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
-
Changing website with country-specific TLD to unlisted. How?
Help: I have a website with a country-specific TLD. Google Console sees the target country as the same for the TLD, but tells me that I can 'select Unlisted' if I "want to ensure that your site is not associated with any country or region." The question is, how? I cannot see how to edit the country in the new console? Any ideas/help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | twofourseven0 -
How should I handle conflict between custom taxonomy and categories in a directory site?
Hello! I posted about this a week ago but haven't solidly figured it out yet. I'm building a website that is a directory of local therapists. I have categories for my blog and custom taxonomy to classify therapists. My problem is that my categories and my custom taxonomy overlap by necessity. For example I have the category "anxiety therapy" and the custom taxonomy "anxiety". Will this confuse google?...Do you think google will be able to figure out the differences between my blog archives and my therapist listing archives?...even though their names are similar and in a couple of cases the same? should I noindex my categories because the point of my site is to get customers to the directory....not the blog?.....even though the blog has lots of useful content? I should note here that I have my custom taxonomy pages set up so that they will display the 6 most recent blog posts in the corresponding category at the bottom of the page....so maybe that makes noindexing the categories more ok? Thank you for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae0 -
DA stuck at 1 for .financial TLD domain
Hello! One of our clients has a domain with a .financial TLD. The domain id over two years old. We have been creating a lot of good content (including articles, infographics and videos) every month for over 12 months. We have also been creating backlinks and the Search Console shows a total of 1319 links to the site from 64 root domains. However, the DA and PA on Opensiteexplorer haven't moved from 1. Also the number of linking root domains shows as zero. Traffic and keyword rankings haven't picked up either. Could someone please help with why this would happen? Is there anything to do with the domain TLD of .financial? Thanks in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rohit05050 -
New g(TLD) advice needed
Hey all, I'm a bit confused by conflicting advice, need some direct input. We're quite experienced in SEO but that doesn't mean we can't get better 🙂 I manage a very old, well established, very generic TLD portal that ranks very highly in MANY keywords. (If you know our domain, I'd appreciate not naming it here) (145 1-3 ranks, 342 1-20 ranks) but there are also many topics we want to improve upon. Lets say, for example, I own gold.com, but I've failed to rank for 'gold events' and I acquired gold.events. What is the thought as to using some of the g(TLD)s versus the original .com? In the example events.gold.com or gold.events or gold.com/events/? I really can't find a consensus on which would bemost effective for SEO purposes. In a more general aspect of the same question, we own MANY "gold.newg(TLD)" domains and are conflicted as to best use of all of them. All advice greatly appreciated. Nat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WorldWideWebLabs0 -
Changing from .net TLD to .com TLD
I have a Fortune 50 serving client that has for a few years been operating their site on a .net domain since the .com was not available. They have just aquired the .com domain for their company name that was unavailable before. However, it was not a transfer of a live domain. In whois it is showing as brand new and "unseasoned" For now I have recommended that they just perm forward the .com to the .net and leave the .net as the TLD But I am sure they want to in the future make the switch. What would my best course of action be as the SEO consultant?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tjkirgin0 -
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 -
Keywords in WMT
Hello, In Googles Web master tools under "content keywords" 2 of my major keywords are missing. My site used to rank well for the keyphrase "short hairstyles" but gets very little traffic from google at all now, about 1% of what it did before april 2012. Someone did a negative seo number on us by pointing 10k+ spammy links to us from message boards, this and the timing of the traffic loss leads me to suspectthe penguin update. I am removing them as best I can but no increase in traffic has resulted so I'm looking for any and all issues and the missing keywords seems to be an oddity. The missing keywords include "short" which is pretty fundemental. The word is in the domain and plenty of times in the content. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
When Google's WMT shows thousands of links from a single domain... Should they be removed?
Hi, Looking at Google's WMT "links to your site" it shows few sites that have thousands of links pointing to mine. There are actually only 1-2 links pointing to me from a site that Google shows 2000.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
I assume that it is simply because they don't have canonical tags. Should I ask for the 2 links to be removed? Thanks0