Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Roland Lüthi on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/12/2014).

German page is ranking in Switzerland before Swiss page! How to change it?

German page is ranking in Switzerland before Swiss page! How to change it?
We have German pages for Switzerland (zattoo.com/ch) and German pages for Germany (zattoo.com/de).
- the 2 pages are localized in GWT
- sitemaps per country
- we also use hreflang 

STILL if I do a brand search in Switzerland (google.ch) german page is ranked 1 and Swiss page on 3!

Is there technically anything else we can do?
My guess is that Google simple values the german page more than swiss page.

Any advice?

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Roland Lüthi: German page is ranking in Switzerland before Swiss page! How to change it?
    We have German pages for Switzerland (zattoo.com/ch) and German pages for Germany (zattoo.com/de).
    - the 2 pages are localized in GWT
    - sitemaps per country
    - we also use hreflang ;

    STILL if I do a brand search in Switzerland (google.ch) german page is ranked 1 and Swiss page on 3!

    Is there technically anything else we can do?
    My guess is that Google simple values the german page more than swiss page.

    Any advice?

     ;
  • Tony McCreath: Are you doing the search in an account/browser/machine that has German as the prefered language?
  • Roland Lüthi: +Tony McCreath ;No, Swiss Ip, machine and browser language english, non logged in.
  • Ian Dixon: A whois lookup suggest that your hosting is linked to Germany +Roland Lüthi ;as one of the listed contacts is in ;Muenchen.

    Google may be associating this as the country of the site rather than using other indicators. They have a mind of their own sadly.

    +Tony McCreath ;the language setting of the browser should be far from significant. The UK and Australia share an (almost) common language. Yet I would expect to see results about the UK while yours would be from down under
  • Michiel Kikkert: Maybe a simple case of duplicate content? 
  • Tony McCreath: +Ian Dixon ;Your right. I did not read properly that both are in German. So location would be the way hreflang should show content variation. The ccTLD should help as well.

    +Roland Lüthi ;I don't see any hreflang tags?
  • Roland Lüthi: +Tony McCreath ;hreflang tags are here: ;view-source:http://zattoo.com/ -> Is this the correct location?

    +Michiel Kikkert ;My understanding is that with hreflang tag (if implemented correctly) you tell tell google this page is for country Switzerland and that page is for Germany ->Therefore you eliminate the duplicated content issue?  ;
  • Tony McCreath: +Roland Lüthi ;The hreflang tags need to be on every page that has an alternate language/region version and all alternates need to be included. ;

    I can't easily see what you have done on the home page but all you can do there is indicate other pages that contain the same content as the home page. Those other pages have to also contain hreflang tags to refer back to the home page and each other.
  • Roland Lüthi: Thanks +Tony McCreath! We'll add the hreflang tag on all the pages and see it it solves the issue
  • Edwin Jonk: You implemented the hreflang in the sitemap, which is in according to Google's guidelines. Therefore I don't see a problem. That said I did do a search on ;https://www.google.ch/#q=zattoo and I get directed  ;to /ch/en/ so I don't see a problem....
  • Roland Lüthi: Hi +Edwin Jonk ;- Thanks for your input. English in for us in Switzerland and Germany the 2n/3rd most important language, with less content updates, no backlinks, etc. ;

    We had recently much more PR, campaigns, content update on German site in Germany (zattoo.com/de) than on the German ste in Switzerland (zattoo.com/ch). ;

    Most of the content is the same or almost the same. ;

    My guess is: We have duplicated content issue, because we haven't used (so far) hreflang and canonical tags correctly. Google values zattoo.com/de 1) as the original content, 2) as the stronger site.
  • Edwin Jonk: How I understand hreflang is that Google is "swapping" /de for /ch. So it wouldn't lead to a duplicated issue. Did you point the rel canonical to the /de?

    P.S. we do ask our members to disable their links, for example zattoo(dot)com/ch

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/12/2014).

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