[Estimated read time: 25 minutes]
Growth. Revenue, visits, conversions. We all want to see growth. For many, focusing on a new set of potential customers in another market (international, for instance) is a source of growth. It can sometimes seem like an easy expansion. If your current target market is in the US, UK, or Australia, the other two look promising. Same language, same content — all you need is to set up a site for them and target it at them, right?
International expansion is more complicated than that. The ease of expansion depends highly on your business, your resources, and your customers. How you approach expansion and scale it over time takes consideration and planning. Once you’ve gone down a path of URL structure and a process for marketing and content, it’s difficult to change.
This guide is here to help you go down the international expansion path on the web, focused on ensuring your users see the right content for their query in the search engines. This guide isn’t about recommendations for translation tools or how to target a specific country. It is all about international expansion from a technical standpoint that will grow with your business over time.
At the end is a bonus! A flow chart to help you troubleshoot international listings showing up in the wrong place in the SERPs. Have you ever wondered why your Canadian page showed for a user in the US? This will help you figure that out!
Before we begin: Terminology
ccTLD – A country-specific top-level domain. These are assigned by ICANN and are geo-targeted automatically in Google Search Console.
gTLD – A generic top-level domain. These are not country-specific and if used for country-specific content, they must be geo-target inside of Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. Examples include .com, .net, and .tv. Examples from Google found here.
Subdomain – A major section of a domain, distinguished by a change to the characters before the root domain. The most-used standard subdomain is www. Many sites start with www.domain.com as their main subdomain. Subdomains can be used for many reasons: marketing, region targeting, branded micro sites, and more.
Subfolder – A section of a subdomain/domain. Subfolders are sections marked by a trailing slash. Examples include www.domain.com/subfolder, or in terms of this guide, www.domain.com/en or www.domain.ca/fr.
Parameter – A modifier of a URL that either tracks a path of a user to the content or changes the content on the page based on the parameters in the URL. These are often used to indicate the language of a page. An example is www.domain.com/page1?lang=fr, with lang being the parameter.
Country – A recognized country that has a ccTLD by ICANN or an ISO code. Google uses ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 for hreflang.
Region – Collections of countries that the general public groups together based on geography. Examples include the EU or the Middle East. These are not countries and cannot be geo-targeted at this time.
Hreflang – A tag used by Google to allow website owners to indicate that a specific page has a copy in another language. The tags indicate all other translated versions of that page along with the language. The language tags can have regional dialects to distinguish between language differences like British English and American English. These tags can reside on-page or in XML sitemaps.
Meta language – The language-distinguishing tag used by Bing. This tag merely informs Bing of the language of the current page.
Geo-targeting – Both Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console allow website owners to claim a specific domain, subfolder, or subdomain, and inform the search engine that the content in that domain or section is developed for and targeted at the residents of a specific country.
Translation – Changing content from one language or regional dialect to another language or regional dialect. This should never be done with a machine, but rather always performed by someone fluent in that language or regional dialect.
Understanding country and language targeting
The first step in international expansion planning is to determine your target. There is some misunderstanding between country targeting and language targeting. Most businesses start international expansion wanting to do one of two things:
- Target users that speak another language.
Example – A business in Germany: “We should translate our content to French.” - Target users that live in another part of the world.
Example – A business in Australia: “We should expand into the UK.”
False associations: Country and language
The first issue people run into is associating a country and a language. Many of the world’s top languages have root countries that share the same name; specifically, France/French, Germany/German, Portugal/Portuguese, Spain/Spanish, China/Chinese, Japan/Japanese, and Russia/Russian. Many of these languages are used in a number of other countries, however. Below is a list of the top languages used by Internet users.
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Please note this is not the list of top languages in the world; that is a vastly different list. This list is based on Internet usage. And there are some languages that only have one country set as the official language, but users exist in other countries that browse the Internet with that language as their preferred language. An example might be a Japanese national working in the US setting up a new office.
Another note is that the “main” country chosen above is what country is the originator of the language (English) or what country shares a name with/is close to the language name. This is how many people associate languages and countries in most instances, but those assumptions are not correct.
Flags and languages
We must disassociate languages and countries. There are too many times when a country flag is used to note a language change on a site. Flags should only be used when the country is being targeted, not the language.
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Web technology and use impacts targeting
The second issue arises in the execution. The business in Germany from the first few examples might hire a translator from France and translate their content to French. From there, the targeting can get confused based on where that content is placed and how it is tagged.
Below are some implementations of posting the translated content we might see by the business. This table looks at a variety of combinations of ccTLDs, gTLDs, subfolders, subdomains, hreflang tagging, and geo-targeting. Each combination of URL setup and tagging results in different targeting according to search engines and how that can impact the base number of Internet users in that group.
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Given the above, you can see that the implementation is not as straightforward as it might seem. There's no single right answer in the above possible implementations. However, many of them change the focus of the original target market (speakers of the French language) and that has an impact on the base target market.
International search strategy tool
This is what many of us face when trying to do international expansion. There is conflicting data on what should be done. This is why I developed a tool to help businesses determine which route they should take in international expansion. It helps them determine what their real focus should be (language, country, or if they need to use both) and narrows down the list of choices above while understanding their business needs, resources, and user needs. It's developed over the years from a flow chart, to a poorly designed tool, to a better-structured tool found by clicking the link in the image below.
Start with those questions and then come back here when you have other questions. That’s what the rest of this guide is about. It’s broken down into three types of targeting:
- Language
- Country
- Hybrid (multiple countries with multiple languages)
No one type is easier than another. You really need to choose the path early on and use what you know of your business, user needs, and resources.
Language targeting
Language-only targeting can seem like the easiest route to take, as it doesn’t require a major change and multiple instances of marketing plans. Country-focused targeting requires new targeted content to each targeted country. There are far fewer languages in the world than countries. In addition, if you target the major world languages, you could potentially start with a base of millions of users that speak those languages.
However, language targeting involves two very tricky components: translation and language tagging. If either of these components are not done right, it can cause major issues with user experience and indexation.
Translation
The first rule of working with languages and translation is NEVER machine translate. Machine translation is highly inaccurate. I was just at an all-inclusive resort in Mexico, and you could tell the translations were done by a machine, not a person. Using machine translations produces a very poor user experience and poor SEO targeting as well.
Translations of content should always be done by a human who is fluent both in that language and the original language of the content. If you are dealing with regional variations, it is recommended to get someone that is native to and/or living in that area to translate, as well as being fluent.
Spending the right resources on translation will ensure the best user experience and the most organic traffic.
