Same to you! Happy to help!

Yeah, that is actually what hreflang was intended to be. Just to differentiate content pages that had the same content just translated, even if in just dialect. Alas it is also used to show geo-targeting, but I try to not be mad about it

Change as much as needed to make the target market user comfortable. There is no hard and fast rule.

If the page is https://www.example.com/us/product/ then the hreflang on that page should be:

If it is on https://www.example.com/product/ then it is actually the same

The other two lines are not needed. x-default is for your homepage when there is no target and you are asking users to set their target. If you visit https://www.ikea.com/ in an incognito window, you'll see what I mean.

And general en is not needed here. You are using hreflang for helping the SEs understand the difference in the content across countries that use the same language. As much as I hate it for that purpose, they do use this as a signal. General "en" is if you had a business that didn't geo-target and rather just had translations. One page in English, one in Spanish, etc. But no localization.

Hi Katarina!

Your theories are right but let me explain a little more.

• US page versions have to be completely unique with content related to US search intent and be indexed separately - therefore no longer canonicalised to UK version.
  If you are going to create a US and UK version of your page, there needs to be a reason why. If there is no reason why other than "someone told us we should," then only do one page. If there is a reason like differing product information then the pages need to be distinct from each other.

• Ensure hreflang is enabled to point Google to correct local page versions
  This is blended with what you said above. If you use a canonical and hreflang, the engines will get confused. You are telling them with the canonical that they are the same page. Then the hreflang tells them that the pages are different because of localization. You can't have both. Remove the canonical and make sure the hreflang is right.

• Ensure local backlinks point to localised pages.
  Yes!

I'm not sure I understand. I assume you are in travel something, and usually, the English speaking audience is of more interest. Now, it is your local audience due to lack of traveling. To be clear, a title tag change can have an impact in under a week. However, the search engines retain the right to ignore your title at any time - they do it all the time with titles that they deem irrelevant.

I'd need to see the pages to be sure, but as long as they are relevant to the audience you are targeting, you should be okay in theory.

Few questions before I can answer this:

Were the links you got going to drive people to your site? Would those people find your site interesting and relevant?

Is the content getting links still going to exist? Meaning will the links still make sense?

Just redesigning your site should not affect link equity, but if your links were acquired just for linking purposes, I don't think they will do much for you over time anyway.

Can you tell me more? Is your target market multi-lingual? Can you expand on why you would change your title language but not the site language?

The quick and dirty answer is yes, but only if they are of use to users. I saw pages on a former employers site do very well even though they were not a part of the main site. It all depends on what the content is and why you are putting it up.

Ah, yes! If you have multiple locations, but the same content in each location you would want to submit a sitemap per country-specific area. However, is your domain on .co.uk? If you are trying to target other countries that are not the UK with that ccTLD, you are going to have a hard time as that is specific to the UK.

However, if you are on a gTLD (general domain), and have country-specific folders, you should have a sitemap per country.

That only goes back to 2017, any data before then? Is there any information before the 2017 changes? I doubt they tracked it, but here is to hoping.

I truthfully don't like the average position metric site-wide, at least for my business. It doesn't tell a complete story. What does the average rank look like over time for 1) the homepage and 2) a product page like https://www.castleford.com.au/amplify/social-media/

Also, I tried to find blog/article content and came across a 404. Resources >> Content Marketing Library >> Under Ads "Read 25 tips for better Google Ads campaigns."

https://www.castleford.com.au/whitepaper-adwords-campaign-download - broken

Are there articles still?

Put simply, the marketer sounds right. But the purchase of exact match domains is not a total loss.

What should have been done:

1. Keyword research done, but not for the keywords that just have the most traffic, but rather those that are relevant and have the most traffic. The relevance is key there.

2. Identified the content on the site that should rank for those terms.

3. If no content exists, creating it on the site so that the content answers the query of the searcher and gives a call to action.

4. Worked with the marketer to influence the links to the pages for each keyword.

What can be done now:

1. 301 redirect the domains to the pages that make sense.

2. Only use those domains for sites if there is a reason for another site to be made on the topic. If your site can do it, leave it to one site, it's less work and less link building.

3. Work with the marketer to get GOOD, relevant links to the page on the clients current site. It's not about him being better than you, it's about you guys working together.

Hi!

Your friendly international SEO here. (PS thanks for the call out there Tom)

You cannot point two HREFLANG tags at the same URL because it's impossible to have both languages on the same page. Well, not impossible, just not recommended. I am not sure if you have translations or not, so both possible answers are below.

Translations (FR and EN) Available
If you have a Canadian subsite and it has two translations, you need to use both geo-targeting and HREFLANG. In your case, the /ca would be geotargeted, but then you need to distinguish the two translations somehow. If /ca is how you are geo-targeting, I recommend parameter for translation. So the French translation of the Canadian homepage content would be http://www.domain.com/ca?lang=fr -- for English of the same Canadian homepage content, it would be http://www.domain.com/ca?lang=en.

