I have been promising Rand all week that, yes, I'd write a post. And then we'd go drinking again. Nevertheless, with Rand on a plane, I thought it was time to get my act together and write something up. Following Rebecca's post about Get Listed, it seemed like a good time to write up something about an issue we at Distilled have been having with Google Local. Rand and I were talking about this after the session on universal search at SES in London that he wrote up the other day.
In a nutshell, the issue arises when you have a business operating in multiple languages. Consider, for example, a hotel chain (let's use the example "Will's Hotel Chain"). Imagine I have:
- UK website at willshotel.co.uk
- French website at willshotel.fr
- Spanish website at willshotel.es
[This whole thing is independent of my domain name strategy - the same issue arises if I have willshotel.com/uk, willshotel.com/fr and willshotel.com/es].
Now, imagine that as a result of some savvy property deals I own hotels in London, Paris and Madrid - so I have:
English pages:
- willshotel.co.uk/london
- willshotel.co.uk/paris
- willshotel.co.uk/madrid
French pages:
- willshotel.fr/londres
- willshotel.fr/paris
- willshotel.fr/madrid
Spanish pages:
- willshotel.es/londres
- willshotel.es/paris
- willshotel.es/madrid
Now - because they have a physical location in those three cities, there is no problem with registering three times - and it might make most sense for me to register:
- willshotel.co.uk/london
- willshotel.fr/paris
- willshotel.es/madrid
...so that when someone searches for me in each region, they can find my local listing and it seems to make sense for each region to be listed in its local language. The problem is that many people wanting to stay in a hotel in Madrid are English, searching from the UK and looking for a page in English about a Spanish hotel. So I really want to register multiple URLs for each geographic location - one in each language, but there is no technical way to list a URL per language. In the absence of that, the only way of achieving the same result is to register each of the 9 pages listed above - each language for each location, but the current guidelines say:
Don't participate in any behavior with the intention or result of listing your business more times than it exists.
Now this does have the result of listing the business more times than it exists and is therefore currently against the guidelines.
But it seems like the goal is perfectly legitimate so it would be great to have a way to do this. I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on how this should be done.
I think the waters are muddied a little by the number of times you see crazy local search results at the moment - see this search that I see at the moment in Google for odeon greenwich (Odeon is a UK cinema chain):
I want to know how to do that!
Is it wrong that I got a little thrill out of seeing the SERPs for my local cinema discussed here?
I would also say that consolidating your locations into one (rather than a different phone number or a 1/2 address, as suggested above) is likely going to accrue all reviews and citations to ONE listing (which will help it rank better) rather than splitting them up over three listings, none of which is likely to rank very well in such a competitive niche?
On a branded search though your name and location(s) rank(s) the best, so having a ton of reviews on one listing wouldn't bring much of a return. Also, if the reviews are are in a mix of languages they might not be as focused as they could be. It's still a tricky problem... should an account be created to aggregate all the reviews of a specific language or just go for greatest number on one location and have readability be second?
Putting content into a specific language niche will make linking easier outside of location searches as well. I.e. you'll get a lot more ES links to an Espanol site than to the Francois version.
Would one solution to this be to list a language-neutral page (e.g. willshotel.com/london) which redirects to the correct localised page based on Accept-Language http header?
The main problem with this (which I think also applies to David's comment below) is that one page can't be optimised (and therefore rank) for different languages. You might be ok for branded search but not for "hotels in London" vs "hoteles en londres". I think you very much need pages in each language for each location and you need all of those pages spiderable rather than redirecting users based on location / language.
Ah, now THAT's an interesting point. Ranking for foreign-language keywords. I was only thinking of it from the POV of user experience once I saw the listing.
I can see the same thing applying here in the US with plenty of businesses hoping to rank for both English and Spanish searches.
Hmm, I'll have to think about that.
Will, maybe I'm not understanding your question properly, but wouldn't you want to register the LOCATION (i.e. address and contact info) of
Willshotel.fr/paris - Some address in Paris
Willshotel.co.uk/london - Some address in London
Willshotel.es/madrid - Some address in Madrid
at Google Maps. Surely your corporate website does not need a Local Business Listing at your UK HQ for every one of your individual properties?
If someone in the UK is searching in English for your Madrid hotel, I think that's a problem you should solve for them once they GET to your site. The contact info they see in the Madrid 10-pack, for instance, will ring direct to that hotel, or point right to willshotel.es, at which point you can use IP sniffing or have a big Union Jack at the top of the page to serve them the English language?
Willshotel.co.uk at its London address is not going to show up in the Madrid 10-pack when someone types "wills hotel madrid"... ?
No - but when they search "wills hoteles londres" from Madrid, we would want a local result for the London hotel *in Spanish* (i.e. willshoteles.es/londres) and when I search "wills hotel London" from London, we want willshotel.co.uk/london. I think, from the comment you left above that we're talking about the same problem now - I should have made it clearer in my post that the languages and locations caused the issues. Thanks for the input, David. Looking forward to seeing if you have any more ideas...