Language tagging: Hreflang and meta language
When you hear about translation and international expansion, the first thing people think about is the hreflang tag. Relative to the Internet, the hreflang tag is new. This launched in late 2010. It is only used by Google as of when this post was written. If the bulk of your traffic comes from Google and you are translating only, this is of use to you. However, do know that Bing uses a different tag format, called the meta language tag.
Tips: Ensure that there's an hreflang tag on every page that's translated to every other translated instance of that page. I prefer the tags be put in XML sitemaps (instructions here) to keep the tagging off the page, as any removal of code increases page load time, no matter how small. Do what works for your team.
What about x-default?
One of the tagging mistakes that happens most often is using x-default. Many people misunderstand its use. X-default was added to the hreflang markup family to help Google serve un-targeted pages, like those from IKEA and FedEx, to users that don’t have language-targeted content on that site or Google doesn’t know where to place them. This tag is not meant to set the "original" page.
Checking for tagging issues
Once you have your tagging live (or on a testing server that is crawlable by Google but not indexable), you can check for issues inside of Google Search Console. This will let you know what tag issues you are having and where they're located.
URL selections
Choosing the URL structure of your language extensions is totally up to you. If you are focusing on language targeting only, don’t use a ccTLD. Those are meant for targeting a specific country, not a language. ccTLDs automatically geo-target and that selection cannot be changed. Your other choices are subfolder, subdomain, and parameter. They're listed below in order of my professional preference and why.
- Subfolders provide a structure that's easier to build upon and develop as your site and business grows and changes. You might not want to target specific countries now or have the resources, but you may someday. Setting up a subfolder structure allows you to use the same structure for any future ccTLDs or subdomains for country sections in the future. Your developers will appreciate this choice because it's scalable for hreflang tags, as well.
- Parameters allow a backup system in case your tagging fails in a site update in the future. Parameters can be defined in Google as being used to modify the language on the page. If your other tags are lost, that parameter setting is still telling Google that the content is being translated.
Using a parameter for language is also scalable for future plans and easy for tagging, like subfolders. The downsides are that they're ugly and might accidentally be negated by a misplaced rel canonical tag in the future. - Subdomains for language targeting is my least favorite option. Only use this if it's the only option you have, by decree of your technical team. Using subdomains for languages means that if you change plans to target countries in the future, you'll lose many options for URLs there. To follow the same structure for each country, you would need to use ccTLDs; while those are the strongest signal for geo-targeting, they are also the option that requires the most investment.
Notice that ccTLDs are not on this list. Those are only for geo-targeting. Unless you're changing your content to focus on a specific country, do not use ccTLDs. I say this multiple times for a reason: too many websites make this mistake.
Detecting languages
Many companies want to try to make the website experience as easy as possible for the user. They attempt to detect the user’s preferences without needing input from the user. This can cause problems with languages.
There are a few ways to try to determine a user’s language preferences. The most-used are browser settings and IP address. It is not recommended to ever use the IP address for language detection. An IP address can show an approximate user location, but not their preferred language. The IP address is also highly inaccurate (just the other day I was "in" North Carolina and live in Austin) and Google still only crawls from a US IP address. Any automatic redirects based on IP should be avoided.
If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice. Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused. Pair this with a good XML sitemap and the user can have a great interaction. Plus, the search engines will be able to crawl and index all of your translated content.
Country targeting, AKA geo-targeting
If your business or content changes depending on the location of the user, country targeting is for you. This is the most common answer for those businesses in retail. If you offer a different set of products, if you have different shipping, pricing, grouping structure, or even different images and descriptions, this is the way to go.
Example: If a greeting card business in the US wanted to expand to Australia, not only are the prices and products different (some different holidays), the Christmas cards are VASTLY different. Think of Christmas in summer, as it is in Australia, and only being able to pick from cards with winter scenes!
Don’t go down the geo-targeting route if your content or offerings don’t change or you don’t have the resources to change the content. If you launch country-targeted content in any URL structure (ccTLD, subdomain, or subfolder) and the content is identical, you run the risk of users coming across another country’s section.
Check out the flow chart at the end to help figure out why one version of your site might be ranking over another.
Example: As a web development service in Canada, you want to expand into the US. Your domain at the moment is www.webdevexpress.ca (totally made up!). You buy www.webdevexpress.us (that’s the ccTLD for the US, by the way). Nothing really needs to change, so you just use the same content and go live. A few months down the road, US clients are still seeing www.webdevexpress.ca when they do a brand name search. The US domain is weaker (fewer links, mentions, etc.) and has the same content! Google is going to show the more relevant, stronger page when everything is the same.
Regions versus countries
Knowing what country or which countries you want to focus on in expansion is usually decided before you determine how to get there. That's what spawns the conversation.
There's one misconception that can throw off the whole process of expansion, and that is that you can target a region with geo-targeting. As of right now, you can purchase a regional top-level domain like .eu, but those are treated as general top-level domains like .com or .net.
The search engines only operate geo-targeting in terms of countries right now. The Middle East and the European Union are collections of countries. If you set up a site dedicated to a region, there are no geo-targeting options for you.
One workaround is to select a primary country in that region, perhaps one in which you have offices, and geo-target to that country. It’s possible to rank for terms in that primary language in surrounding countries. We see this all the time with Canada and the US. If the content is relevant to the searcher, it’s possible to rank no matter the searcher.
Example: If you’re anywhere other than the UK, Google "fancy dress" — you see UK sites, right? At least in the US, "fancy dress" is not a term we use, so the most relevant content is shown. I can’t think of a good Canadian/US term, but I guarantee there are some out there!
URL selections
The first thing to determine in geo-targeting beyond the target countries is URL structure. This is immensely important because once you choose a structure, every country expansion should follow that. Changing URL structure in the future is difficult and costly when it comes to short-term organic traffic.
In order of my professional preference, your choices are:
- Subfolders. As with the language/translation option, this is my preferred setup, as it utilizes the same domain and subdomain across the board. This translates to utilizing some of the power you already built with other country-focused areas (or the initial site). This setup works well for adding different translations within one country (hybrid approach) down the line.
Note: If you go with subfolders on both, always lead with the country, then language down the line.
Example: www.domain.com/us/es (US-focused, in Spanish language) or www.domain.com/ca/fr (Canada-focused, in Canadian French). - ccTLDs. This is the strongest signal that you're focusing your content on a specific country. They geo-target automatically (one less step!), but that has a downside as well. If you started with a ccTLD and expanded later, you can’t geo-target a subfolder within a ccTLD at this point in time.
Example: www.domain.ca/us will not work to target the US. The target will remain Canada. It might rank in the US, depending on the term competition and relevance, but you can’t technically geo-target the /us subfolder within the Canadian ccTLD. - Subdomains. My last choice, because while you're still on the same root domain, there's that old SEO part of me that thinks a subdomain loses some equity from the main domain. BUT, if your tech team prefers this, there's nothing wrong with using a subdomain to geo-target. You'll need to claim each subdomain in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and set the geo-target for each, just as you would with subfolders.
Example: gb.domain.com
Content changes
The biggest question asked when someone embarks on country-targeting expansion is: “How much does my content need to change to not be duplicated?” In short — there is no magic number. No metric. There isn’t a number of sentences or a percentage. How much your content needs to change per country site or subsite is entirely up to your target market and your business.
You'll need to do research into your new target market to determine how your content should change to meet their needs. There are a number of ways you might change your content to target a new country. The most common are:
Product differentiation
If you offer a different set of products or services to different countries by removing those that are not in demand, outlawed, or otherwise not wanted, or by adding new products for that country specifically, that is changing your site content.
Example #1: Amazon sells the movie "Elf" in the US and the UK, but they are different products. DVDs in Europe are coded for Europe and might not play on US players.
Example #2: Imagine you're a drugstore in the UK and want to expand to the US. One of your products, 2.5% Selenium Sulphide, is not approved for use in the US. This is one among hundreds or thousands of products that are different.
Naming schema
The meaning of product names can change in different countries. How a specific region terms a product or service can change as well, making it necessary to change your product or service naming schema.
Keyword usage
Like the above, the words you use to describe your products or services might change in a new country. This can look like translation, but if it’s the change of just a few terms, it’s not considered full translation. There's a fine line between these two things. If you realize that the only thing you're changing is the wording between US and UK English, for example, you might not need to geo-target at all and mark the different pages as translations.
Keyword use change example: "Mum" versus "Mom" or "Mother" when it comes to Happy Mother’s Day cards. You need to offer different cards in this and other categories because of the country change. This is more than a word change, so it’s a case of geo-targeting — not just translation.
Translation change example: Etsy.com. Down at the bottom of the page, you can change your language setting. I set mine to UK English, and words like "favourite" started to show up. If this sounds like what you would need to do and your content would not change otherwise (Etsy shows all content to all users regardless of their location), consider translation only.
Pricing structure
Many times, one of the most common things that change in country-specific content is pricing. There's the issue of different currency, but more than that, different countries have different supply and demand markets that should and will change your pricing structure.
Imagery changes
When dealing with different cultures, sometimes you find the need to change your site imagery. If you’ve never explored psychology, I highly recommend checking out The Web Psychologist – Nathalie Nahai and some of her talks. Understanding your new target market’s culture is imperative to marketing effectively.
Example: Samsung changes the images on their UK versus China sites to change the focus from an individualistic to a collectivistic culture. See my presentation at SearchLove San Diego for more examples.
Laws, rules, and regulations
One of the most important ways to change your content is to satisfy the local laws and regulations. This is going to depend on each business. You might deal with tons, while others might deal with none. Check out local competitors — the biggest you can identify — to see what you might need to do.
Example: If you move into the UK and set cookies on your visitor’s machine, you have to alert them to the use of cookies. This is not a law in the US and is easily missed.
User experience and IP redirects
When people start moving into other countries, one of the things they want to ensure is that users get to the right content. This is especially important when products change and the purchase of an incorrect product would cause issues for the user, or the product isn’t available to them. Your customer service, user experience, or legal team is going to ask that you redirect users to the correct country. Everyone gets to the right place and the headaches lessen.
There isn’t anything wrong with asking a user to select the country they reside in and set a cookie, but many people don’t want to bother their users. Therefore, they detect the user’s IP address and then force a redirect from there. There are two problems with this setup.
- IP addresses are inaccurate – I was in Seattle, WA once and my IP had me in Washington, DC. No kidding. Look at that distance on a map. Think about that distance in terms of Europe and how much might change there.
- Google crawls from California – For the time being, using an IP-based forced redirect will ensure your international content is not indexed. Google will only ever see the US content if you do a forced redirect.
You can deal with this by detecting the country-using IP address (or if organic traffic, what version of Google they came from) and using a JavaScript popup to ask what their preferred country is, then set a cookie with that preference. Even if the user clicks on another country’s content in the future, they will be redirected to their own.
No hreflang??
If you went through that tool, you noticed that my geo-targeting plan does not include hreflang. Many other people disagree with me on this point, saying that the more signals you can send, the better.
Before I get into why I don’t recommend setting up hreflang between country targeted sub-sites, let me make one thing clear. Setting up hreflang will not hurt your site if you are really focusing on country targeting and it’s not that intricate of a setup yet (more on that later). Let’s say you're in Canada and want to open a US-targeted site. Your content changes because your products change, your prices change, your shipping info changes. You create domain.com/us and geo-target it to the US. You can add hreflang between each page that is the same between the two sub-sites — two products that exist in both locations, for example. The hreflang will not hurt.
Example: If you don’t have the resources to change your content at the moment to fully target the UK, only translate your content a bit between your US (domain.com) and UK (domain.co.uk), and have plans to change your content down the road, an hreflang tag between those two ccTLDs can help Google understand the content change and who you're targeting.
Why I don’t recommend hreflang for geo-targeting only
Hreflang was meant to help Google understand when two pages are exactly the same, but translated. It works much like a canonical tag (which is why using another canonical can be detrimental to the hreflang working) in which you have multiple versions of one page with slight changes.
Many people get confused because there's the ability to use country codes in the hreflang tags. This is for when you need to tell Google of a dialect change. An example would be if you have two sub-sites that are identical, but the American English has been changed to British English. It's not meant to inform Google that content that's targeted at a different country is targeted at that country.
When I recommend geo-targeting only, I make it very clear to clients that going down this route means you really need to change the content. International business is so much more than just translation. Translating content only might hurt your conversion rates if you miss some aspect of the new target market.
Hiring content writers in that country that understand the nuances is very important. I worked for a British company for 4 years, so I get some of the differences, but things continually surprise me still. I would never feel comfortable as an American writing content for a British audience.
I also don’t recommend hreflang in most geo-targeting cases, because the use of geo-targeting and hreflang can get really confusing. This has led to incorrect hreflang tags in the past that have wreaked havoc on Google's understanding of the site structure.
Example: A business starts off with a Canadian domain (domain.ca) and a France domain (domain.fr). They use hreflang between the English for Canada and French for France using the code below. They then add a US site and the code is modified to add a line for the US content.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://domain.ca/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://domain.fr/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="https://domain.com/" />
This looks odd because there is one English-language page with no regional modifications that is on a Canadian-targeted domain. There is a US regional English dialect version on a general top-level domain (as .com is general and is not US-specific, but people use it that way).
