Weekly SEO news: 21 August 2018
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Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.

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Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. International SEO: how to optimize your web pages for international markets

Does your website serves multiple languages and countries? It can be difficult to ensure that Google and other search engines index your web pages correctly. Read this article to learn how to get your web pages into the right local versions of Google.

international SEO

Version 1: use local domains for each language

Country specific domains are the best way to server international content. For example, use yourcompany.com for the USA, yourcompany.de for Germany, yourcompany.fr for France, etc.

If you have a .de domain, it will be much easier to get high rankings on German search engines. In addition, a German website with German content is very easy to understand for website visitors and search engines.

It is much less confusing than a website that contains English, German, Spanish and other content.

Version 2: let your visitors choose which language they want to see

Another way to present international content is to let your website visitors choose the appropriate version. Your homepage contains a country and language selector to let users choose their favorite version.

After the selection, the user should be redirected to a web page that has a unique URL, i.e. each language version should use unique URLs.

If you use this method, it is important that your web pages use the x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation for the country selector page, which was specifically created for these kinds of pages.

In general, this method is more confusing than the first method. It's easier to make mistakes that can lead to problems with search engines.

Version 3: redirect visitors automatically

Instead of letting your website visitors choose, you can also redirect them based on their location and their language settings. You can do this with 302 redirects or by dynamically serving the right HTML content.

This method also requires the x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation and you must also make sure that the language pages have individual URLs.

Automatic redirects can be annoying. For example, if a person from the US is on vacation in Europe, it is not good if the US version cannot be accessed. It's also easy to make mistakes that can lead to indexing problems if you use this method.

Regardless of the method that you use to present your international content, all of your pages should have rel-alternate-hreflang annotations.

Check your local rankings and check the accessibility of your web pages

The Ranking Monitor in SEOprofiler enables you to check the rankings of your web pages in 162 countries. You can check your rankings from all 92,000+ locations that are supported by Google. If you want to know how your website is ranked in a particular region, the Ranking Monitor is the right tool for you.

In addition, Googlebot must be able to access your pages (you can test this with the website audit tool in SEOprofiler). Visitors should also be able to visit different language versions of your website.

Optimize your pages now

Getting high rankings for international websites is even more difficult than getting high rankings for regular websites. If you haven't done it yet, try SEOprofiler now to find out how to improve the Google rankings of your web pages:

Try SEOprofiler now

2. Internet marketing news of the week

GoogleExpandable Featured Snippets mark continued shift in search

"It’s time to freak out about another new search results feature. Expandable featured snippets have landed. [...]

Despite the influx in direct answers in the Spring, and the subsequent decrease in featured snippets, long-term trends suggest that featured snippets are going to continue to be a prominent feature in organic search."

Old content still showing up in Google search results? Google might not find that content important

"Have you ever been in a position where you have removed pages from your website and it has taken Google a really long time to remove that content from its search results? There is no need to worry. It just means that Google has not crawled the page yet and has not figured out the content has been removed."

GoogleGoogle pushing all display network campaigns onto apps

"Any display network campaign will start showing ads on mobile devices and in apps unless action is taken by the advertiser. And Google isn’t hiding it. They say it will be 'a significant increase'.

If you thought you could just uncheck mobile app and tablet app in the device settings, they are getting rid of those. The changes seem small, but they are thorough in cutting off your options."

How Google’s medic update could disappoint searchers

"Though they say it’s been fully rolled out, search professionals are still observing and cataloging the effects of this algo change. [...]

It seems as if, in the overall health niche, Google has a new way of determining who’s a trustworthy source and who’s not– and they’ve adjusted the SERPs accordingly."

+++ SEARCH +++ ENGINE +++ NEWS +++ TICKER +++

  • Securing web sites made them less accessible.
  • AP Exclusive: Google tracks your movements, like it or not.
  • Google's location data blunder will only sow more distrust.
  • Google adds posts to local branded search results.

3. Previous articles