Hreflang + canonical

[seidelbastpa]

Dear community,

As part of an international company, I am running a site which serves all French speaking Europeans, hence residents of France, but also of Belgium, Switzerland, Luxemburg. Currently, this websites exists only in a single version which uses the .fr ccTLD. Let’s call it www.mysite.fr.

In parallel, another office of the same company runs the website that serves all Dutch speaking Europeans, hence residents of the Netherlands, but also of Belgium: www.mysite.nl.

I have reached very good organic SERP rankings in France, but the rankings in Belgium are significantly worse.

Now I want to create a .be duplicate, www.mysite.be, in order to leverage the power of the .be ccTLD and achieve better rankings in Belgium. In other words, the content of www.mysite.fr and www.mysite.be/fr-be/ (the Dutch version will be reachable at www.mysite.be/nl-be/) will be almost identical, a part from a few references to the Belgian market here and there, as well as a Belgian phone number in the header. My thinking is: .be domains get a head start by Google compared with identical sites from other TLDs, including .fr.

So I want to climb in the rankings in Belgium and not decrease in France.

I see two options

1) Simply create www.mysite.be/fr-be/ and let it compete with www.mysite.fr. Hopefully some .be pages would overtake the .fr pages, and if not I still keep the .fr-page rankings.

2) Apply the recommendations that Google has made on multiregional websites by adding canonical and rel link elements, as well as specifying the .fr version as the canonical version. (Details below)

BUT: in the Google+ hangout [plus.google.com ] Pierre Far of Google says that this will lead only to an URL replacement without changing the ranking. And he continues "Our ranking takes account of many signals and suppose that the algos decide that the canonical URL deserves position 5 for this query. On www.google.com, we would show www.example.com as position 5. On www.google.ie, we'd replace that to show ie.example.com at position 5 and on www.google.co.uk we'd replace that to show uk.example.com."

To me, it is not clear in this statement on what Google version the canonical version “deserves position 5”.

If before the launch of the .be website, my .fr-page ranks #1 on google.fr but #14 on google.be, what will be the ranking for the new .be-page on google.be if I use hreflang + canonical link elements:
a) Will the ranking be close to #1, because the new .be-page inherits the indexing signals from its canonical version AND now is considered as relevant for Belgium because of its .be domain?
b) Will the ranking be more or less unchanged, because it’s still the canonical version (the .fr-page) which is considered and the .be domain is not taken into account as positive additional indexing signal?
c) Will the ranking be worse than #14, because the new .be-page is newer as its canonical version and therefore benfits from less indexing signals?

What do you suggest? Option 1 or 2?

Thanks a lot for your help.

PS: Here is what I would do if I choose option 2)

In order to achieve that Google shows the .fr version for users being located in France and elsewhere, as well as the .be version for users being located in Belgium, I would add the following link elements to the relevant pages:

I use the homepage only as an example. I am aware that I need to repeat it for all pages.

On the .fr homepage
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.mysite.fr/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-be" href="http:// www.mysite.be/fr-be/" />

On the .be homepage of the French section
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.fr/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.mysite.fr/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-be" href="http://www.mysite.be/fr-be/" />

[edited by: tedster at 3:47 pm (utc) on Mar 27, 2012]
[edit reason] make the link active [/edit]

[tedster]

Hello seidelbastpa - welcome to the forums. that Google+ page from Pierre Far is an excellent find.

One difference between Pierre Far's discussion and your situation is that all the alternate language content he is discussing exists on subdomains of a .com TLD - but your situation is using ccTLDs.

I don't have deep experience in this area, but my understanding is that the country code TLD automatically targets the correct country with no further "fancy dancing" involved. At least that's how I've seen it work out in practice in several cases.

[seidelbastpa]

Hello tedster,

Yes, I also thought that a ccTLD is sufficient ... until Google announced the New markup for multilingual content on Dec 05, 2011. [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.fr...]

In the same Google+ hangout, another Google employee, Christopher Semtours, confirms that the href lang + canonical markup should be used for duplicate content on different TLDs as well.

But the question on how this impacts the ranking still remains.

[rango]

What you are suggesting here: option 2, is in my opinion correct and based on all Google's suggestions that I've read seems correct also.

Not adding the canonical tag is asking for duplicate content issues and it's best to avoid that!

I recently totally stuffed up a situation with hreflang and canonical tags by doing what you're talking about except applying it to totally different languages. That was *definitely* not the right thing to do. But I did get a bit better idea of how things would be handled.