Remember, this is a bot that's trying to logic out a structure. For a user that prefers UK English, there is no logical choice. The general English is a Canadian site and the general TLD is in US English. This is where we get some of the inconsistencies with international targeting.
You might be saying things like “That would never happen!” and “They should have changed the first English to Canadian English (en-ca)!”, but if you've ever dealt with hurried developers (they really do have at least 50 requests at once sometimes) you'll know that they, like search bots, prefer consistency.
Hreflang should not be needed in geo-targeting cases because, if you're really going to target a new country-specific market, you should treat them as a whole new market and create content just for them. If you can’t, or don’t think it’s needed, then providing language translations is probably all you need to do at the moment. And hreflang in geo-targeting cases can cause confusion with code that might confuse the search engines. The less we can confuse them, the better the results are!
Hybrid targeting
Finally, there is the route I call "hybrid," or utilizing both geo-targeting and translation. This is what most major retail corporations should be doing if they're international. Due to laws, currency, market changes, and cultural changes, there is a big need for geo-targeted content. But in addition to that, there are countries that require multiple language versions. There might be anywhere from one to a few hundred used languages in a single country! Here are the top countries that use the web and how many recognized languages are used in each.
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Do you need to translate into all 31 languages used in the US? Probably not. But if 50% of your target market in Canada prefers Canadian French as their primary language, the translation investment might be a good one.
In cases where a geo-targeted site (ccTLD use) or sub-site (subdomain or subfolder) needs more than one language, then there is the need to geo-target the site or sub-site and then use hreflang within that country-specific site.
This statement can be confusing, so let me show you what I mean:
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This requires a good amount of planning and resources, so if you need to embark on this path in the future, start setting up the structure now. If you need to go the hybrid route, I recommend the following URL structures for language and country targeting. As with before, these are in order of my professional preference and are all focused on content targeted to Canada in Canadian French.
(Country structure/Language structure)
- Subfolder/Subfolder
Example: domain.com/ca/fr - Subfolder/Parameter
Example: domain.com/ca/page.html?lang=fr - ccTLD/Subfolder
Example: domain.ca/fr - ccTLD/Parameter
Example: domain.ca/page.html?lang=fr - Subdomain/Subfolder
Example: ca.domain.com/fr - Subdomain/Parameter
Example: ca.domain.com/page.html?lang=fr - ccTLD/Subdomain (not recommended, nor are the other combinations I intentionally left out)
Example: fr.domain.ca
The hybrid option is where the hreflang setup can get the most messed up. Make sure you have mapped everything out before implementing, and ensure you're considering future business plans as well.
I hope this helps clear up some of the confusion around international expansion. It really is specific to each individual business, so take the time to plan and happy expansion!
Troubleshooting International SEO: A flowchart
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This is a refreshing approach to an old topic and you summed it up quite well, Kate.
The technical standpoint in international SEO is often overlooked and poor decisions are made, such as using automated WordPress translation plugins or machine translation where it’s not appropriate to do so. It really reflects poorly on the brand. Do it right and reap the benefits.
From a practical standpoint, if a U.S.-based company is looking to expand into a new market, they don’t necessarily have to look outside of the country. The U.S.-based Spanish speaking population is huge and underserved (see Pew Research Center). It's time to capture some of that market.
A good way to implement some of the concepts you describe would be to have English and Spanish versions of the website focused on the U.S. market.
Hi Kate,
The thing I would consider the most important is local keyword research. Translated keywords do not work. We have found with one particular client that in the Top 10 keywords in the US and in the UK there was only one keyword overlapping. I would consider keyword research the most important thing to do when entering a new market.
I also tallied up the search volume for a set of US keywords and compared how the translated versions of those keywords matched up to locally researched versions of the keywords and while the statistics varied from country to country, we found that you can lose 90% of your potential search volume by not doing the keyword research.
Regarding hreflang, there is a time and a place but if your client has 10 English language pages, all with the same products (and descriptions) but you need to use separate pages due to currency, pricing, delivery options, then hreflang works really well.
Thanks
Hi Kate,
Overall a very good post, because you point out and answer to some of the most frequently asked questions we see about International SEO.
However, I think it is right to explain why “many International SEOs” (me included) says that it is a best practice using the hreflang annotation whenever possible, even if in that “whenever” we should understand that there are some exceptions where hreflang can be avoided.
First of all, and this also a curiosity I have, I don’t understand from where you conclude saying that the ISO combination “en-CA”, for instance, is not for geo-targeting, but only to explicit only "dialect variations"?
My experience and my understanding is telling me that with rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-CA” href=”URL”, we are telling Google this:
“Dear Google, show this URL to users speaking English and searching from this country”, and not only “this URL is in this local CA variant of the en language”.
If it wasn't so, why there are many "UK" versions so visible in Ukraine, simply because they use "en-UK" instead of "en-GB" in the hreflang :-)?
Moreover, we can use the hreflang annotation also for suggesting to Google to show a URL in a language that is not the or one of the official languages of a country to users searching from that same country.
Example: Netflix offers also English versions in every country market it is present.
Why? Quite surely the answer or answers must be searched in some of the International SEO issue you yourself describe in this post, like legislation (Netflix redirects based on IP first, also because TV rights are strongly country-based).
Another example: a rent-a-car website may consider to have an “international” English version in its Spanish website, so to target foreign tourists searching rent-a-car information/deals while being already in Spain. Why not sending them to a generic English website or a Great Britain or USA targeting one?
Again, because of legislation, possibly. And because those sites have a different meaning and specific geo-targeting which is not covering the needs (eg: different currencies) of a more global audience.
Another reason why I, and others, suggest using the hreflang annotation is given by experiencing how buggy still is Google in delivering the best geo-targeted results in its local Google SERPs.
As I briefly told in my answer to the Carlos’ comment here, it is not so strange seeing .es websites outranking Mexican targeting ones in Google.com.mx, something that should not happen because a .es domain clearly should target “only” Google.es and surely should not outrank .com.mx and .mx ccTlds.
This is a common issue that Google still has not fully solve, and that is affecting substantially every country sharing the “official” language with others (ask Canadians about USA sites outranking them, or Irish about British ones).
Therefore, using the hreflang will surely be of help for better dealing also with this kind of problem if we have a multi-country website or strategy.
A third reason why it is good using hreflang is related to versions targeting different languages and/or countries as, for instance, UK, Germany and Italy.
In this case, I agree that using the hreflang in every URL of those versions can be redundant, but it is not so if we consider their homepages and every URL, which is strongly relying on brand searches or branded searches.
