Only 1 language out of 3 has most visitors?

[Actlas]

Our .com website is hosted in Belgium and is fully translated using the Falang extension in Dutch (main language (.com/nl), French (.com/fr) and English (.com/en).

In Google webmaster tools:
.com/nl is geotargetted to Belgium
.com itself is geotargetted internationally

Almost all visitors are Dutch speaking and come from the Dutch speaking part of Belgium and the Netherlands. We have very little international visitors. Even almost no visitors at all from the French speaking part of Belgium.

Any ideas on how to improve this?
Should .com/fr and .com/en be geotargetted internationally specifically by adding those in webmastertools?

[waarnemer]

if you are using a sitemapping tool like xmap, you can add language specific sitemaps..

What is your sites URL?

[Actlas]

You can find our website here. We are indeed using xmap and submitted language specific site maps. We also applied most basic seo best practises.

Our site is indexed pretty well but our page rank is low. Especially the English and French versions of the site are doing bad. Perhaps we are getting penalised by Google for some reason? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Google webmaster tools or analytics access can be provided if you would want to create a quick look.

Bedankt!

[waarnemer]

You rank being low is the least I'd worry about...
What you need to know is if your site visitors really do business with you...

I mean... If I have 100 visitors they all just never search for me on google but just type my url from a piece of paper, and all 100 spend €10000,- with me, my ranking probably is low based on visitor count, but i have a great conversion...

Anyway... back to the tech site of your website...

• your landing pages expire in the past.. 1st january 2001..?
• other pages and files do expire two hours ago.... ?
• firebugs pagespeed warns to set a cache validator...
• firebugs console gets me the error: jquery is not defined..
  it is there, but your jquery.ui.min.js is called before jquery itself causing the error.
  also there are some deprecated mootools functions...

Now two warnings Google may penalize now/in future:

• Password fields present on an insecure (http://) page. This is a security risk that allows user login credentials to be stolen.
• Password fields present in a form with an insecure (http://) form action. This is a security risk that allows user login credentials to be stolen.

Meaning you have login fields and forms on your page whilst not having a secured site (https://)

Now another thing is that your default language is probably dutch... all new visitors do see the dutch landing page first.
Have the default in english, have the language selected by visitors browser settings.
This ensures me from the Netherlands getting the site in dutch and our chinese visitor getting it in english as chinese is not there and it falls back to english.
Have the sitemap xmls from xmap submitted to webmaster tools per language.
Check this: Two cookies with the same name get set: ie: 4c6b275b817d6e16afe6e9f0e709d935. One containing the language, one containing language and path..
When I select another language, let's say french, a third with the same name gets set containing language and path..
And it is not only that particular cookie...
After browsing your site for a while I have a huge number of similar named cookies piling up in my browser. The cookie mechanism should replace the cookie, not add up...

Not all articles have been translated.. http://www.actual-laser.com/en/what-we- ... neges-inox (full content and url)
http://www.actual-laser.com/fr/componen ... n-markeren (only url)..

....Now back to why you do have dutch speaking customers and no french and english..
There is so much to consider...
Before you had a website... where did your customers come from?
How and where do you advertise and profile your company besides the internet?
This also will create traffic to your site.. these french and english have to know you to become relevant...
You are competing with more in french (110 milj native speakers) and english (335 milj native speakers+lingua franca) than you do in dutch (23 milj native speakers). So you can expect more businesses like yours and at least the words in search queries do tend to be used more in these languages... your context and relevance need to be very clear...

Another thing to consider... when from the UK.. can I buy? How do you ship? Put it in on your page.. Someone coming from Australia wants to know..
Make your self relevant to those people too.

Oh and yes if possible target these /fr/ and /en/ to the right locations...

[Actlas]

Thanks alot for your extensive research! I will try to fix these problems as soon as possible first.

The other reason behind bad ranking seems to be the massive amount of pages google (still) has in its index that needs to be cleaned up by returning 404's as far as I know. Are there tricks to speed up google removing old urls instead of applying them for deletion one by one in webmastertools?

What troubles me is the fact that the cms doesn't always return a 404 although it should.
/fr/naamplaten or other random text returns a blank page instead of a 404.
/nl/naamplaten should be the only url returning a page, /fr/plaques-nominatives is the French version.

[waarnemer]

mmhh for the blank pages, do check the status of that page using firebug for instance..

for me http://www.actual-laser.com/fr/naamplaten shows your site but no component content... just design, menu and footer...

[Actlas]

I added the following the following lines to htaccess by following the seo advice from moz.com

Code: Select all

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/ico "access plus 1 months"

I also followed this tutorial adding the ETag rules they recommend.
http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/joo ... -speed.htm

I guess this is wrong and causes the expiry date weirdness?

[waarnemer]

Try this one at the bottom of your htaccess

Code: Select all

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header unset ETag
Header unset Last-Modified
</IfModule>
FileETag None
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|gz|JPG|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header unset Cache-control
Header set Expires "access plus 1 month"
</FilesMatch>

[Actlas]

-The landing page expiry date problem seems to be fixed by adding your code.
-Caching is disabled at the moment because we are trying to find what the problem is with our website.
-The jquery is not defined error does not appear anymore to me now.
-I understand using SSL is better but the content for distributors on our site is not really top secret and a lot of Joomla websites allow logging in without using SSL...
-Default language is now set to browser language. We are using Falang 1.4.0 (latest) for the translation, I don't really know where the duplicate cookies come from.
-All articles are translated. There was a problem with Falang that is now fixed.
-I added an international shipping badge.

Google stil refuses to rank us better and index more than 600 out of our 1000 sitemap url's. Any advice on improving this?

[waarnemer]

- expiry not being set still shows for the js and css files
- server sided caching is something you need to test. when turned on it can even slow down your site.. always test and compare your stats. It can also have unexpected effects on extensions when turned on. You need to check your extensions together with the caching...
- jQuery sorted; great
- SSL is not to protect your content, in my sample it is to protect your customer details. Your traffic will be encrypted, logins and passes, bank and creditcard details will be more secured... it is to prevent from people listening in and stealing credentials... If you want to sell stuff through the site, your clients will have more faith you do all to protect their data. I don't buy in a webshop without it.
- If the cookies are from Falang, ask the people at Falang?
-
-

To index 1000 pages is a lot of work... being on 600 is pretty ok... give it time..