Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We are setting up several international sites. Ideally, we wouldn't set up any redirects, but if we have to (for merchandising reasons etc) I'd like to assess what the next best option would be. A secondary option could be that we implement the redirects based on IP. However, Google then wouldn't be able to access the content for all the international sites (we're setting up 6 in total) and would only index the .com site. I'm wondering whether the Hreflang annotations would still allow Google to find the International sites? If not, that's a lot of content we are not fully benefiting from. Another option could be that we treat the Googlebot user agent differently, but this would probably be considered as cloaking by the G-Man. If there are any other options, please let me know.

Hi there superMozers! I´ve read a quite a few questions about multi-lingual sites but none answered my doubt / idea, so here it is: I´m re-designing an old website for a hotel in 4 different languages which are all** hosted on the same .com domain** as follows: example.com/english/ for english example.com/espanol/ for **spanish ** example.com/francais/ for french example.com/portugues/ for portuguese While doing keyword search, I have noticed that many travel agencies separate geographical areas by folders, therefor an **agency pomoting beach hotels in South America **will have a structure as follows: travelagency.com/argentina-beach-hotels/ travelagency.com/peru-beach-hotels/ and they list hotels in each folder, therefor benefiting from those keywords to rank ahead of many independent hotels sites from those areas. What **I would like to **do -rather than just naming those folders with the traditional /en/ for english or /fr/ for french etc- is take advantage of this extra language subfolder to_´include´_ important keywords in the name of the subfolders in the following way (supposing the we have a beach hotel in Argentina): example.com/argentina-beach-hotel/ for english example.com/hotel-playa-argentina/ for **spanish  ** example.com/hotel-plage-argentine/ for french example.com/hotel-praia-argentina/ for portuguese Note that the same keywords are used in the name of the folder, but translated into the language the subfolders are. In order to make things clear for the search engines I would specify the language in the html  for each page. My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´ although most travel agencies do it in their site structure. Any Mozers have experience with this, any idea on how search engines may react, or if they could penalise the site? Thanks in advance!

I have a client who already has rankings in the US & internationally. The site is broken down like this: url.com (main site with USA & International Rankings) url.com/de url.com/de-english url.com/ng url.com/au url.com/ch url.com/ch-french url.com/etc Each folder has it's own sitmap & relative content for it's respective country. I am reading in google webmaster tools > site config > settings, the option under 'Learn More': "If you don't want your site associated with any location, select Unlisted." If I want to keep my client's international rankings the way it currently is on url.com, do NOT geo target to United States? So I select unlisted, right? Would I use geo targeting on the url.com/de, url.com/de-english, url.com/ng, url.com/au and so on?