0:14
Search engines want you to be effective in a global economy.
Clearly they can drive more paid-search revenue when there's more content.
However, they also care deeply that their users around the world
can make better use of their search engines to get to the content they need.
You know how to enable this.
And the search engines have given guidance on how to set up
your sites in a global manner most effectively.
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So let's get into it.
What is the guidance from the search engines on multiregional and
multilingual sites?
Predominantly this will be from Google.
Google says make sure the page language is obvious.
Make sure each language version is easily discoverable.
Consider you choice of URL carefully.
Target site content to a specific country,
have the appropriate URL structure and geo targeting.
I'll go into more detail on each of these shortly.
1:58
Additionally they recommend you use a robot's txt file to block their
engines from crawling automatically translated pages on your site.
These auto translations often can be viewed as spam and
can create a Poor perception of your site.
So you do want to remove them from the index.
Make sure each language version is easily discoverable.
You can do this best by keeping the content for
each language each language on separate URLs.
And consider cross linking each language version of a page.
3:10
Some scenarios where this tag is recommended.
Keeping the main content in a single language in translating in the template.
Therefore pages that feature user generating content like forums
they'll typically do this.
Perhaps your content has small regional variations with similar content in
a single language.
For example, you might have English language content targeted
to the US Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and India.
Your site content is fully translated, but it doesn't show up for
those searching from their country.
They see the US English content because it ranks better due to the algorithm
rather than content in their language or country of choice.
Using site maps to indicate alternate language pages.
So the implementation of hreflang can be a little tricky.
And if your site is using this, you want to enable
the site map to be where Google can find the Instruction and
a direction for these href alternate language pages.
Targeting site content to specific country allows engines to be aware of and
improve the quality of the search results for those different countries.
ccTLDs are Country-code top-level domains
Is the clearest indicator whether that content is for Germany versus China
versus France, based on the ISO code used in the domain, itself.
You can also use server location and specifically, the IP address of
the server, in a country where you're hosting content in order to affiliate
that IP address more closely to the content and the language it represents.
You can also use the global settings in Google's search console
by setting up international targeting when you have a generic top-level domain.
It helps Google determine which countries are most important for
users intended to find them.
If your site has a country coded top level domain such as .de, .fr,
.au it's already associated with a geographic region.
So in that case you wouldn't use the geotargeting
option in Google search console.
Now, if no search console settings are set up,
Google relies largely on the sites country domain.
And signals including the IP address, any location information on the page,
any links to the page from within the country and even any currency information
showing pounds versus dollars versus yen are additional indicators.
So duplicate content for
international sites does add another level of complexity.
When your website is providing content for different regions and
in different languages sometimes content that
can be created that's very similar to other content.
6:47
In addition, follow the guidelines for rel alternate hreflang
tagging to make sure the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.
Bing also includes information geotargeting.
This gives a hint to Bing about the intended audience for
your website or section of the site.
Now they do allow you to do this with multinational sites
not requiring that you verify each section to geotarget separately.
So you can define a country audience for your entire website or for
sections of your website from within a single view.
This is slightly different than Google,
which does require you to do it at a country by country level.
7:29
Now, the other global engines that are in the second tier,
predominantly Yandex, Baidu, and Naver, are definitely worth doing some
research on because They're so specific to certain regions, I suggest you
do some research on your own to understand what's unique to those properties.
Two things though, that I'll say.
The best practices of good quality content, strong links,
internally and externally, and
a solid website infrastructure are always good principles to keep in mind.
The second is that some of these engines have a bias or some correlation
with advertising or ads that are more predominant in the search results.
So you will want to account for that as you understand in particular Yandex,
Baidu and neighbors algorithm for both paid and organic listings.
So in this lesson we’ve covered the guidance that the search engines have
provided on doing global SEO effectively.
Dave LloydSenior Manager, Global Search Marketing
