Hi, Was wondering if someone would know what's going on here. We've been searching for a while and can't fix this on Google search. We just want to be relevant and for some reasons, google doesn't index it right. The search keyword term is in French language and the search result is our english page. We've set the Language settings properly... Not sure what's going on. Any ideas?
I am not an expert but from what I understand their bot looks for internal "signals" to identify if the domain and the subdomain should be treated as separate websites. If it doesn't find enough sufficient data it won't treat them as such. It would be helpful to you, I think, to check out this page to find out all the nuances regarding how the bot indexes sites: https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/hangout-library/subdomains/ The info is from the top gurus, so it's right on the mark.
It happen also in my search results last week they have similarity but still most related I think, my website ranks in top ten but then i noticed that there is one greek language website url is also ranking in top 10 first page. I think Google is experiementing the other languages information that are most related to the target query regardless of its languages.
Possible that Google is experimenting however, I found that the hreflang must be at the beginning of your <head> tag to ensure Google to crawl and classify your site properly. I've made the change and I monitor the search results at the moment.
No, our sitemap URLs are only showing the french ones. The URL is different for English using the sub-domain en.sportdirect.ca and none of those URLs are in the sitemap.. (restrictions with Shopify) However, google indexed it as a french URL in the french results. I just checked again after the header row change with HREFLANG and the results shows the same.
Your sitemap is quite a mess. Did you see that - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en Did you have to put English version in subdomain necessarily? Perhaps it just ranks better than www (French) version.
Our sitemap is automatically created by Shopify and we can't change that, unfortunately. We had an option to put English as a variable instead but I find it's cleaner when embedded in a sub-domain sitemap. Google actually recommends using sub-domain or sub-folders such as sportdirect.ca/en or sportdirect.ca for french as our main native language. And Yes, we followed Google's recommendation for Hreflang settings. We changed them back in late November as well as moved the tag at the top of the page after the <head> as recommended. We didn't implement the "default" value maybe that's the issue. I just checked and I would have expected this page to rank higher with the french result given it's a french search. These are the Hreflang settings found at the top of that page. Following language code ISO 639-1 standards. <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://www.sportdirect.ca/collections/gymnastique" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://en.sportdirect.ca/collections/gymnastique" /> At this point, I'm thinking maybe Google didn't re-crawl that page yet. That's why it's still showing. Is there a last crawl date available?
Perhaps it is understood and tolerated by search engines, yet you have two separate websites for now. Definitely go with x-default. Yes it is available in Google search console.