Hello everyone! I hope you're doing well. I was hoping to get some help from you.
I have a Gtld targeting different countries/languages.
I need to un index the root domain due to UX issues as it keeps appearing in almost all countries and has poor CvR vs country homepage, i'm thinking about :
1. http://example.com -add no index follow and 301 to:
http://example.com/us for example? As a new start url? I have sitemaps and properties for each language but i’m unsure about how Google will behave in terms of crawling and indexing the site if I add no index follow to root domain without a 301 to another folder.
Thanks and happy new year⭐️
Hi Sonia,
I would recommend you to handle that in another way that would allow you to leverage the existing root home page: Use your root domain as the home page for your main country leveraging the high popularity it has -which is likely the reason why it ends up ranking across all the markets-. So, let's say the US is your main market, the one you use as your "default" market too for those users coming from a market that you don't target. Let's imagine you have at the moment a home page for the US at the moment: example.com/us/ ... I would then instead use example.com for the US, and what I would do is to 301-redirect the example.com/us/ to example.com and enable there the US home page. Then the rest of the US site can still be under the /us/ subdirectory, that won't change. What's important in this case is that you ensure that you provide all the signals: hreflang annotation -and cross refer with the home pages of other markets-, add the country name in title, meta description, headings, main content, include address, etc.
I hope this helps :)