I have a site with to languages, say English and German.
sitename.com/ - is for English
sitename.com/de/ - is for German
Currently the english speaking users that use Google.com, they type in the company name and see my site in the results with the link which points to sitename.com/ and has English description - that's good.
Now, german speaking users that search via google.de, they type company name but again...they see my site in results which points to sitename.com/ and has english description - not good. How do i make it point to sitename.com/de/ and have description in german lang ?
The strongest geotargeting signal for Google is the top level domain. Unfortunately in your case you have a generic top level domain, but there are two things you can do to rank with the German section of your site on google.de:
Set a geographic target for the /de/ subfolder in Google Webmaster Tools. This is a two step process: first you verify your main .com domain in Google Webmaster Tools, than you can verify yourdomain.com/de/ as another website and set a a geographic target under Site configuration > Settings > Geographic target. See more info about geotargeting
Get links to the German section of your websites from German speaking websites. How to get such links depends largely on your site topic, so I cannot give you a specific advice.
Related
Recently I made my site to reroute the url, based on the language set in the visitors browser. So if a Swedish visitor came to the site, he was rerouted to mysite.com/sv, and an english visitor to mysite.com/en.
Soon after I released this, my Google rank just plummeted. So how did I go wrong here? Is there some common practice to auto-redirect of visitors based on their locale that doesn't hurt SEO, or do I need to set some kind of HTTP code for this to be approved by search engines?
The penalty you've acquired is for cloaking.
Short answer: Don't do redirects yourself - instead use hreflang codes and canonical links, then let the person's Google settings decide.
A Swedish person searching on google.com wants the English version, even if their browser is Swedish. Google does checks where it uses different user agents from different locations to test if you're serving the same content they see to everyone else. When this differs, your site gets flagged for attempting to hide it's true content - hence 'cloaking'.
More here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en
I currently have a website running under a German domain .de (www.mysite.de)
I'm adding now Internationalization support for English and French languages.
The I18n will be handled by a different URL structure for SEO purpose
www.mysite.de/en will handle english related content
www.mysite.de/fr will handle french related content, and so on
My first question is if from a SEO prospective I should move the German related content under its own path as well (www.mysite.de/de)?
If this is the case, then should I do a 301 Permanent Redirect to the www.mysite.de/de when someone comes to www.mysite.de.
Online I can see different examples.
apple.com for example handles US traffic and apple.com/fr the french one for example.
spotify.com has a 302 Temporary Redirect in place that forwards you to a specific language site like spotify.com/us for US
I know that Google lets you specify somehow the language target associated to a specific URL in your site with something called 'Search Console geotargeting'. This is allowed just for gTLD domains so I can not do it with mine as it uses specific German country domain (.de). I'm wondering if there is something I would need to configure on Google side using the webmaster tool or if hreflang metatag will be enough to signal that for example all pages under /fr are for French related searches
Proper implementation of hreflang is enough in your case.
My first question is if from a SEO prospective I should move the
German related content under its own path as well (www.mysite.de/de)?
Not necessarily. It's a matter of setting correct paths in hreflangs.
I'm wondering if there is something I would need to configure on
Google side using the webmaster tool
Just make sure you don't configure your site for german audience only, leave it to international.
I have a question re: cloaking.
I have a friend who has a business in Canada and the UK.
Currently the .ca site is hosted on Godaddy. The co.uk domain is registered (with uk ip address) with domainmonster and is using a cloaked/framed redirect to the .ca site.
As a result (my assumption) the .ca site is indexed fine by google, the .co.uk is not.
The content is generic for both sites. How do I point the .co.uk site directly to the content independently (preferably without duplicating the content hosting in the UK), so that for instance if the .ca domain was taken away altogether the .co.uk domain would remain an entity in itself from Google's point of view?
Does Google index a generic set of content and then associate different country domains with that content?
I hope I have explained this ok.
Thanks,
Greg
What exactly do you mean by cloaked/framed redirect? Implementation of this may vary and this will result in different states of your site with search engines.
Best way to see how Google has indexed your site is to run site:youdomain.co.uk query and see what results are returned(check cached versions, etc.). Also make sure to create Google WebMaster Tools account and look through the info there.
If only one of your sites is indexed I suggest first to create 2 different accounts in Webmaster tools, specifying different geo targeting for them and removing the redirect, such that each site returns 200 response code and doesn't do any type of cloaking/redirecting.
If one of the sites is failed to be indexed, put a link to it from the other one, and a bit of simplest link building(submit to DMOZ, Yahoo Directory for instance) as well make sure you submit the different sitemap for both sites(again via Google Webmaster Tools).
Hope this answers your question.
Is it possible to get two "editions" of a website both indexed by the major search engines (Google/Yahoo/Bing/Teoma) which differ in content language only and are hosted under different TLDs?
Say English content is available at "http://domain.com/", German content at "http://domain.de/". Now, if e.g. Google.com is used I want it to list the "domain.com" entry and vice versa. Is "Duplicate Content" an issue here?
Depending on website software you use (wordpress, joomla, custom, etc), you might have a plugin or addon for each that supports multiple domains and search-engine pinging/seo. If that's the case, it should be possible.
I'm assuming your website layout is the same but you have a ".com" and ".de" TLD pointing to the same directory/software installation and a (auto?) language selector to choose between English and German.
Edit: (for quick readers)
It shouldn't need separate webspace for each site. What I do for my sites to get them submitted is use Sitemaps. I've never generated one myself, so I can't help in that aspect. However, you could generate sitemaps for each language (e.g. sitemap.en.xml.gz | sitemap.de.xml.gz) and have your application ping search engines with these sitemaps. Essentially, you'll have the same content but in different languages and it'll be in a sitemap which can be submitted to google/bing/yahoo/etc.
I used this method on a wordpress blog I had and every time I submitted/changed content, it would re-generate sitemaps (updating links/etc) and ping the search engines again.
We basically have 2 sites ( Java /JSP / Apache Webserver) :
something.ca & something.com
The .ca is canadian content, and the .com is american content.
We need users to be redirected based on the ip addreess.
We want US users to get the .com site and Canadian users get the .ca site.
What is the best way to do this (at a webserver level or otherwise ) ?
Please elaborate.
In my web surfing experience, most websites - UPS.com for example - ask the user to select their country site rather than trying to figure it out themselves. They remember the selection in a cookie. Much depends on how voluntary your use case requires this redirection to be.
On the implementation side, I'd use a filter that would check the setting and fire a redirect if need be.
I've used GeoIP from Maxmind and it works well. They have a free version GeoCountry Lite That's 99.3% accurate. the Java API is here I would follow google's practice of having a link back to the original version if you do the redirect.
Check out GeoDirection. It may handle what you want through javascript.
http://www.geobytes.com/GeoDirection.htm
Another option would be to grab the culture from the browser environment settings and map those cultures to countries in your application. Depending on what you are actually trying to do this may not work for you as this will not give you the user's physical location, but will get you their preferred culture. So if a Canadian travels to the US they will still get the Canadian site unless they changed their browser settings for some reason.
There are a lot of IP geolocation APIs out there - I don't know if there's anything good out there that you don't have to pay for:
Using culture settings is an option, but doesn't work in some cases. What if you have a German user in the US who likes his dates etc. displayed in the format he's comfortable with? Doesn't change the fact that he's in the US.
I think that's one of the reasons why most companies simply ask the user and then store that information in a cookie (UPS, FedEx and most major airlines do that). Check out www.lufthansa.com. They actually ask for location and language(to account for countries with more than one official language like Switzerland).