Weekly SEO news: 6 October 2020
Welcome to the latest issue of our newsletter!

Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.

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Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. International SEO

If your website serves multiple languages and countries, it can be difficult to make sure that Google and other search engines index your web pages correctly. There are several ways to handle international content.

International SEO

1. Use local domains for each language

A very good way to serve international content is to use country specific domains. 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.

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.

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.

Optimize your website now

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

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

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

Stay safe during these difficult times!

2. Internet marketing news of the week

John MuellerGoogle: removing links can impact your rankings

"If links are the reason why a site is ranking higher, then if you remove them the site will rank lower. Links aren't the only reason sites rank, obviously, so I wouldn't blindly focus on them.


Google : Google shopping now free worldwide

"We’re bringing free listings to the Shopping tab in countries across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Just as we don't charge sites to be part of the Google Search index, listings for participating retailers are eligible to appear in these results at no cost to them.

Paid listings will continue to appear in ad slots and will operate in the same way as Shopping ads do today. This change will take effect by mid-October 2020."

StatisticsCan you risk pulling your SEO budget in 2020?

"Businesses are facing massive struggles during 2020 as a result of Covid-19. Knowing where best to spend limited resources is critical. So don’t be hasty in pulling your SEO budget. Consider what affect that might have on other marketing channels and your business as a whole first. [...] How the search engines rank and display results continues to change. If you are neglecting SEO budget you may not know about those changes, or adapt to keep up."


Google: Submitting a URL doesn't reprocess the sitemap file

"Submitting a URL doesn't reprocess the sitemap file, but that's fine -- the sitemap file will get picked up regularly and it'll setlle down. No need to manually resubmit the sitemap every time :). (FWIW most sites never submit URLs manually.)"


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

  • Bing: Fake it and you'll never make it.
  • Google: You might see fragment identifiers in Search Console if we show jump links in search.
  • Google confirms indexing bug and announces fix.
  • Google Maps  for highway accidents.

3. Previous articles