Hey all,
So…the big “G” is shaking things up for the international SEO side of things and the keyword of the moment (excuse the SEO pun) is mark up, mark up MARK UP!!
We saw the Panda released in 2011 which shook the duplicate content world somewhat and it looks like an international version could be set free in 2012. It looks as though anyone partaking in a bit of international SEO and who operates one website across a host of languages will now be tarnished with the duplicate brush.
“But Kickstart…” I hear you cry”…just get your geotargetting hat on, login to Google Webmaster Tools and get cracking” Yes Kickstartees, this used to be the case HOWEVER…no more. BOOOOOOOO
So Google is seperating the men from the boys and has created a a variety of new mark ups that will be used to inform Google that you are in fact duplicating odds and sods in various languages for a reason and not just for the fun!
It took around about 55 times of reading through Googles blog on this for Kickstart to understand what the chuff the big G was on about however, here goes…this is what we have interpreted these mark ups as:
If you have a domain with multiple sub domains in different languages you can now use a mark up that highlights to Google that the foreign content is the same as the .com but just in a different language, almost like a foreign canonical. You can also specify the region you want to target via your source code now as well.
For example…you’ve got the below versions of one site:
• http://www.example.com/ – contains the general homepage of a website, in Spanish
• http://es-es.example.com/ – is the version for users in Spain, in Spanish
• http://es-mx.example.com/ – is the version for users in Mexico, in Spanish
• http://en.example.com/ – is the generic English language version
You can use these specific mark ups to highlight to Google that es-es.example.com is the version for user in Spain, in Spanish etc etc.
PHEW…
For more clarity on this crazy mark up party visit the Google Blog and their support centre and see if you can decipher what this means for all you neeks out there!
Thanks and take care peeps,
Kickstart