I have a website which currently displays all prices in US dollars. I'd like to change it to pounds if you are from the UK and euros if you are from France or Germany. The text on the page will always be displayed in English.
I've explored the various options and most say that Google prefers you to offer different urls for each variation rather that simply render different content based on the users location/ip address.
Therefore say I'm on my shop home page I would offer the following urls (which display the appropriate currency):
www.example.com/shop - default which is US dollars
www.example.com/uk/shop - UK
www.example.com/fr/shop - France
www.example.com/de/shop - Germany
Obviously I don't want Google to penalise me for duplicate content. I have been researching hreflang to get by this but haven't quite fully grasped it as a lot of the examples are over simplified.
Say for example I am on www.example.com/shop. Would I simply render the following within the head?:
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.example.com/uk/shop" hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.example.com/fr/shop" hreflang="fr-fr" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.example.com/de/shop" hreflang="de-de" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.example.com/shop" hreflang="x-default" />
Now if I was on www.example.com/fr/shop would I need to render the same as above?
Additional Questions:
Should I provide a variant for en-us even though it would be the same as the default?
Also if the user was on www.example.com/shop and I detected the user was from France would I simply redirect the user to www.example.com/fr/shop? My trouble with this is how could someone in France see prices in dollars? I'm assuming I could store a cookie to make sure this redirection only happens the first time.
My final question is does this make sense to do this even though the text will still be in English and the content will only vary by price/currency?
I know that's quite a few questions but I'd really appreciate the clarification. Thanks
Obviously I don't want Google to penalise me for duplicate content.
Google does not penalize websites for duplicate content.
Say for example I am on www.example.com/shop. Would I simply render the following within the head?
Yes.
Now if I was on www.example.com/fr/shop would I need to render the same as above?
Yes.
Should I provide a variant for en-us even though it would be the same as the default?
No.
Also if the user was on www.example.com/shop and I detected the user was from France would I simply redirect the user to www.example.com/fr/shop? My trouble with this is how could someone in France see prices in dollars?
You should. Add a conversion button on your page.
My final question is does this make sense to do this even tough the text will still be in English and the content will only vary by price/currency?
Not really, you should have translated text too.
Related
What namespace/scheme/whatever does this "vr:canonical" come from?
<meta property="vr:canonical" content="URL_FROM_OTHER_PAGE" />
(edit: I know canonical links, just curious about that "vr:" thing)
After analyzing the page (and the code of its used trackers and counters and advertising scripts), this seems to be a property used by an advertising tool named "VisualRevenue", a product by the Company Outbrain.
Thanks for your effort.
For example:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://moz.com/blog" />
This would tell Google that the page in question should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL above and that all of the link & content metrics the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL.
The Canonical URL tag attribute is similar in many ways to a 301 redirect from an SEO perspective. In essence, you're telling the engines that multiple pages should be considered as one (which a 301 does), without actually redirecting visitors to the new URL
Today I came across a <link rel="image_src"> tag. I don't know about it, so I use google. Google tell me that this tag are similar to og:image. So I came to open graph main site to read about it http://ogp.me/, but i found nothing about link rel="image_src". So this tag is replacement to meta property="og:image" or is in special tag in another specification ? How use this tag or for what is used?
The rel attribute specifies the type of the link, i.e. the kind of the relationship between the document and the linked resource. Usually just a few keywords, like stylesheet and icon, are used. Although many other keywords have been proposed and registered, most of them are write-only: they are meant to express something, but nobody cares (no software uses the information).
The extension mechanisms of HTML5 include, in the description of link types, a somewhat obscure mechanism that allows, in theory, anyone register his favorite keyword in the existing rel values wiki to make documents using it as rel value “conforming”.
And image_src has indeed been registered there, with the information that it is used to “specify a Webpage Icon for use by Facebook, Yahoo, Digg, etc.”, no specification has been identified but an article about it is linked to, and it is “probably redundant with rel=icon”.
You can use this tag to use an image as the thumb for link share.
When someone posts a link to your site on social media, such as Facebook, the image that is displayed with your link is usually the first one in your code. This may not be the image that best fits defines your site, and it may not fit well in the small box that Facebook posts. The link rel="image_src" tag lets you control what image (or images, you can have more than one by stacking separate references) is displayed alongside your link.
I'm dealing with a request to change the OG meta tags for pages based on the "status" of an item on that page, which could change every few days. The goal is to have something related to the "current status" show up when a user shares the page such as "X is happening right now!" instead of a normal "This is the page for X.". To do this, it seems we would need to change og:title and og:description dynamically.
