It is worthwhile an English version for just 0.8% of the traffic?

[guarriman3]

One of my websites has two versions:

in Spanish (https://products.example.com), with 400,000 products/URLs

in English (https://en.products.example.com), with other 400,000 products/URLs.

I created the English version in 2015 to focus on the US market. However, I'm seeing that the different Google updates eroded 86% the clicks from Google of the English version, as the Spanish one remained unchanged, as you can see in the attached images:

Spanish: [ibb.co...]

English: [ibb.co...]

As far as I've checked, the hreflang tags are correctly implemented.

In the last 28 days, the English version received only 0.8% of the clicks from Google, mainly from the US. However, the clicks from the US to the Spanish version are 6 times higher than to the English version.

I'm suspecting that the 400,000 URLs of the English version are damaging my crawl budget and my ranking. So I'm considering to:

create 301 redirects from each one of the English URLs to the Spanish URLs

remove (410) the 400,000 English URLs

noindex the 400,000 English URLs

I think that the best option is the last one (noindex), since I can still invite users to visit the English version. My plan is to set 'noindex' in each one of the 400,000 URLs of 'https://en.products.example.com' and:

leave the hreflang tags on both versions

not use 'robots.txt'

remove the sitemaps

I would love to hear your thoughts.

[lucy24]

One quick thought: If you’re concerned about your crawl budget, "noindex" won’t help, since they have to crawl in order to see the tag. This applies equally, whether you use a <robots meta> or an x-robots directive. I think if G### keeps meeting noindex repeatedly, they'll reduce crawling, but that will happen over a long time.

to set 'noindex' in each one of

I hope you didn’t mean that literally :) and that instead you have some straightforward way of appending noindex to all those 400,000 pages in one fell swoop.

[guarriman3]

If you’re concerned about your crawl budget, "noindex" won’t help

Yes, you're right, Google will keep crawling my site. But, as you claim, in the long term they will stop doing it. And I want to save crawl budget and also deindex the whole site, to give relevance only to the Spanish URLs. I cannot see any other alternative

I hope you didn’t mean that literally

I will modify the PHP code of the site to set the X-Robots directive for all the requests for the English subdomain. Not sure if I would be able through Apache's htaccess.

[lucy24]

Not sure if I would be able through Apache's htaccess.

It would depend on the physical directory structure, so probably not.

:: quick run to Apache docs ::

Yah, thought so. <Location>--which, confusingly, is based on URLpath rather than physical location--can't be used in htaccess, while <Files> depends on individual filenames. (Which, in your case, is probably “index.php" throughout.) And mod_rewrite doesn’t seem to have a header-setting flag, darn it.

Edit: Oh, wait, you said subdomain. If this corresponds to a different directory on the server, it should be straightforward, since all you'd need to do is put a single universal

Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"

directive in the htaccess for this directory.