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
-
.com or other TLD?
Hi, We are in the process of considering our domain url options for a new site. The plan is to migrate other site (bringing their link juice) to an main brand level domain. At the moment our desired .com url is unattainable however from a band perspective another extension e.g (.group) would probably be a better brand fit - however I wanted to know what the implications might be from an SEO perspective. At the moment some of our sub domains are ranking extremely well for desired keywords. Assuming we implement the correct redirect rules to maintain these rankings, would there be any other implication for our rankings (particularly in the UK and US) for not using a .com domain and using an alternatve TLD extension. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | carlsutherland0 -
Does 302 redirects pass link juice ? - I've read conflicting reports
Hi Mozzers Ive noticed that I have some 302 redirects on my website which have been there for some time . They should really 301's but I am wondering if 302s pass link juice or not as from what I've read they don't so I just wanted to check if anyone knew for sure, thanks pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
International SEO with 27 TLD`s
Hi Guys! Would like to have your expert opinion on the structure of a big international company. They are active over 27 regions, with all their own local TLD website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sie.SAS
Some of them are translated, but most of them are in English (big duplicated content, you know it). Next to that they have a webshop on 4 subdomains of theses 27 local TLD's. In my opinion it would be best to merge them all back to the .com domain and set-up a 301 redirect for all local TLD`s.
However what is your opinion on these 4 webshops? should I make them in the following structure : .com/region/shop (for example .com/fr/shop) Thanks for the feedback! Kind Regards S.0 -
How often does the WMT incoming links gets updated?
Hi, We made some drastic changes removing links (mainly resulted from one domain) and wondered when we should expect a change in the incoming links report of Google's WMT...? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Data highlighter in WMT displays old version of page
I want to mark up a business address for Google Local, so I thought I would use the data highlighter in WMT. However I only just added the address to the the bottom of the home page and when using data highlighter iit is giving me the old version of page to mark up without the address on. Rather frustrating, does any body have any experience on the time frame until Google updates the page in the data highlighter? According to this thread it's not even related to the page re caching: Data Highlighter: Start link is pulling an old version of page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Milian0 -
Google WMT Turning 1 Link into 4,000+ Links
We operate 2 ecommerce sites. The About Us page of our main site links to the homepage of our second site. It's been this way since the second site launched about 5 years ago. The sites sell completely different products and aren't related besides both being owned by us. In Webmaster Tools for site 2, it's picking up ~4,100 links coming to the home page from site 1. But we only link to the home page 1 time in the entire site and that's from the About Us page. I've used Screaming Frog, IT has looked at source, JavaScript, etc., and we're stumped. It doesn't look like WMT has a function to show you on what pages of a domain it finds the links and we're not seeing anything by checking the site itself. Does anyone have experience with a situation like this? Anyone know an easy way to find exactly where Google sees these links coming from?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
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 -
Anyone managed to decrease the "not selected" graph in WMT?
Hi Mozzers. I am working with a very large E-com site that has a big issue with duplicate or near duplicate content. The site actually received a message in WMT listing out pages that Google deemed it should not be crawling. Many of these were the usual pagination / category sorting option URL issues etc. We have since fixed the issue with a combination of site changes, robots.txt, parameter handling and URL removals, however I was expecting the "not selected" graph in WMT to start dropping. The number of roboted pages has increased by around 1 million pages (which was expected) and indexed pages has actually increased despite removing hundreds of thousands of pages. I assume this is due to releasing some crawl bandwidth for more important pages like products. I guess my question is two-fold; 1. Is the "not selected" graph cumulative, as this would explain why it isn't dropping? 2. Has anyone managed to get this figure to significantly drop? Should I even care? I am relating this to Panda by the way. Important to note that the changes were made around 3 weeks ago and I am aware not everything will be re-crawled yet. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Further
Chris notselected.jpg0