I don't think I'd consider the Odeon Cinema example spam since search intent is obviously branded and multiple location listings are beneficial. Since they have all those different addresses available, each result corresponds to another theater. Conceivably they could get more specific with their URLs, tying the location to a specific url, instead of their one corporate site, as well as the phone number to it's specific theater.
Location/phone brings up another aspect of how you could optimize for your theoretical hotel locations. By modifying your address slightly (inserting a 1/2 or using different street names/numbers due to a corner address) you could link the Spanish/French/English speaking phone number (an even easier thing to get multiples of) to its respective address, URL, and reviews. That way someone clicks the link or calls the number that corresponds to their language and it should all be pretty seamless.
Chuckallied, I agree that it's not spam, but Odeon should be shooting for the SAME address/phone (based on the SERPs, the one at Bugsby Way) to yield an Authoritative Onebox for "Odeon Greenwich". Pretty much all Local Searcharati agree this is FAR more powerful in terms of click throughs and phone calls than an individual listing in a 10-pack. Then, they should focus on Authoritative Onebox for "Odeon Leicester Square" and another for "Odeon Camden Town" etc.
Frankly, I'm surprised that the G Maps algo hasn't sniffed this out already, since as you say it is a branded search. Their postal code radius is clearly too broad for this particular search.
Really? Having address and phone number that relates to the place you want to go seems much more applicable to me, especially in the case of languages and hotels. I don't want to call a number to a language I don't understand to a place I'm not trying to go. With something more corporate and centralized, I agree that it makes sense to go with the SAME address/phone to increase clicks, calls, and authority. With something more location specific and detailed, "What's the view like in room 312?" like hotel chains, they're setup to handle this sort of interaction at the individual location. I think Will has found a good, confusing outlier.
It may not be spam but it's certainly a sub optimal user experience. Especially as all those links go to the odeon homepage rather than branches near Greenwich. David- I have seen your reply and have other stuff to add to the discussion but I'm struggling to comment effectively from my phone. I'll chip back in from my computer tomorrow. Thanks for the input guys.
Stick in "Cinema Greenwich" as a search term and see how many times Odeon comes up in the listing.
Yes they are spamming, but they arent spamming for the search term "Odeon Greenwich", theyr spamming for "Cinema Greenwich".
Its in the term "Odean greenwich" that we may see their plot revelead.
Sucks to be a competing local cinema.
Double Edit: However in this case, the search was specifically for Odeon, so I think its fine and useful that they should appear multiple times as they are in the area multiple times, just that the phone numbers etc should be for each unique cinema location.
Again its up to Google to put the most useful results at the top of the list, so the other businesses called odeon in the area may be less worthy
1. If you have multiple domains like UK, FR, ES you can set the geolocation in Googles Webmaster Tools. 2. You can add a GEO RSS for each UK, FR and ES site. 3. You can set the lang HTML attribute in your documents. For example if you markup HTML 4.01 you can use add to each language: <html lang="en-gb"><html lang="fr"><html lang="es"> If you markup XHTML: <html xmlns="https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-gb" lang="en-gb"><html xmlns="https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="fr" lang="fr"><html xmlns="https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="es" lang="es">4. Add link elements in your pages for the languages, for example like this: In the United Kingdom site pages: <LINK lang="fr" title="Française" type="text/html" rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://willshotel.fr/" /><LINK lang="es" title="Español" type="text/html" rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://willshotel.es/" />In the French site pages: <LINK lang="en-gb" title="British English" type="text/html" rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://willshotel.co.uk/" /><LINK lang="es" title="Español" type="text/html" rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://willshotel.es/" /> In the Spanish site pages: <LINK lang="en-gb" title="British English" type="text/html" rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://willshotel.co.uk/" /><LINK lang="fr" title="Française" type="text/html" rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://willshotel.fr/" />5. Add the sites in the local Google Maps. 6. If there are any local postal addresses (not P.O. Box) and telephone numbers would be a plus.
Hi willcritchlow,
Good article, great topic. I mostly agree with Seoworker's comments about this topic. What we do at www.quarkis.com is pretty much exactly as Seoworker outlined above in his comment above, but not quite as simplified as that.
We tend to differ in our approach at step #4. Rather than adding various link elements of multiple languages within a given page, we create entire pages of just one given language, for each of the languages needed.
Furthermore, we detect the visitors country and serve up the appropriate localized webpage accordingly. Despite having several of essentially the same page content but in multiple language, it doesn't spam the search engines because algorithm directs the search engine to the appropriate page.
So Spanish Google would find and categorize the Spanish language versioned homepage for all 3 hotels, the one in Spain, the one in GB and the one in France.
French Google would find and categorize just the French language homepages for all hotels... etc.
Excellent outline of the problem.
I agree with the first comment - I'd send the user to the right page based on the browser language. Besides the http headers, one could also consider using JavaScript to check the browser user interface language.
If you don't find a match, you need to have a default, i.e. English. You also need to test that the user can override what you've done - they may have an English language browser if they work for an international company which has centralized help desk support etc. but they do indeed want the page in French or Spanish.
With this approach you would do the users a favor, but certainly not the spider.