TLD Conflicts in WMT
-
Hi
I'm running into some top level domain conflicts in Google's webmaster tools. I hope you can help me out. Thanks in advance.
Website example.com has sub folders for each language. There's no content at the root example.com. The root 301 redirects to English at example.com/en/.
In Google Webmaster Tools the root site is added because the web developer can't find a Joomla plugin to put the sitemap and robots file in each sub folder. It's all mixed in the root. So only 1 sitemap and robots exists for all the sub folder languages in the root of the site.
As a results Google shows the root site in search results where it should show the appropriate sub folder (in this case Dutch). I see these conflicts occur everywhere.
Soon Chinese, Romanian and other languages will be added. I'm afraid this problem will only get worse.
What can I do to make sure Google treats every sub folder as a distinctive site and doesn't treat the root as a site?
-
Google can be very stubborn about wanting to see content at the root level. The other common problem, though, is that the crawler just may not see the other language variants. Are you auto-redirecting by IP (i.e. geo-location)? One major issue is that Google crawls from the US, so you'll need crawl paths to all of the variants.
The first thing to check is that Google is actually reading/honoring the 301. You'll need to see what the crawler is seeing.
Google has added some new tags for sites in multiple languages (especially if the same language is shared across regions/countries). I don't have a lot of good data on them, but Google reps are encouraging their use:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html
You may find life is easier, long-term, if you put the dominant language at the root level, along with navigation options for other languages, and then use geo-location to send visitors to other pages. It also saves you a 301-hop for the primary market and will strengthen your SEO a bit for that language.
-
Hi István
Thanks for the suggestion.
Do you mean by:
_"_I would go for a canonical in the index page"...you would create a webpage in the root of the site with a canonical to the default redirect /en/?
-
Hi Jacob,
I would go for a canonical in the index page. This should remove the .com version from index and tell search engines which is the "main" language.
I hope that solves this issue.
Greetings,
Istvan
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
URL Parameters Settings in WMT/Search Console
On an large ecommerce site the main navigation links to URLs that include a legacy parameter. The parameter doesn’t actually seem to do anything to change content - it doesn’t narrow or specify content, nor does it currently track sessions. We’ve set the canonical for these URLs to be without the parameter. (We did this when we started seeing that Google was stripping out the parameter in the majority of SERP results themselves.) We’re trying to best strategize on how to set the parameters in WMT (search console). Our options are to set to: 1. No: Doesn’t affect page content’ - and then the Crawl field in WMT is auto-set to ‘Representative URL’. (Note, that it's unclear what ‘Representative URL’ is defined as. Google’s documentation suggests that a representative URL is a canonical URL, and we've specifically set canonicals to be without the parameter so does this contradict? ) OR 2. ‘Yes: Changes, reorders, or narrows page content’ And then it’s a question of how to instruct Googlebot to crawl these pages: 'Let Googlebot decide' OR 'No URLs'. The fundamental issue is whether the parameter settings are an index signal or crawl signal. Google documents them as crawl signals, but if we instruct Google not to crawl our navigation how will it find and pass equity to the canonical URLs? Thoughts? Posted by Susan Schwartz, Kahena Digital staff member
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AriNahmani0 -
Is there any benefit of having a .tv tld instead of a .com for a video centric website?
We are launching a video dense website. Is there any evidence that having a .tv tld can help with video optimization? We are trying to find proof that Google looks at a .tv tld favorably for video SEO as opposed to a .tv website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications0 -
Should I disavow a particular site (no warnings in WMT)?
I’m currently getting a lot of external links to my website from ‘xyz’. This a series of sites with near identical content and duplicate URLs (xyz234.com, xyz63.com, xyz456.com etc). There are 15 of these sites which are contributing 6236 external links. Would you agree that these URLs are candidates to be disavowed? I currently have no unnatural link warnings in GWT but I’m concerned with watching out for negative SEO and keeping our link profile healthy. Would pruning spammy links like these be a good step? Any help would be appreciated! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Using the same content on different TLD's
HI Everyone, We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same language. For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German, We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise? All answers appreciated. Cheers, Mel.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape1 -
WMT Showing Duplicate Meta Description Issues Altough Posts Were Redirected
Dear Moz Community, Some time ago we've change the structure of our website and we've redirected the old URL's to the new ones. About 2,000 posts were redirected at that time. While checking Webmaster Tools a few days ago I've discovered that about 500 duplicate meta-description issues appear in the "HTML Improvements" area. To my surprise, altough the old posts were redirected to the new path, WMT sees the description of the old posts similar with the one of the new post. Moreover, after changing the structure all meta-descriptions were modified and they weren't the same used before the restructure. For example I've redirected /blog/taxi-transfer-from-merton-sw19-to-london-city-airport/ to /destinations/greater-london/merton-sw19/taxi-transfer-to-london-city-airport-from-merton/ Now they are shown as having duplicate content. I've checked the redirects and they are working. I get the same error from the redirected pages for about 150 titles. Did anyone else get this errors or can you please offer me some suggestions about how I can fix this? Thank you in advance! Tiberiu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiberiu0 -
Google WMT Showing Duplicate Content, But There is None
In the HTML improvements section of Google Webmaster Tools, it is showing duplicate content and I have verified that the duplicate content they are listing does not exist. I actually have another duplicate content issue I am baffled by, but that it already being discussed on another thread. These are the pages they are saying have duplicate META descriptions, http://www.hanneganremodeling.com/bathroom-remodeling.html (META from bathroom remodeling page) <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Bathroom Remodeling Washington DC, Bathroom Renovation Washington DC, Bath Remodel, Northern Virginia,DC, VA, Washington, Fairfax, Arlington, Virginia</a>" /> http://www.hanneganremodeling.com/estimate-request.html (META From estimate page) <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Free estimates basement remodeling, bathroom remodeling, home additions, renovations estimates, Washington DC area</a>" /> WlO9TLh
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebbyNabler0 -
A bit of a confliction?
After reading this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success I understand that it is best to index the archived categories, now that they are being indexed im getting duplicate errors from SEOmoz reports. Any suggestions? We added the canonical code but the issue still exists in the SEOmoz report.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Moving External TLD To Subfolder of Corporate Domain?
Our Challenge: Our corporate site receives about 20,000 visits per week. Unfortunately, nearly half of those visitors are "looking" for a link we provide in our navigation link found on our homepage that takes them to our “Employee" focused site which resides on a separate TLD. Because so much of the traffic to our corporate site lands on our homepage only as a stepping stone en route to the "Employee" site, the bounce rate, time on site and Average page views for our corporate site are all negatively impacted. Meanwhile, the "Employee" site gets more than 100,000 visits per month and enjoys enviable metrics- low bounce rate, high average page views and average time on site. Our Goal: minimize or eliminate the negative impact of so many visitors using our corporate site as a stepping stone to reach the employee site. leverage the traffic volume and positive metrics enjoyed by the employee site to improve the search engine authority of our corporate site. Our Solution: Move the "Employee" site to a subfolder of our corporate site – for example www.oursite.com/employees Install Google Analytics on all pages within the subfolder Provide a 301 redirect from old "Employee" domain to new employee subfolder The expected result is an increase in overall corporate site traffic, more page views, higher time on site, and lower overall bounce rate from merging these two website properties. Our Need: After comparing the subfolder option to subdomain approach, we feel that the proposed solution is our best course of action and are looking for validation or an alternate recommendation.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisMakara0