How and Why Google, Yahoo! and other search engines should handle international content March 22
Last summer Rand entered a post in his blog about this very topic – how and why search engines should handle international content. I’d like to add my comments as I have been dealing with this at my company for some time. I work for a global enterprise company managing SEO and am faced with the challenge of SEO by country for this reason.
I’m going to speak to Google specifically, not because I think they are any better or worse at this than the other engines but because most of our search referrals come from Google and therefore it is a priority. I’ve also learned that trying to boil the ocean will likely make me crazy before I even raise the temperature one degree.
Rand’s article was on the mark. The “why” is easy in my opinion – because the search engines want to provide the best customer experience. The best customer experience means providing the most relevant content to the searcher. However, that is oftentimes not the case when someone searches for content from web sites in their country.
The problem is as follows – not just for my company but my company is the example:
The company I work for has international presence in over 80 countries and we have web sites targeting those countries and various languages. However, if you go to a Google web site outside the US and search for my company’s products you get a variety of mixed results – and arguably none that would be considered most relevant to the search query
Let’s use Google.com.mx as the example.
I search for a product my company sells with the brand name included (so as not to argue whether our content would be deemed highly relevant).
When searching “the web” the first two results are my company’s pages targeted at customers in Spain, no results in the top 30 from the site intended for Mexico.
When searching “pages in Spanish”, again, first two results are pages for Spain. Then on the second and third pages I see results from my company’s web site meant for Argentina and Chile. Still no pages from the Mexico site.
Finally, when I search this same query and select “pages in Mexico”, zero results from my company’s web site in all Google results. In fact, I’ve verified that no web pages from my company’s site are in the Google Mexico index.
As you can see, none of these results would be considered most relevant when you know that there is a page out there specifically targeted to this customer in this market for this exact product.
So then why does this happen and “how” (this is the hard part) can we fix it?
Vanessa Fox – Google’s Site Maps Program Manager has blogged about this citing “If you want your site to show up for country-restricted searches, make sure it uses a country-specific domain (such as www.example.com.br). If you use a domain that isn’t country specific (such as .com), make sure that the IP address of the site is located in that country.”
It’s also stated pretty clearly in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.
This is the problem for our web site. We aren’t likely to do either of these things as it just wouldn’t be feasible for such a complex site that has been in existence for so long to make such changes.
Therefore, the “how” is a bit trickier. I don’t believe Google is ignoring that this is an issue that needs resolved – I just don’t think they’ve figured out how to resolve it yet. And I’ve actually been told by Google that this is a priority.
Given the lack of consistency across sites as to how they structure their individual country content, it may be difficult for the engines to figure out the target audience without some help from each company. Rand’s blog and the comments offered some ideas. A couple more might be a standard robots meta tag that tells the engine exactly what country and language the page is targeting. Or is there a way to leverage the site maps program to let the engines know how to translate the site’s URL structure or meta tags they may already use for internal reasons?
My objective with this post is to keep this conversation alive so the engines will continue to pursue a solution. Would love to hear if anyone has seen any recent threads on this topic or if they have ideas for a solution. Until then I’ll keep chatting up anyone who will listen.