Instinctively, I think having these change too often could be bad for SEO but I have yet to find any real proof. I've been looking for any information on the impact of changing these tags too often, but have found nothing. Does anyone have any hard evidence that this would actually hurt SEO or that there would be any other detrimental effect?
Meta Title and Description are 2 important factors in SEO.
Changing them every week would not hurt.
What would hurt you, is if the new Title and Description are not related to the content you had previously, this would definitely confuse Google.
Also keep in mind that Google may crawls your website once a week, or even more. Google may miss completely new metas if you change them too often.
Making dynamic meta tag will just only give bad effect for your page . considering that Google update their Database everyday, you will just make it confusing for them .
And also, meta tag is for Search engine not for human . Alternatively, you can make that Status in your page Social media, not on your main Site
Generally, the point of having tags is to let the search engines have an idea what your site is about.
Ranking well in the search engines take time; if the tags keep changing, the search engines won't be able to determine effectively what a page is about. In terms of SEO, that wouldn't help the overall rankings and bringing in traffic.
I'm looking how to add meta info to a page.
One way is the meta tag
<metatag name="country" content="Canada" />
another I saw is
<metatag name="geo.country" content="CA" />
using the ISO 3166.
I like the second one because is standard with ISO and easy to understand by crawlers.
Which one of these options is standard? Or most of the crawlers accept them ?
I know that Google does not use any of them, but Bing does.
One site is for desktop web browsers and another one is for WAP (mobile) browsers. Is there any difference?
Why not use both? BTW it's <meta /> not <metatag />
From what I've seen, though, geo.country may be the way to go.
http://marketingblogonline.com/geo-tag-seo.html
I still don't see any reason not to use both, though.
EDIT: Actually, poking around a little more I see that <meta name="country"> doesn't seem to be doing much– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=0610ddf168b8d424&hl=en.
You also want to consider that a global business probably shouldn't have a country tied to it, anyway. Otherwise you're limiting your customer base.
But, if you are certain that making your website local will help your business, I have just read that HTML5's lang attribute identifies both country and language.
<html lang="en-US">
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 –– List of country codes
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4646.txt –– How to write the lang attribute.
First off I want to say that I wasn't really sure where to post this but it is very much programming related. If it is in the wrong spot I apologize and please let me know where I should post it instead.
When sharing an article on a friends wall, facebook will grab a thumbnail of the article. How do they always get the right thumbnail from articles?
It doesn't grab the logo img element of of http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/world/asia/07convoys.html?hp for example but rather grabs the correct image element that corresponds with the article.
I'm looking to do something similar and was wondering of a good way to parse the html to find the image given this example. Thanks.
Actually, Facebook's way of finding thumbnails isn't so magical. It searches for a set of <meta> and <link> tags which specify which title, description, and image to use.
If it cannot find any of the <meta> and <link> tags it is looking for, it basically asks the user to choose whichever <img> tag fits.
In the case of the NY Times, it uses the following:
<meta name="thumbnail" content="whatever.jpg" />
Facebook recommends you use a <link> tag instead for the thumbnail.
<meta name="title" content="title" />
<meta name="description" content="description " />
<link rel="image_src" href="thumbnail_image" />
Source: Facebok Share/Specifying Meta Tags
They don't always grab the correct image, even though there's certainly some good logic in place.
In many cases, I've seen a list of thumbnails to choose from, meaning Facebook's parser considered them equally relevant.
I would guess they (probably among other things) look at the dom structure and find images close to content that looks "shareable".
UPDATE:
After some empirical testing, it seems that image dimensions play a big role. Images too small and too wide are not considered thumbnails. If your logo is the right size though, expect it to show up as one of the thumbnails. Try sharing something on http://www.e24.se for example.
These are just guesses as I don't have any knowledge of Facebook's internal operations, but if I were parsing thumbnails from a page I would consider several things:
Size of the image, as previously stated
Relevant keywords in the href or alt attributes
Location of the <img> tag on page, the closer to relevant content the better, but may not always work for complicated layouts
Absence of ad-related keywords in the <img> tag or nearby tags (doubleclick comes to mind)
Also, as far as I know the Facebook meta tags are fairly new, so my guess is that the link page scraper is still grabbing images the hard way ;) However if you're running a site and want Facebook to grab the right information when it scrapes your pages I highly suggest implementing them.