In fact, in case of brand searches, it is still quite common seeing the strongest version of a site outranking the regional or others languages ones, even if all the versions have been correctly geo-targeted via Google Search Console or even if we are using ccTlds for those versions.
In this case the hreflang annotation is of help, because is telling Google to show only the regional version of the site to users using the regional language in that country. And doing so we avoid traffic dispersion and loss of potential conversions.
However, I cannot but remark – as you do – that reducing International SEO only to hreflang is very myopic :-)
Hey man, I figured you'd comment. As mentioned in the post, I don't typically recommend the use of hreflang in all cases, but do concede it can help. However, it's like using rel next and prev and a canonical on paginated blog archives to me. It can help, but unnecessary. Sadly, people are so confused about all of this and afraid to test things, that I think Google is allowing the hreflang to influence some signals as that is how some webmasters use it. But that wasn't how the markup was intended. How people expand their sites internationally is typically not user friendly and webmasters sometimes use all the technical shortcuts they can, and that is what I am kind of campaigning to stop.
Now to your questions:
First, I don't get this one. "If it wasn't so, why there are many "UK" versions so visible in Ukraine, simply because they use "en-UK" instead of "en-GB" in the hreflang :-)?/" Please explain.
In the Netflix example, I am a huge fan of using hreflang within specifically targeted country sites/sections.
I am not following the rental car example either, I'm sorry. In that instance, if the Spain based rental car company wanted to have an overall English section, that's totally possible. In their case, I'd recommend one site on a general TLD. Since they are selling to people searching from all over the world, geo-targeting isn't necessary. Rather, they would offer their main content in Spanish, and then translations to the other major languages and use hreflang between.
I agree with you that Google is still buggy, which is why I never say don't use hreflang, but that I don't think it's required in every case.
In your example: " it is not so strange seeing .es websites outranking Mexican targeting ones in Google.com.mx, something that should not happen because a .es domain clearly should target “only” Google.es and surely should not outrank .com.mx and .mx ccTlds."
I get your point there, but relevance and strength still dominate any tagging or geo-targeting settings. If a .es domain's content works best and is relevant, if I were Google, I'd show that above .mx as well. This is why this guide. The focus needs to be first on creating the content to the market in question and then marketing it up as needed. But it's still up to Google to determine the best results in each query given what is in their index.
I don't think we disagree as much as we think. There are instances where I think Google is still jacked on their interpretation of signals, but I really do think that is partly our fault as SEOs. Google has also been very nad in the past with their technical writeups of this topic. Alas, if you leave something like this to a tech writer that doesn't know the topic, you can't expect much.
Have a great day!
First, I don't get this one. "If it wasn't so, why there are many "UK" versions so visible in Ukraine, simply because they use "en-UK" instead of "en-GB" in the hreflang :-)?/" Please explain.
"UK" is the ISO code for Ukraine, therefore using hreflang="en-UK" is not only wrong for targeting Great Britain (ISO code being GB), but it is also telling to Google: "Show this URL to users using English in Ukraine". And that's why there can be many English speaking site meant to target GB very well doing in Ukraine by mistake :-).
Cannot answer properly to your others questions right now (must do finish a work I'm doing), so I'll edit later this comment adding my others comments/answers.
I look forward to it!
Gianluca, the ISO Code for Ukraine (region) is UA. There is a "uk" language code for ukraine. See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_co...
Hello, Kate,
Highly informative, Its always been confusing of using lang tag while targeting different location. Procedure and Information you provide is somehow the complete guide for International SEO. I suggest use Analytics, identify your visitors from every country, check languages they spoke, according to that plan your international seo strategies. Keyword analysis also plays major role while targeting international audience. You have clearly describe the most of the questions like, ccTLD, gTLD, subdomain etc... Device specific international seo case studies would be wonderful. Thank you for this.
Great post Kate, thanks! Lots to think about as I manage Australian and NZ sites. Just one thing... I hate to be that nitpicking person, but I can't help pointing out that .tv is a ccTLD (for the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu)
Oh man, that is my mistake. I'll get someone to edit that. Thanks for catching!
This was really interesting, thanks!
I work in house at a global and am currently starting a project in which we are turning off our US and several European ccTLD sites and bringing everything under our .com which currently targets the UK. Our aim is to not lose too much visibility short and long term on country specific versions of Google. What we are working with is directly translated pages that will need to target specific European countries as well as US versions which are English but with imperial measurements on specification pages.
I had an idea of what to do as I have done some smaller scale work before but this time I am limited to using subfolder URL structure to achieve the goal. This article has given me a lot of pointers and should make things run a lot more smoothly, thanks!
Oh man, that's a larger undertaking. Good luck with it and let me know if I can help!
My tips on international SEO include adopting digital-first model, tailoring your offer to local consumers, and using marketplaces and moving fast.
Just what I was looking for! thank you very much for all this information, I will be very useful
Good to learn about targeting international audience and making a global website.
Hi Kate,
what is the impact in revenue when you skip this important seo step? Can you share some experiences ( before and after the implementation)?
kind regards,
Jeroen Stikkelorum
Hi Jeroen,
I am not sure what you mean. I cannot put numbers to anything without looking into your specific case. Your site, industry, set up, etc. You could be leaving revenue on the table, but there is no way to know how much or even if you are. Apologies, but you would need a professional analysis to determine that.
A very interesting post, Kate Moris!!! #GoGlobal
Hi Kate,
Thanks for the lovely post. I am working with an ecommerce & would like to understand the international targeting. I hope creating sub-directories is the most efficient way to do this for us but when I look back at our competitors they are not doing it. How complex is this? What do you recommend? How about targeting a single property & have it work internationally?
Appreciate your feedback.
Thanks,
Don't trust what your competitors are doing is best. You never know what they have to deal with in terms of technical talent and actual technology setup.
If you'll check out the tool linked to within the article, it points you to a tool to identify how to best set up your international expansion. From there, working with a qualified developer and a great international team is best.
Best of luck!
Thanks for the note Kate...I'll check the tool to see the potential opportunities.
Katie - My site just runs too slow in China, so I am going to host a version of it there locally and change the ccTLD to XYZ.cn. Same everything, just .cn. Don't worry, I have people there to handle the legwork. Am I really going to run into significant issues with Google if I don't include any of these indicators? - THANKS
I don't think so. The content, if it is exactly the same as any other content out there might not perform as well in Google, but that's the extent. Just having the .cn will geo-target that content and I'd hope that you'd change it a bit since it is China. There are so wide differences in culture and language, so I assume you'll change something. It's hard to say without a site to check out though.
