (in English) targeted to those countries and see how they go; if it works, then you can look further into the big international SEO question of wheather to use local domains, subdomains or folders to target those countries and languages.

Hope that helps

In Moz Pro, if you go to Search > Keyword Rankings, you'll be able to scroll down to the "Tracked Keywords Overview" section. In the table there is a column named "Universal Results" which will show an image or video icon next to the keyword. Here you can find some more information - https://moz.com/blog/hot-off-the-press-more-universal-results-included-with-your-campaign-rankings.

Hope that helps!