For SEO’s who run an international SEO campaigns there’s always the fear that search engines are serving overseas or foreign users the wrong content.
Most search engines are effective at detecting a pages content, e.g what language is used on the page. Nevertheless, many search engines still have a hard time serving the appropriate variation of a page to location specific users, e.g those in another country.
So, it’s vitally important that SEO’s who run International SEO campaigns are able to inform search engines which pages they should serve and in what instances they should serve them.
Here’s a how it’s done…..
Is This Happening to You?
First of all, you need to see if this problem is occurring on your site.
A way to judge is this is to use our dear old friend, Google Analytics.
If the translated variations of your webpages are in a separate or same folder on your website and you haven’t yet a custom profile for each country or language variation, then all you have to do is simply navigate to Location in your main analytics profile, choose a secondary dimension which will be Landing page – this will then display what pages users from different countries having been landing on.
The last step is to use the advanced filter option to pin-point one specific country.
To set up an advanced filter for the information we require, you’ll need to see use the following example:
Advanced > Include > country/territory > containing > Country Name > Apply
Follow the same process for Analytics profiles set up to track multiple domains. If your country specific websites are on separate domains or on sub-domains which have unique tracking codes then simply follow the first two steps of example above.
Review the Analytics data.
If there’s a landing page(s) that are attracting a high volume of traffic but the page isn’t included in the country specific areas of the website, then my friend you have a problem on your hands – Google’s been displaying the wrong content!
If you’ve indicated a problem or would just like to be cautious then read on…
Becoming a Hreflanger
Unless you’ve dealt with internationalisation issues on your website I doubt you’re hugely familiar the Hreflang tag.
It’s a useful tag that’s conventionally used (I’ll get back to this) in the header on a webpage. Its purpose is to indicate to search engines where to find a translated version of a page. This then assists Search engines in serving the correct content to the appropriate website users.
Tip : Implement the tag by inserting syntax below into the <head></head> of your webpage.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="" href="" />
Syntax Breakdown:
- < Link > – An indication to search engines that the page is linking to another page for a resource
- Rel=”alternate” – A microformat that indicates there’s a an alternative variation of the page that your viewing
- Hreflang=”” – An indication to who the alternative page should be served to. Populate with the location and language attribute codes fitting for the alternative page.
A list of country codes can be found here .
A list of language codes can be found here .
Although very simple, this tag can be very effective in targeting specific users.
For example, let’s say my website has a page for Canada, a country where a large percentage of the population speaks French.
I create two variations of one page, one in English, while the other in French. I then place the following tag into the <head> tag of the English page to notify search engines that there is an French alternative of this page and it should be served to French speakers users instead the English page, and vice versa.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ca-fr" href="www.example.com
/fr/variant" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ca-en" href="www.example.com
/en/variant" />
Notice the ‘ca-fr’ attribute in the tag, this indicates that
the alternative page should be served to French speakers
in Canada.
- Href – A reference to the URL where the alternative page exists
For more information about Hreflang tags then visit Google’s documentation.
Although Hreflang tag is very effective at its job, implementing these tags across an entire website can be a hugely laborious process which can consume many mind numbing hours.
Another downfall of implementing these tags is that they can encumber the <head> section of your page (especially if there are many variants) therefore increasing the code to weight ratio which is said to have negative SEO benefits, so this maybe not always a sensible option.
Quite recently Google’s announced that they will now crawl Hreflang tags within XML sitemaps. Fantastic news for SEOs who optimise enormous, international websites, or those who are sceptical about placing lots of tags and Meta data in their head tags.
An added benefit of listing all of your Hreflang tags within one document is that they will all get crawled in the same instance, where as they may get indexed at different times if they were implemented in headers of Individual pages.
XML Sitemaps are essentially maps to guide Search engines around a website. Principally for the benefits of search engines, XML sitemaps are submitted via Google’s and Bing’s Webmaster tools.