And something else to think about, all you'll really care about in China is Baidu ... so do you really care?? You do but you don't. It's like focusing on Bing in the US. You care, but not as much as Google.
Great Article! This guide is really informative and useful.
sometimes i have confused with my site jasa pengiriman barang, the href always show error on google wmt
[Link removed by editor.]
Hi Kate,
in these weeks I am facing the problem of geotargeting for my site and this post is exactly what I need. Thanks.
It states that the topic for my business is vital because sales are heavily dependent on my presence on the Internet.
my simple doubts:
can a ccTLD domain have a good international ranking or not?
can a ccTLD (example .it in my case ) in English have a good ranking also in google.com?
and if I want default language in english is this not possible to have with a .it domain?
Example:
www.mysite.it in english
www.mysite.it/it in italian
www.mysite.it/es in spanish
does this work or it's something dangerous?
confused
marco
asp.net has Localization which can switch your web localize depend on location automaticaly
Great tips!
I like the fact that you talk about translation and culture. When translating a website, focusing on words and SEO isn't enough. Adapting your website to a different culture is crucial, and I've seen so many websites out there very badly translated, or people installing a google translate plugin thinking that that's enough. Wrong.
We communicate very different in different languages and we may not even have the same objective or offer exactly the same services in the new target that we want to target. This remind me of one of my blog posts: https://circalingua.com/your-success-depends-on-you...
Business should be aware that hiring a linguist strategist or a professional translator is crucial when we aim at having a multilingual website.
Thanks for all the information!
That's a great post. When translating the website to another country it is also important to research local keywords and to have the cultural factor in mind. Transcreation agencies can help on this matter.
Hi Kate,
you got me more than just a little confused with your second table, specifically the statement that germanybusiness.de/fr with hreflang would only target French-speaking searchers in Germany.
No argument about a ccTLD being primarily targeted for that country. However, does it really work to the exclusion of other countries? And should it? My intuition would be "no" and my opinion would also be "no".
If you are a big company and wand brand domains, it might sometimes be easy to get "all" ccTLDs for the targeted countries. However, oftentimes you cannot get them or are too small; sometimes the gTLDs are in use already. What you seem to be saying is that I could/should not ever target anything internationally with, say, www.brandname.de/en/ www.brandname.de/fr/ etc? That would seem very strange to me. User signal and familiarity with domain-ending aside, what exactly should prevent the proper targeting with hreflang here? If domain endings really mean, "show this in the country the TLD belongs to", I am quite surprised. If it merely your opinion that this should be the case, I disagree.
Let's just look at one example- I am not affiliated with this page in any way, it was just the first I found that uses a ccTLD and subfolders for targeting other languages: https://www.bike-components.de/. They do use subdirectories for /en/ /fr/ and quite some more. They also use hreflang for (language!) targeting. With the logic from the table, they should never be visible outside of Germany due to the .de domain though. It does, though (tried with Austin, English, Desktop via Google.com - the English version does appear) and that is exactly what I would expect. In fact, I'd be startled if it didn't and I think the people behind that site would be as well when they get 0 traffic.
To me a ".de/{cc}/" with hreflang mostly denotes that the company/website is originally based in Germany, not that they should never be shown outside that country. Am I reading you wrong somehow?
Regards
Nico
hey Nico,
I wouldnt obsess too much about the general rules... as a rule of thumb and following best practice if you plan your company SEO strategy properly and from day 1, you would go for a TLD that you could then structure for geotargetting using subdirectories. Once your company would be established and get more serious about investing in international markets you could migrate your sites onto ccTLDs. Or you could get started with ccTLDs if you had a lot of marketing resource from day 1.
However, now to answer your question, it is indeed possible to use ccTLDs to tackle geotargetting of other regions via subfolders. In other words bike-components.de could use /fr to target french audiences in and outside Germany, or they could well simply use /fr to geotarget it to France if they want to. Google is not going to penalise you for having near to accurate technical geotargetting, so long as you demonstrate via other signals the intent of your geotargetting.
Kate has provided a kind of blueprint, but it's in no way 100% complete because there are so many different scenarios that could break the general rule.
I think the vernacular will help here. What I meant really is "targeting" - not where Google might show the content. hreflang, geo-targeting and all technical things you can do are merely suggestions to Google. They will always show whatever is the most relevant.
I said in another comment, above, that the content changes and marketing changes for targeting are the often missed parts of international targeting. That is what makes all the difference. But this guide explains what the technical signals are saying to Google. Whether or not Google wants to believe those signals is up to them sadly.
I would never say never to targeting using a ccTLD, but you are telling Google that you are a German company targeting Germany. Also, in the case of domain.de/en and domain.de/fr, you should use hreflang if all you are doing is targeting. We do not disagree there, so I am thinking I am missing what you mean in your example.
However, your content can still show elsewhere. Relevance and strength are still more important than signals. That is why a .de with language translations can show in another country. However, all else being equal (strength of page, relevance of content), for a query from a user in France that has results with a .de domain, a .com, and .fr, I would expect the .fr, .com and then the .de to rank. However, pages are never equal and relevance to the user is never the same, so SERPs will always fluctuate.
Hi Kate, thanks for sharing this.
I dealt in the past with ccTLDs with English language targeting countries like Australia, Singapore, Emirates and Canada.
Main language was english, and all websites had unique content, but we saw a real improvement in targeting only after putting the hreflang tag in the HP of these websites.
Before hreflang tag, we saw that some SG results were appearing in Canada, or some AU results were appearing in SG and so on.
After the tag implementation, the problem was solved.
My suggestion then is to implement hreflang tag anyway, where possible. It's not gonna hurt anyway, and it might help on having the right targeting in less time.
thanks again for sharing! rock on!
Sadly, there are a few instances where this has been true, but I've also seen a few others where the wrong hreflang has caused so much confusion that it was hurting a site. This is why I leave it up to the reader and their specific instance. Blanket statements help no one as I've learned the hard way many times.
Hello Alessio ,
When you are using ccTLDs which clearly sends strong signals to Google regarding the best version to show for its particular targeted audience. However, you have faced such instance and it's considered in very few instances. According to me if you have the same content for all the different country targeting ccTLDs then I will also suggest implementing HREFlang tags.
@Kate - I have recently attended the Mozinar on Internation SEO myths by Kaitlin McMichael (https://moz.com/webinars/top-myths-about-international-seo). It was really a great experience attending such insightful webinar, she explained many things. However, your post is also a value addition to this webinar and easy to understand the importance of HREFlang tags.