It kind of worked like this:

* Searched for "widget" (english) in google.fr
* Result popped up with english text as title, etc
* BUT the url pointed to a french page which had the canonical tag back to the english page.

Rankings were being based on the English page content, not the French page. As a result, all French language searches plummeted.

In your case though, that's not a problem because both are French. I don't think your rankings would suffer by using the canonical tag the way you plan to.

If there is any difference in Belgian French titles, etc. compared to French French titles, then it will be slightly odd, because the user will see the French French titles in Belgium even though the link points to the Belgian French page (if that makes sense :D).

[seidelbastpa]

Hello,

JohnMu / Johannes Müller of Google in Switzerland has said here [groups.google.com ]

Generally speaking, the rel-alternate-hreflang construct does not change the ranking of your pages. However, when a page where you use this markup shows up in the search results, we may use this markup to find alternate, equivalent pages of yours. If one of those alternates is a better match for the user, their query language, and the location, then we may swap out the URL. So in practice, it won't change the ranking of your pages, but it will attempt to make sure that the best-suited URL (out of the list of alternates) is shown there.

My conclusion is:
1. If I use the rel-alternate-hreflang construct a .fr and a .be page will continue to compete with each other, so our .be pages might get better results and if they don't I still keep the ranking of the .fr page. Also, the URL of the .fr page might be swapped to a .be page and propably this will improve the CTR as users from Belgium will tend to find .be domains more relevant.
2. If I use the canonical construct, a .fr page and a .be page WON'T compete with each other because everything leads to the canonical version (.fr page).
3. In my opinion, Google cannot assume that all webmasters are aware of the rel-alternate-hreflang construct and subsequently Google must continue to support (at least for some time), the rule that "reproducing the same content on [different ccTLDs] was perfectly acceptable and shouldn't trigger removal for duplicate content"

So I intend to implement the .be site with the rel-alternate-hreflang construct but without the cananonical construct.

Does anybody have an opinion?

[rango]

2. If I use the canonical construct, a .fr page and a .be page WON'T compete with each other because everything leads to the canonical version (.fr page)

For Belgian searchers, the link will point to your .be version if you use canonical and hreflang setup. The title and snippet will be taken from the .fr version.

And you entirely avoid the possibility of duplicate content issues. I don't think you can say Google *must* do anything, so why not stay on the safe side and stick to their recommendations?

I don't really see the downside of canonical + hreflang in your case.

[seidelbastpa]

Thanks Rango,

The downsite I see, and I tried to express it in my conclusions, that if I use the canonical tag there is no chance that the new .be page performs better than the former .fr page.

If I don't use the canonical tag, the .be has so to speak it's own life and can outrank the .fr version.

would you agree?

Of course, I will monitor the results closely and if something backfires, I will add the canonical element.

Cheers

[rango]

Yeah, you have a point there, though I'd still prefer to just be focussing efforts on one page rather than try to push up two of them separately.

It's a bit of a risky game and there's nothing stopping Google penalizing one of the domains for duplicate content either.

[seidelbastpa]

Hello rango (coming back after the Easter break)

To my knowledge, Google is only penalising duplicate content if it is of spammy nature, which is not the case here.

the "risk" is that I don't win much as the .be signal is not strong enough. But I can live with that.

[Andy Langton]

There is no penalty for duplicate or similar content. Google will simply select one copy to rank - but this might be at your expense, since it could choose a copy that ranks badly, and lower your visibility.

I've worked quite bit on gaining local/localised rankings in Google, so I can share a little experience on hreflang.

I've found it to be an easy way to achieve result "replacement" whereby you can get a more attractive, localised copy of a brand page to display in preference to another URL. This is for "high confidence" results - i.e. Google knows what should rank, and switches appropriately, much in the same way as it has historically done for local TLDs.

That said, Google is cagey about the process. If the result is not high confidence, you can actually get multiple copies of the "same" page in local results. Once local copies get backlinks, Google seems to get easily confused about what it should display.

I've also found that (if referenced via hreflang alone) Google doesn't result "trust" the localised copy at all, and it has no opportunity to rank, except for the keywords where it is happy to replace one URL with a localised copy. This is to be expected, of course!

So, I would say that Google's own advice seems reasonable close to my own experience. But you don't get free additional coverage unless you promote your local copies appropriately.