International Targeting

[William]

Hello,

I'm looking for some feedback. I created a thread here: Christforums International Targeting

My question is about the code I added, whether it is even necessary or may provide a better signal to Google in indexing the site "globally".

Your thoughts?

I added this to the header_css:

<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.christforums.org" hreflang="en"> 
 <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.christforums.org" hreflang="x-default" /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">

I am rather uncertain as to whether language needs be specified, but I want to target English speakers not only from the U.S. but also Europe, France, Great Britain, Australia, etc etc. Enjoy, William

[glennrocksvb]

I've never done International Targeting before but reading the Webmaster Tools help on it, I think it is used if your site supports/offers multiple languages and you want to ensure that your target audience will see in the Google search results the pages in your site that is relevant to the user's language. So someone from Spain will be linked from Google to Spanish version of your site and someone from Germany, to German language. Since you only have one language version of your site, I don't think you need to set International Targeting at all. This is just my understanding, but I could be wrong.

[William]

I was rather unclear as to whether a site could be of single language but multi regional. Like you I read some things that made me believe I would need a different url for en-gb and en-us etc. I'll keep the tags and meta information in place and see how it goes in a few weeks.

I came from using a Joomla site, and if I remember correctly the default language was set to en-gb. I noticed at that time a strong traffic flow from Great Britain. Most of my current traffic is from the U.S., and I was rather intrigued to find the geo targeting in webmaster tools set to U.S. Now that I have "unlisted" I'll see in a few weeks whether this is meaningful at all. With a year of statistics I should be quite able to determine if my pooling changed from one area to the next and whether it is significant.

Thanks Glenn,
William