Max Prin - Stacking Signals: How International SEO Comes Together (And Falls Apart)

Transcript

1. How International SEO Comes Together (And Falls Apart) STACKING SIGNALS: Max Prin Technical SEO Director Condé Nast
2. 2 Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 Special thanks to Gemini for 99% of the images in these slides. NO MENTION OF AI, LLMs, AEO OR GEO IN THIS PRESENTATION WARNING
3. GOALS HELP GOOGLE DELIVER THE RIGHT URL TO THE RIGHT USER (COUNTRY/REGION & LANGUAGE) 3 INTERNATIONAL SEO Canonical tags, noindex tags AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT hreflang tags as crawling signals CONTENT DISCOVERY Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 Domain strategy, hreflang tags
4. 4 Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 ONCE UPON A TIME… .com/en-us/war-game .com/de-de/war-game LOTS OF CLIENTS, CHALLENGES, MANUAL REVIEWS, AUTOMATION
5. 5 technicalseo.com/tools/hreflang/ Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025
6. 6 Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 @patrickstox | ahrefs.com/blog/hreflang-study/
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9. TOP PRIORITIES 9 WELCOME TO CONDÉ NAST GET RID OF AMP REVAMP HREFLANG TAG LOGIC Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 MIGRATE ~60 WEBSITES TO A NEW PLATFORM
10. 10 CONDÉ NAST 20 BRANDS 11 MARKETS 63 WEBSITES Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 • 62 TLDs • 1 sub-domain + franchises*
11. DOMAIN STRATEGY 11 01 Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025
12. OPTIONS 12 DOMAIN STRATEGY fr.example.com es.example.com SUB-DOMAINS example.com/fr/ example.com/es-mx/ SUB-FOLDERS Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 example.co.uk example.de ccTLDs (country-code Top Level Domains)
13. 2 APPROACHES 13 DOMAIN STRATEGY MARKET-FIRST wired.co.uk => wired.com + es.wired.com LANGUAGE-FIRST Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 ccTLDs - multiple websites in the same language for the same brand/magazine.
14. CHALLENGES 14 DOMAIN STRATEGY Over-targeted setup (country in hreflang, ccTLDs) => how do we reach audiences in other English and Spanish speaking countries? (e.g. example.es in Argentina?) New domain? Sub-domain? Sub-folder? NEW WEBSITES…MORE DOMAINS? Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 How do we eliminate avoid duplicate content? ENGLISH + franchises: Australia, Philippines, etc. SPANISH DUPLICATE CONTENT
15. ENGLISH www.vogue.com/… www.vogue.com/uk/ www.vogue.com/ca/ SPANISH es.vogue.com/… es.vogue.com/es/ es.vogue.com/mx/ *applies to French too (fr, ca, …) 15 OTHER SINGLE-MARKET LANGUAGES www.vogue.com/it/… www.vogue.com/de/… www.vogue.com/ja/… LANGUAGE-FIRS T SINGLE DOMAIN SETUP? DOMAIN STRATEGY Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025
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17. 17 In each country: Top 10 results for 1,000 queries THE REALITY OF THE SERP DOMAIN STRATEGY Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025
18. HREFLANG TAGS 18 02 Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025
19. AUTOMATED IN HTML CODE 19 HREFLANG TAGS COUNTRY-LANGUAGE en, es LANGUAGE Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 en-us, es-mx, fr-fr, etc.
20. ≠ LANGUAGE ≠ MARKET 20 HREFLANG TAGS Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 NO REAL DUPLICATE CONTENT HREFLANG AS CRAWLING SIGNAL = LANGUAGE ≠ MARKET STRAIGHTFORWARD SIGNALING hreflang="country-language" ≠ LANGUAGE = MARKET
21. x-default 21 Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 default language tag HREFLANG TAGS hreflang="en-gb" hreflang="en" hreflang="x-default" hreflang="en-us" ORIGINAL ARTICLE SYNDICATED VERSION
22. 22 Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 HREFLANG TAGS FRANCHISE WEBSITES developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/build-sitemap#cross-submit Manual XML Sitemaps for key pages + cross-submission • Verify ownership of all sites in GSC
23. 23 HREFLANG TAGS Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 BRAND PRIORITY hreflang="en-us" ORIGINAL ARTICLE hreflang="en-gb" 1st SYNDICATED VERSION
24. 23 HREFLANG TAGS Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 BRAND PRIORITY hreflang="en-us" ORIGINAL ARTICLE hreflang="en-gb" content="noindex" canonical="Vogue-UK" 1st SYNDICATED VERSION hreflang="en-gb" 2nd SYNDICATED VERSION
25. CANONICAL + NOINDEX 25 03 Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025
26. = LANGUAGE = MARKET 26 CANONICAL + NOINDEX Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 REAL DUPLICATE CONTENT COMPETING IN SERP hreflang="en" ORIGINAL ARTICLE hreflang="en" content="noindex" canonical="Wired" SYNDICATED VERSION
27. 27 Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 CANONICAL + NOINDEX
28. GEO-REDIRECTS 28 04 Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025
29. 29 GEO-REDIRECTS Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025 HREFLANG CAN BE SLOW TO PROCESS… SLOWER THAN INDEXING WHY? When published at the same time, a US article can be ranking in the UK instead of the UK version, or vice-versa. EVEN IF HREFLANG WORKS FOR WEB SEARCH, IT DOESN’T IMPACT GOOGLE DISCOVER … In the UAE: syndicated content on India brands showing up in Discover instead of the original version from the UAE. REDIRECT USERS IF PAGE EXISTS IN THEIR LOCATION If same brand / magazine and same language SOLUTION?
30. Thank you! Max Prin | Tech SEO Connect 2025