2 replies to this topic

[newbieSEO]

Hi cool people out there!

I trust that you all are fine and feeling more than just well! :-)


I am a complete newbie in terms of SEO. I read a lot about it the last 2 weeks but there are some unanswered questions. Especially how strongly will my site be punished by Google when I deploy exact English copies (of the site) for different English countries.

I do not expect that someone is going to write a 5 pages recommendations but it would be nice if some of my essential questions could be clarified.

So I am just writing down some stuff over here.

What would you recommend in the sense of Geo IP routing, parental site, etc. to get the best possible SEO ranking of the following website project?

• It is supposed that there is a multi national website
• The parent website would be NAME.com
• Native English countries are represented by an English website, e.g. US, UK, Australia
• Other countries are represented by an English website and a website in the countries own language, e.g. DE, CN, BR, RUS
• All English websites do have exactly the same content, this applies also to the English websites of DE, CN, BR, RUS.
• All non English websites are in the language of the pertaining country, e.g. DE in German, CN in Mandarin, BR in Portuguese, RUS in Russian
• Website would be built using Sitecore, most likely

Goals:

• Best possible SEO ranking
• Real visit numbers for every country website. Not biased by the parental one. So that one can see how often a site was visited from a pertaining country.
• Users should be automatically redirected to their native language site. E.g. Germans to the German version, Chinese to the Mandarin version, etc. – Geo IP routing

It would be more than nice and neat if one could give five or six short points. So that I could have at least an idea of what the "right" strategy would look like.

Thanks and all the very best!
The newbieSEO

[qwerty]

You're a complete noob and you're taking on a project like this? I can tell you now that this is going to be a lot of work, and yes, it would take many pages to tell you everything you're going to need to do, but here's some stuff to keep in mind:

• You can use IP detection to send users to the right site, but that shouldn't be necessary. If they're in Germany, searching google.de, they should find your German site (assuming you're putting it on a .de domain). If you're suggesting that someone in Germany should be automatically redirecting to the German site when they request the US site, I don't think that's a great idea, unless you've got some legal requirement that people can only see the local version.
• I'm not clear on why you want an English site in non-English speaking countries in addition to the site in the local language. If people in Germany wish to read your site in English, they can go to the UK site (which goes back to my previous point about forcing users to a particular ccTLD no matter what they request).
• You may want to use user-agent detection to check their browser's default language to send them to the right version of a multi-lingual site.
• For multiple sites in the same language, you can use hreflang tags to indicate that one site contains English content for Canada, another has English content for the UK, etc. But even then I'd advise against using the exact same content on all of those sites. There are differences between the way a language is spoken in different countries. Brazilian Portuguese isn't the same as Portuguese Portuguese, and certainly American English has differences even with Canadian English.

[newbieSEO]

Hey!

Thanks for replying. ..No, it is not the case that I gonna built up the site(s) myself. Rather I started a job and to my surprise I will be completely in charge of this. Once it is the case that the project will be realised. ..Wow, so I am learning as much as I can in order to cope with this task.

But to answer your (and my) questions:

• You can use IP detection to send users to the right site, but that shouldn't be necessary. If they're in Germany, searching google.de, they should find your German site (assuming you're putting it on a .de domain). So it would be best to have a proprietary domain for every countrie and not something like www.NAME.com/de-de and www.NAME.com/us-en or www.NAME.com/uk-en. And I assume that it would affect my page ranking?
  
  If you're suggesting that someone in Germany should be automatically redirecting to the German site when they request the US site, I don't think that's a great idea, unless you've got some legal requirement that people can only see the local version. No, I don't want to force someone to a certain site. So if a German wants to read the US site it would be fine if he/she gets to the US site. But if a German just searches for the company site on Google or Bing, than I would like him/her to get to the German site.
• I'm not clear on why you want an English site in non-English speaking countries in addition to the site in the local language. Because translation is very susceptible to flaws, takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. The English version would be the one most up to date and the native language version would be updated when translation of the English text is done.
  
  If people in Germany wish to read your site in English, they can go to the UK site (which goes back to my previous point about forcing users to a particular ccTLD no matter what they request).
• You may want to use user-agent detection to check their browser's default language to send them to the right version of a multi-lingual site. At the moment it is the case that the company does have one "parent site". And everyone who approaches the companies website the first time gets to this parent site (no matter from which place in the world). At this point the visitor needs to switch the country and language manually. And as said before, I would like to have at least the language switch done automatically. Am I right when I am saying that no Geo targeting/IP routing is needed when user-agent detection is turned on? So I wouldn't have any problems on regards to SERPs?
• What of importance is to me is that I can see in analytics how many people have been visiting which country/language site. ..And at present, the parent site fetches all the traffic because visitors are redirected to this site when they visit it for the first time. ..So this ruins the "real numbers" of the considered sites.
• For multiple sites in the same language, you can use hreflang tags to indicate that one site contains English content for Canada, another has English content for the UK, etc. But even then I'd advise against using the exact same content on all of those sites. Yes, that is absolutely right and I don't dare to contradict. Though, it would be okay to have the English UK version as English version in countries like China, Brazil, African countries.
• There are differences between the way a language is spoken in different countries. Brazilian Portuguese isn't the same as Portuguese Portuguese, and certainly American English has differences even with Canadian English. Yes, you are right, ..every time I speak to a Portuguese deploying my Brazilian Portuguese it is a bit harder for me to understand what the Portuguese tells me. Though it is a nice language and I will go back there, for sure :-)