I have worked on many international SEO projects and I majorly come across "No Return Tag" error which usually shows up for 404 pages and for redirected pages which are not indexed by Google. Once you fix 404 errors and once all the newly redirected pages will get indexed then all your no return tag errors will get resolved.
I would also like to share few important things which you should consider while implementing HREFlang tags to avoid errors:
Please share your views on it and also there are any other errors or issues which you have noticed related to HREFlang tags.
Thanks!
Awesome post Kate, thanks for sharing!
I have an international client that is situated in the US and UK and has two separate sites that have duplicate content. To avoid any issues, we set up the hreflang tags as recommended. However, we did it on a page level and it was getting complicated for the developers as the websites (US & UK) had different parameters. Because of this we are removing the page level tags and updating the XML sitemaps instead.
You had said that "I prefer the tags be put in XML sitemaps (instructions here) to keep the tagging off the page, as any removal of code increases page load time, no matter how small." - is the removal of code that we are doing (removing the hreflang tags) going to affect page load time?
I think Kate was meaning "as any removal of code improves page load time..." :-)
Minorly. It's not much code, but in my world, the less code on the page, the better. :)
Great comprehensive post Kate. Some really useful and helpful stuff. Please could you (or anyone else) spare a minute or two to point out any flaws, duplicate content issues, and potential penalties with the following example scenario:
Example: My-site sells specialist and standardized clocks to the Canadian market. I want to start selling into the Australian market using a ccTLD (mysite.ca to mysite.au). The site structure, content and layout would all remain the same. The only things that would change are the location address, phone number, and currency on the products. I would use hreflang au. I may also write the odd blog post that specifically targets an Australian audience.
Please provide me with some feedback. Thanks in advance.
In your case the hreflang would make that difference and help Google targeting better one version for the USA market and the other for Australian one, and avoid the risk of duplicated content filtering.
Thanks Gianluca. I was hoping that would be the case.
If you aren't changing the content at all, not a different product set, etc, using hreflang could help get the point across. Using ccTLDs is already geo-targeting so you're good there.
In your case though, that's perhaps not the best way to go in the future. If you see your product sets changing and expansion is coming to other countries, it might be. But for now, the ccTLD usage might be overkill. For now, you should be fine, but come back and review this if you decide to enter more markets.
Thanks Kate. Very helpful.
Very interesting post Kate. Thanks!
there are so many language differences!. One small advice having targeted both US and UK customers is to adapt the language based on the potential interest of a service or product. Both audiences may be interested equally in a product, then I´d suggest to use keywords that apply to both realities in a product description (ie: holiday / vacation) but if a product or service may interest more one of the audiences for whatever reason (in travel sector this is sometimes clear depending on the detination) then there should be adaptation. This requires research on what interest a given audience.
Very beautiful tutorial about international website expansion. You explained it very well and very understandable. As I am working as part of a website for Professional resume writing service this tutorial helped me a lot. We hear it over and over again from businesses of all sizes: finding and attracting new customers is one of the biggest marketing challenges they face. The good news is that a world of potential customers is out there, just waiting to buy what you’re selling. Thank you so much for sharing this useful information. And I wish all the success for your project.
Hey Kate,
Great article as always!
I would be grateful if you could help me for below written query.
We offer a business platform service. Now we're planning to go in international market.
What is the best strategy here?
I'm fine with hreflang, content translation and subfolder.
1] Based on Language:
www.example.com/en [English]
www.example.com/sv [Swedish]
www.example.com/da [Danish]
Does it help me to get ranking in English speaking countries like US, UK, CA, NZ?
2] Based on Country:
www.example.com/uk [UK]
www.example.com/se [Sweden]
www.example.com/dk [Denmark]
Can I use same English content for all English speaking countries liek US, UK, CA, NZ?
Can someone please advice me?
Thanks
Fal
Hi Fal, Sadly, I don't know your market well enough to know if you need to have just one English area, or if your market is picky enough to need regional dialects. Keyword research can help. Find the countries you want to target and identify what the top keywords are in each area. Are there keyword variations between the US, UK, CA, and NZ? Are those variations known language variations? If so, then yes. If not, just one English area should be fine.
Fal,
I personally wouldn't advice using language geotargetting for Sweden or Denmark... where else do people speak Swedish other than Sweden....? same goes for Denmark, unless you plan to penetrate into Greenland where Danish is one of the languages (not official). I would just keep it simple and go for the 2nd set up based on country. I assume the main site is in the US or AU.
For your 2nd question, Kate has provided the perfect answer IMO....it sounds a bit ominous to attempt to reuse exactly the same content in EN for those 4 countries, particularly if your domain geotargetting option will be subdirectories. If it's cctlds, you'd be more on the safe side but then you need more money for local marketing, local market branding etc... you need a strategy that considers variations in your product terminology and semantics in each of those countries, and a subsequent application for your site content. Good luck!
Excellent article on international seo. For me, it's so much easier to accomplish the technical component than the subtle content piece. For instance, established language differences between UK and American English could be fairly easily looked up, but the nuances between types of ideas that would appeal to each culture through writing or imagery can be challenging to distinguish. Luckily, most of the international sites that I have worked on have been industrial businesses, so there hasn't been much crossover there.
Hey Cynthia!
Thanks for the read. I agree that the technical is easier, but just the technical changes without actually marketing to the target market and changing the content is where people mess up. This is where the weird results usually come in. Technical isn't everything, it's merely the structure.
Hi Kate,
Great post... just a quick point, in your last flowchart diagram, in the bottom righthand green box should the URL be > domain.com/ca/fr rather than domain.com/ca/en ?
Many thanks,
Andy
You are correct! I'll get that fixed as well. Thank you!
Real value here Kate :) Thank you for this exceptional article/guide/reference material.
Hi Kate,
thanks for taking the time to put this great guide together. It’s a good reminder of best practice to international technical SEO
Just a suggestion for your 2nd table top-down :
https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/56f18cc756dad1.57447378.jpg
I think it can get more complex than that if we are talking about large enterprises where often technical changes at large scale can be challenged by the technical teams who many ask for easier to implement alternatives.
For example, you could expand the table by adding lang and country geotargetting via subfolder without using a ccTLDs. I mean in your germanybusiness example it would be germanybusiness.com/fr-BE/ for French in Belgium + germanybusiness.com/en-BE/ for English in Belgium or germanybusiness.com//nl-BE/ for Flemish in Belgium.... those could work well without the need to use HREFlang, simply to add language structure to the taxonomy and then geotargetting via S. Console…. if each subdirectory targets a different language within a country other than the top level country, and if the content has been translated properly, there is often no need for the hreflang annotation in this case, which is harder to implement.