Below is a simple XML sitemap that lists three variations of a single page which all link back to each other through the Hreflang attribute.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
- <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
-
- <url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/uk/</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://
www.example.com/us/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://
www.example.com/de/" />
</url>
- <url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/us/</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://
www.example.com/uk/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://
www.example.com/de/" />
</url>
- <url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/de/</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://
www.example.com/uk/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://
www.example.com/us/" />
</url>
</urlset>
Top tip
The implementation of the Hrelang link is rather easy, especially if you’re already familiar with XML sitemaps.
If you’re running a large website and plan to create a multinational XML sitemap then I suggest you use The Flow Media’s Hreflang Sitemap Tool.
This useful tool which uses data from Excel spreadsheets and enables Webmasters to produce vast multinational XML sitemaps very quickly, I recommend you check it out.
Other Options
So that’s one way you can combat content issues, but sometimes this isn’t always enough.
Luckily there’s more SEO’s can do to make sure their content is being served correctly…
Webmaster Tools
I strongly recommend you run Google’s and Bing’s webmaster tools in conjunction with your website and they provide an unrivalled amount of useful content.
There are many benefits of aligning your website and Webmaster tools such as the ability to outline where you’re website is geographically targeted to.
Webmaster Tools also helpfully generates detailed reports on how your website is performing and how it can be improved as well as highlighting what improvements you can make on your website such as broken links and invalidated HTML.
Google’s Webmaster tools have an option which allows you set the geographical location of your website, e.g what country it’s set to target.
If your website targets users in many different countries then don’t fear. You can still use Webmaster tools to target multiple geographical locations, all you need to do is set up multiple Webmaster tool profiles, look at the example below.
I set up four Webmaster tools profiles:
All you need to do then is access each profile in Google’s Webmaster tools and set the Geolocation of the profile to the desired country where the section of the website is supposed to target.
Location, Location, Location…or is it?
Having your website hosted in the country where you’re targeting users is said to have ranking benefits, however since the introduction of Cloud hosting (Website hosted in multiple locations) the focus on physical location has been dramatically lowered.
The fact that Google may not be displaying the best results due to the fact it depends highly on physical location may have become a problem.
Although physical location has some added benefit, I doubt it will be long before search engine start ignoring physical location as a factor in determining where a websites targeted to.
Last but not least : LINKS!
Links from country specific ccTld’s to the country specific section of a website is a definitive hint to search engines that a certain section of a website is targeted towards a specific country of group of users who user who speak a different language.
Try and organise your link profile to match the correct the sections of your website, otherwise search engines may get confused and once again start serving your content to users in another country or who speak a different language
USA website section (.com, .net, org)
UK website section (.co.uk)
German website section (.de)
Ultimately remember, Search engines have a mind of their own and always serve what they algorithmically feel is the most appropriate. All you can do is suggest alternatives and hope they will abide.
By implementing two or more of the techniques I mentioned above you’ll be pushing a pretty big hint, big enough that hopefully search engines will stop serving your content to the wrong audience.
About Jonathan Verrall
Very interesting post! This is going to be very resourceful for the future. I like and prefer the use of rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” is situations like this.
AG Infosoft recently posted..Bad Links – How to Tackle this Problem
Great post – Especially mentioning the Hreflang tag for the translated version of a page. As this is very important to rank internationally as well as locally in that specific region and or language when it comes to the various Search Engines.
This is totally new to me, Never heard that we can take a look on international projects this way. Great information and thanks for sharing it.
Thank you for updating me about Hreflang tag and how it can be used appropriately. Google Analytics and webmaster tools are great to keep track about your website performance and provide with useful information which can prove beneficial if taken into consideration seriously.
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Hi Jonathan,
This is a great post and helpful post for people with websites that don’t just serve English as its language. In fact, I didn’t know such syntax existed until I saw it here. This proves how little I know regarding HTML.
Very interesting post.Especially mentioning the Hreflang tag for the translated version of a page. As this is very important to rank internationally as well as locally in that specific region and or language when it comes to the various Search Engines.
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