Hello again. In this lesson you'll receive global guidance from the search engines directly. Search engines want you to be effective in a global economy. Clearly they can drive more paid search revenue, when there's more content. However, they also care deeply that their users around the world can make better use of their search engines to get to the content they need. You know how to enable this, in the search engines have given guidance on how to set up your sites in a global manner most effectively. In this lesson, we'll go into more detail on that guidance, and what you can do about it. You'll learn knowledge of what's required to do SEO globally from the search engine's perspective, specific coverage on the Hreflang tagging initiative, and how to set up Google Search Console settings correctly for global SEO. So let's get into it. What is the guidance from Search engines on multi-regional and multilingual sites? Predominantly this will be from Google. Google says make sure the page language is obvious. Make sure each language version is easily discoverable. Consider your choice of URL carefully. Target site content to a specific country. Have the appropriate URL structure and geotargeting. I'll go into more detail on each of these shortly. Make sure the page language is obvious. Google uses only the visible content of your page to determine its language. They don't use any code level language information such as lang attributes. Help Google determine the correct language by using a single language for content and navigation on each page and not doing any side-by-side translation. Additionally, they recommend you use a robots.txt file to block their engines from crawling automatically translated pages on your site. These auto translations often can be viewed as spam and can create a poor perception of your site. So you do want to remove them from the index. Make sure each language version is easily discoverable. You can do this best by keeping the content for each language on separate URLs. Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way a French user who lands on the German version of your page, can get to the right language version with a single click. Also they suggest avoiding automatic redirection based on the user's language. These redirections could prevent users from viewing all the versions of your site. Hreflang tag is a critical consideration if you're doing multilingual. Google uses this rel alternate hreflang attribute to serve the correct language or regional URL in search results. Some scenarios where this tag is recommended; keeping the main content in a single language and translating only in the template. Therefore pages that feature user-generated content like forums, they'll typically do this. Perhaps your content has small regional variations with similar content in a single language. For example, you might have English language content targeted to the US, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and India, your site content is fully translated, but it doesn't show up for those searching from their country. They see the US English content because it ranks better due to the algorithm rather than content in their language or country of choice. Using site maps to indicate alternate language pages. So the implementation of Hreflang can be a little tricky. If your site is using this, you want to enable the site map to be where Google can find the instruction and the direction for these Href alternate language pages. Targeting site content to a specific country allows engines to be aware of and improve the quality of the search results for those different countries. ccTLDs or country code top-level domains, is the clearest indicator whether that content is for Germany versus China versus France based on the ISO code used in the domain itself. You can also use server location and specifically the IP address of the server in the country where you're hosting content in order to affiliate that IP address more closely to the content and the language it represents. You can also use the global settings in Google Search Console. By setting up international targeting when you have a generic top-level domain, it helps Google determine which countries are most important for users intended to find them. If your site has a country coded top-level domains such as,.de,.fr,.au, it's already associated with a geographic region. So in that case you wouldn't use the geotargeting option in Google Search Console. Now if no Search Console settings are set up, Google relies largely on the sites country domain and signals including the IP address, any location information on the page, any links to the page from within the country, and even any currency information showing, pounds versus dollars versus yen, are additional indicators. So duplicate content for international sites does add another level of complexity. When your website is providing content for different regions and in different languages, sometimes content can be created that's very similar to other content. This generally isn't a problem as long as that content is for different users in different countries. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs, for example, a ccTLD domain and a.com/country folder, you should pick a preferred version and either redirect, or use rel canonicals appropriately. In addition, follow the guidelines for rel alternate hreflang tagging to make sure the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers. Bing also includes information about geotargeting. This gives a hint to Bing about the intended audience for your website or section of the site. Now they do allow you to do this with multinational sites not requiring that you verify each section to geotarget separately. So you can define a country audience for your entire website or for sections of your website from within a single view. This is slightly different than Google which does require you to do it at a country by country level. Now the other global engines that are in the second tier predominantly Yandex, Baidu, and Naver are definitely worth doing some research on. Because they're so specific to certain regions. I suggest you do some research on your own to understand what's unique to those properties. Two things though that I'll say, the best practices of good-quality content, strong links internally and externally, and a solid website infrastructure are always good principles to keep in mind. The second is that some of these engines have a bias or some correlation with advertising or ads that are more predominant in the search results. So you will want to account for that as you understand in particular Yandex, Baidu, and Naver's algorithm for both paid and organic listings. So in this lesson we've covered the guidance that the search engines have provided on doing global SEO effectively. It is imperative that your strategy is aligned with their overall objectives in guidance. This allows you to get the most benefit from your website performance and target content and conversions that you've worked really hard to get on your website for those audiences globally that should be served that content in the most effective way.