Also I agree with the point you make above about that relevance and strength still dominate any tagging or geo-targeting settings. No one is going to convince Google to use the local version (eg: Argentinian version) of a key page if the top level Castilian page has way more authority, page-level relevancy and overall better content. This is an ongoing problem but I can see why Google often favours non localised, but global versions of a page in detriment of a localised one despite having ticked all boxes with technical geotargetting tagging.
thanks again for the guide! It was great read
You're right, David, but in my example I was talking about sites clearly targeting the Spain Spanish audience and with a .es domain name (hence automatically geotargeting Spain on GSC) outranking argentinian websites in Google.com.ar or Mexican in Google.com.mx, even if they are .com.ar or .com.mx/.mx domain names.
That is a bug that Google is still very far from correcting :-)
Gianluca, I got it. That's how I interpreted it, I sometimes see .es sites ranking higher than their regional counterparts in AR or MX... but for the most I think it tends to happen more when the regional LatinoAmerican tlds are brand new or very young.... in those cases Google keeps liking the .es site for specific queries historically the one with the greatest authority and trust... it can be solved with local link building.
In my previous role at the British Council this was kind of solved for the most the moment we moved from subfolder geotargetting onto ccTLD. As the regional offices ( AR, MX, CO...) had been promoting the cctld for a long time and they were authoritarian tlds it wasnt much of the problem.... I agree those that there could be other rare exceptions.
Great post Kate, thank you! One of my favorite topics.
I usually prefer to look at "going global" from a product point of view and talk more about the cultural differences to take into account and the competitive analysis for each language and country, but I'd like to point out a few things from our technical experience running Investing.com in over 20 languages, 3 of which have multiple countries editions.
First, I usually don't like using the term translation. When we hire translators, that's what they usually do. Translate.
The idea of turning an English site into a French or a Russian one means first of all to understand the product and the market entirely, and only then to localize the language. It maybe sounds like a wisecrack, but I believe the terminology makes a huge difference.
About the hreflang for geo-targeting, so first of all, Google's hreflang guide does use an example of 4 local editions in English. So that confused me a bit.
For us, the hreflang works absolutely great for localized editions of the same language. With English, in every one of our 5 cases, the switch of our SERPs on the local Google took 2 to 3 months in every single case after we implemented the hreflang. 6 editions in English in total.
Then, I was very curious to ask you about Subdomains, why is it your least favorite option? - it's my favorite:)
Three years ago we migrated our international sites (ccTLDs) to a single domain's subdomains. Simply because buying the main domain with all of its ccTLDs wasn't an option. Besides the fact that it isn't a perfect solution from a branding point of view (and for some countries more than for others), it's the easiest one to maintain, it's a lot more clear to users where they are, and it works just as great as ccTLDs in Analytics, Search Console, and the list goes on.
While this is only my experience with one domain, from an SEO-rankings perspective I never saw a downside for migrating to subdomains.
X-default, perhaps we are one of these who made the mistake, and I'd like to check it more thoroughly, but I was 100% confident until today that it's there to show the original version. Google Play use it, and I did speak to a known Googler about it back in 2014 who told me explicitly that we should use x-default for our main version. But he might be very wrong!
One last thing, for a very long time we were thinking about auto redirects based on IP. I totally agree with you that it's not best practice, nor a great user experience. Google doesn't recommend it, and I think that all SEOs outside of the US know how difficult it is to reach Google.com..
The solution we found to be the best for us is to show a little pop up with a suggestion. It detects your IP in case you visit our www version from a non-English speaking country, and makes it your default version only if you choose to. It actually works very well.
Thanks Kate!
Hi!
"About the hreflang for geo-targeting, so first of all, Google's hreflang guide does use an example of 4 local editions in English. So that confused me a bit."
I don't get your confusion. In the Google guidelines, it is just as I explained. There are regional version of each language and if you speaker to a person in Canada, Ireland and Australia speaking English, the words would be different in some cases. The hreflang with "en" would be the alternate of the content in more general English.
"Then, I was very curious to ask you about Subdomains, why is it your least favorite option? - it's my favorite:)"
I believe I explained above, it's just not the prettiest form and there's the old SEO in me that prefers subfolders for the link equity flow of the main subdomain.
As for X-Default, that is the way it was explained to me and makes the most sense for usage. Yes, sometimes Googlers get it wrong but I won't call that person a liar. Instead, direct from the same Google guide you linked to above:
"For language/country selectors or auto-redirecting homepages, you should add an annotation for the hreflang value "x-default" as well"
Thanks for the comment, hope that clarifies things!
Having worked on MANY international seo projects, this guide is awesome and I utterly agree with your views on href lang. Use wmt or gsc and you're fine! Href lang can cause drops in visibility and I only recommend it on multilingual domains or where there's an issue with the wrong site appearing. Best example is Canada, I hreflang those pages with fr & en duplication
Bookmarked and shared!
Hi Kate!!!
So we must use the same Spanish for a web with many provinentes visits from countries like Argentina or Mexico? The language is the same, but there are many differences ...
Great Post!!
Hola Carlos,
first of all a disclaimer: I am one of those international SEO experts who think that hreflang should be used the most of the case for better orienting Google.
Answering your question, for a website that is targeting different Spanish speaking countries, the hreflang is a must to use markup. In fact, you are probably aware how many times a Spain Spanish website (even if it is a .es domain name) can outrank Mexican or other Spanish based country websites and viceversa.
Therefore, using the hreflang to tell Google that one version is targeting Spanish speaking users in Spain (hreflang="es-ES") and another is targeting the Spanish speaking users in Mexico (hreflang="es-MX") can really help in geo-targeting.
Finally, the ideal is not using the same "Spanish" version for targeting different Spanish speaking countries. It is quite known amongst Spanish speaking people that the Cervantes language is very different in Spain and Mexico and even between Mexico and Colombia or other Spanish speaking countries in Latam.
Therefore, apart the currency, phone and address change, you should also use the local Spanish variation, which is - obvious but worth reminding - also something that will improve the effectiveness of the different versions of your site.
Great... You made the difference very clear.
Hi Carlos!
Are you speaking of within a country? In Argentina, do you see the need for different regional dialects within that country? That's a horse of a different color. Dialect changes inside of a country are harder if they are regionally focused (meaning a specific subset within the country like Bavarian German vs high German). Google doesn't yet deal with groups of countries or areas within a country.
If you mean do you need to use the same Spanish for Argentina and Mexico, no. If your site offers the same products or services to both Argentina and Mexico, but the language is different, you'd use hreflang to tell Google that any two pages on that site are the same except for the minor translation.
You have to know your market to know what is needed. If you can give me more context, I'll try to help.