The canonical set up in that instance is:

Page: http://www.domain.com/ca?lang=fr

Page: http://www.domain.com/ca?lang=en

Note that the HREFLANG tags are the same because you have to reference the current page and all translations of that page.

Translations NOT Available
Now, this answer assumes that you just have the Canadian content in English, or just in French. If that is true, you don't need the HREFLANG. You just need to geo-target the subsite for Canada.

Now I do recommend that you offer translated content for the Canadian audience, but please don't auto-translate content. Just offer it in one language until you can get the resources to have it translated by a real person.

Hope that helps!

When did you change the URLs on your site? A crawl is showing some older URLs so I'm curious.

This is an interesting problem to have! I think the issue they are running into is that your auth file for http is redirecting to https. They want you to remove the http site from your account and then add the https site. Once you have done that, you can use the Site Move tool.

Is that a little more clear? I would love to hear if that works for you. it would be a great YouMoz post!

This is one of the instances that made me change the way I see the HREFLANG tag. So many people disagree but hear me out.

The HREFLANG tag is only for language differentiation. There are language and country codes because, as you point out, there are many countries that speak the same language and some have some major dialect changes. The biggest example being UK and US English. Therefore, if you have a site developed in US English that you want to "translate" to UK English, but not change the content of the site other than that, you would use HREFLANG tags to note the difference in the pages to Google. Since you changed nothing else (no currency changes, no legal changes, no product set changes), there is no reason for country targeting. You are just translating the same content ... aka changing a few words.

Now, let's say that you are operating a site that has a geo-targeted section to South Africa. Depending on the setup, you might not need HREFLANG tags at all. If you are changing the content other than through translation to target South Africa, that is geo-targeting. Targeting the country.

You can do both geo-target AND change language settings. For instance, if you are a Canadian company that legally has to have all of it's content in Canadian French (fr-ca) and Canadian English (en-ca), you would use HREFLANG between those two. But then you decide to move into the US. You might create a subfolder, subdomain, or ccTLD specific to the US market since you can't offer all of your products or services over there due to regulations. You would geo-target the new section/site to the United States, but not use HREFLANG since the content is targeted at a different country. You would want to make sure the content changed enough and the Canadian English pages might rank for a while but over time the US site/section would get stronger.

I hope that all makes sense.

In your instance where you have geo-targeted, I assume that is for a reason. However, because you have geo-targeted that section to South Africa, you cannot geo-target it to the Congo as well. You would either need to great a section for the Congo and geo-target that, or, if geo-targeting isn't really needed, use one big site and country specific translations. Only do this if your content is the same across the board and you are changing some of the wording to local dialects.

If you want to know more, check out my international search tool that might help you find what structure you should have: http://www.katemorris.com/issg/

Did they ever see good rankings and traffic in Australia? Do you have a date that things went south or has it always been like this?

Tommy is getting to the point but things are still very confusing when it comes to international.

Can you go check out this flow chart, see what is best for your business, and then let me know? http://www.distilled.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/International-Search-Strategy-Guide.pdf

That should answer most of your implementation questions as well, but I want to make sure it make sense. So check it out first and let me know.

But if what I am assuming is the case that you have geo-targeted sites and there is no translation going on within the geotargeted sites (.com and .co.uk), then HREFLANG is not needed. What I mean by translation isn't happening in the site is that the .com (US) site isn't translated to Spanish or any other language. And the same in the UK. If no translation is happening within a geo-targeted site, HREFLANG is not necessary.

Let me know what you're trying to do with geo-targeting and international strategy and I can help better answer your question.

Oh wow. Missed this somehow. I remember answering but the answer isn't here. Weird.

Short answer, this markup would be confusing to a bot. You are telling Google that /fr has multiple regional translations. Which isn't true. If you have one French translation that isn't regionally focused, you need one hreflang tag for that page.

If you are trying to geo-target a specific country, you need to actually make content for that country you are targeting. If you don't have the resources for that, just offer your content in french without geo-targeting and it should rank just fine if it's relevant and strong.

According to Google, Other is actually not organic. It's other advertising channels. See the link below and how they define other.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3297892?hl=en&ref_topic=3125765

Hi Katarina!

Your theories are right but let me explain a little more.

• US page versions have to be completely unique with content related to US search intent and be indexed separately - therefore no longer canonicalised to UK version.
  If you are going to create a US and UK version of your page, there needs to be a reason why. If there is no reason why other than "someone told us we should," then only do one page. If there is a reason like differing product information then the pages need to be distinct from each other.

• Ensure hreflang is enabled to point Google to correct local page versions
  This is blended with what you said above. If you use a canonical and hreflang, the engines will get confused. You are telling them with the canonical that they are the same page. Then the hreflang tells them that the pages are different because of localization. You can't have both. Remove the canonical and make sure the hreflang is right.

• Ensure local backlinks point to localised pages.
  Yes!