I have read the documentation from Google about the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag.
Using this tag tells Google where pages are located with basically the same content, but in other languages or tageted at other geo locations.
Now I have a question about this:
Let's say I have the website example.com.
It is in English, and I welcome worldwide the English speaking visitor.
For Adsense optimization however, I have set the geo targeting (in webmastertools) to USA, so that this helps me to get the optimal number of visitors from the USA.
However, Canada and the UK are also intersting countries to get visitors from.
Now if I would use the 'rel="alternate" hreflang="x"' tag, could I optimize to get visitors from those countries too ?
Example:
I setup a copy of example.com at
example.co.uk
example.ca
and then adding to the headers:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-CO.UK" href="http://www.example.co.uk/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-CA" href="http://www.example.ca/" />
So I tell Google these are pages with basically the same content, geo targeted at different countries.
Normally this is done when for example you work with payments, and one country pays in US dollar, a and another one in British Pound. Then you can setup copies from your pages, each with the correct currency, and you tell Google what page is for which country.
In my case I would change some grammar as used grammar can be a bit different in the different English speaking countries,but that would be the only difference there is between the pages.
In my example example.com doesn't rank so well for Canada ( as it is geo targeted for USA), but using this tag, do you think example.ca would rank better in Canada then example.com ?
Do you think it makes sense to set up these copies with country specific tld's, (and using the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag) to rank better in the country specific search engines ?
( assuming that country specific tld's are a positive factor in country specific search engines )
[edited by: brotherhood_of_LAN at 7:29 pm (utc) on Nov 22, 2013]
[edit reason] Changes mysite to preferred example.com [/edit]
