One SEO professional asked John Mueller during the submitted Question and Answers segment of his hangout whether they should make a separate UK version of their English blog.
Their question was: the company they work for is working on expanding its market in the UK. They recently launched a UK subsite. Seventy percent of their U.S. traffic comes from their blog, and they don’t currently have a blog on the UK subsite.
They are translating their posts into the Queen’s English. And they are wondering if doing this would be beneficial for UK exposure.
John explains that he doubts that doing this would make a big difference.
In particular, when it comes to hreflang, which is the way that one would connect different language or country versions of their pages, Google would not be ranking these pages better just because they have a local version.
It’s more about if they understand that there’s a local version, and they have that local version indexed, and it’s a unique page, then they could swap out that URL at the same position in the search results to the more local version.
It’s not that your site will rank better.
So, in the UK, if you have a UK version, it’s just that Google would potentially show your link to your UK page instead of the current one.
For informational blog posts, John suspects that you don’t really need to do that. One of the things that John would also take into consideration with internationalization is that fewer pages are almost always better than having more pages.
If you can limit the number of pages that you provide, by not doing a UK version of content that doesn’t necessarily need to have a UK version, then that’s almost always better for your site and it’s easier to maintain.
This happens at approximately the 03:15 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 03:15
Okay, so the first question I have on my list here is: the company I work at is working on expanding its market in the UK and recently launched a UK subsite. 70% of our US traffic comes from our blog, and we don’t currently have a blog on the UK subsite. Would translating our US blog posts into the Queen’s English be beneficial for UK exposure?
John (Answer) 03:42
I doubt that would make a big difference. So in particular, when it comes to hreflang, which is the way that you would connect different language or country versions of your pages, we would not be ranking these pages better just because we have a local version. It’s more that if we understand that there’s a local version, and we have that local version indexed, and it’s a unique page, then we could swap out that URL at the same position in the search results to the more local version.
So it’s not that your site will rank better in the UK, if you have a UK version. It’s just that we would potentially show the link to your UK page instead of the current one. For essentially informational blog posts, I suspect you don’t really need to do that. And one of the things I would also take into account with internationalization is that fewer pages are almost always much better than having more pages.
So if you can limit the number of pages that you provide, by not doing a UK version of content that doesn’t necessarily need to have a UK version, then that’s almost always better for your site and it’s easier for you to maintain.
