Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller, explains how sites can optimize country-specific search result content through the strategic use of subdirectories.
The topic was discussed in a recent Google Search Central SEO office hour hangout.
A guy named Hazel Wwrong joined the livestream to ask Mueller how Google can identify when site content is geolocated, rather than looking for an implementation of hreflang.
In response, Mueller describes how Google looks for patterns in URLs to indicate the target country of a page.
You can use this information to structure your website in a way that targets multiple countries with the same domain.
Continue reading the following sections for more details.
How to use subdirectories to target multiple countries with the same domain
When asked what signals Google looks for to identify when content is optimized for a particular country, Mueller said:
“We try to group URLs by clear patterns that we can identify. For example, by subdomain or subdirectory.
So if you’re in a subdirectory, with a country higher up in the path, then it’s easier for us to say that everything under this path is for this country and everything under this other path is for another of a country.
You can also verify each path in Search Console and explicitly state that the path applies to this country or that the path applies to another country, which is easier for us. “
The URL pattern described by Mueller looks like this in practice.
Suppose you own a store in the US that ships products to the rest of the world. Here’s what the URL pattern looks like:
- America: your-website.com/products
- Canada: your-website.com/canada/products
- U.K: your-website.com/uk/products
etc.
Mueller points out that if you’re already using hreflang and Search Console to target specific countries, using subdirectories probably won’t make much of a difference.
So if your site isn’t set up this way, you don’t have to change everything around you.
This is just another signal that Google looks for, in addition to other geolocation signals.
“In practice, I don’t hear a lot of people saying it makes a huge difference. So I don’t know if that’s something you really need to do, especially if it’s a more complex setup.
But I’ll try to make it as clear as possible which country is associated with each URL. Have a clear path in the URL.
I think someone finally filed a question about using the country as a URL parameter. In theory, you can do this. I think it becomes more difficult for our system to identify which URLs belong to which country. So I don’t think we’re likely to embrace geolocation.
Obviously if you are using hreflang then this is not a problem as you can do this on a per URL basis. “
Hear Mueller’s full response in the video below:
For more information on geolocation, see:
Featured image: Nikolai Klimenko/Shutterstock
