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The rest of this post will contain documentation on what it does & how to use it.

This is only the initial version, and I already have a list of additional improvements that I will be making, which …

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888.com

888 has several international sites, and in this case the www.888.com is competing with the uk.888.com and au.888.com sites for the term ‘online Texas Holdem’. 

From the chart below, we can see the the Australian site has had the better rankings for most of the past 10 months.

However, thanks to the conflict, the pages are working against each other. The highest was page two on Google UK, while the UK site hasn’t made it above page three. 

At the moment, 888 ranks on page five on Google for this term, which is as good as nowhere.

As a result, the company uses PPC to give it some prominence: 

Poor search rankings cost money. As Keyword Planner shows, the suggested bid for this term is £8.36. 

hotelscombined.com

This international conflict is a problem for several travel sites. Here, hotelscombined’s UK site is seemingly doing battle with its .com site for the term ‘hotels in texas’. 

As the chart shows, it has enjoyed some very high rankings for the term, but the ‘wrong’ site (for Google UK users) has been ranking most of the time. 

From a UX perspective, this isn’t such a bad thing for users, as the site detects the location and serves prices in sterling. So the average visitor will be totally unaware they’re not on the UK domain.

However, the conflict between the two domains, which contain identical content, has meant that the site’s rankings have been unsteady, at times near the top of page one, others near the foot of page two. In a competitive market, this has an effect. 

Expedia

Expedia has similar issues, and we can see a lot of movement for the term ‘hotels in michigan’ between different domains. 

One is the US domain (.com), one Canada, and ‘Expedia’ in the chart refers to the .co.uk site. 

At the moment, I can see it on number four in the organic results on Google UK for the term (it’s also using PPC). 

However. it’s the US version that appears in the SERPs: 

And alas, Expedia doesn’t detect I’m from the UK, serving me results in dollars. 

This could give users the impression they’ve gone to the wrong version of the site and I suspect many will hit the browser’s back button as there’s no obvious way to change the currency displayed. 

Obviously, detecting the user’s location, as hotelscombined does, would solve the UX issue, but Expedia should look to solve the domain conflicts which are affecting its rankings. 

Even within the UK results, Expedia is experiencing some internal cannibalisation.

In the period shown here, Expedia had five similar Michigan hotel pages ranking for the term at different times.

During the gaps in between, the Canadian and US domains were ranking in their place, as shown on the previous Expedia chart. 

This means that, for instance, UK users searching for this term during September would see the US version of the page, as they do right now. Thanks to the currency being shown in dollars, this page is less likely to convert. 

Internal cannibalisation like this within the UK domain can be dealt with through effective internal linking, giving Google the right signals for the best page to index. 

This would ensure that the correct (i.e. the one Expedia wants to rank for) UK page was shown, though there still remains the problem of international cannibalisation. 

Essentially, on all three sites shown here, the different international domains are competing against each other for search terms.

This is an issue to be solved between the various web teams dealing with different domains. In many cases, they may not even be aware this is happening. 

How to avoid international cannibalisation

Essentially, on all three sites shown here, the different international domains are competing against each other for search terms.

This happens when you have duplicate content and theming across separate TLDs that are owned by the same company.

This is an issue to be solved betwen the various web teams dealing with different domains. In many cases, they may not even be aware this is happening. 

It could be that the UK and US digital teams from a single corporation aren’t communicating properly, or haven’t decided on a unified strategy on how to direct specific content at different regional search engines. 

According to PI Datametrics Head of Search Jon Earnshaw: 

Another reason for this occurring is that one nation’s digital team simply doesn’t see implementing the relevant tags as a priority as they may believe it will negatively affect their positions. This greediness or oversight could instead pull both sites down in the SERPs. 

In essence, a local country subfolder approach is the only way, supported of course by rel=alternate tagging.

Here’s an example (one of ours on Unify). This goes on every page that has multi-country presence. You now have to include a self referencing URL. This is taken from the homepage: 

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”pt-br” href=”http://www.unify.com/br/” />

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”cn-cn” href=”http://www.unify.com/cn/” />

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de-de” href=”http://www.unify.com/de/” />

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-us” href=”http://www.unify.com/us/” />

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-gb” href=”http://www.unify.com/uk/” />

Jon also explains that Google recommends rel=alternate hreflang in the following three scenarios:

1. You have a completely alternate version of your site or page translated in a different language.
2. You translate only the navigational components of a page, like the navigation, sidebar, or footer, but the main content remains in only one language. This is commonly used on pages that include user-generated content.
3. Your pages have very similar content within a single language with regional variations, for example you have Spanish language content targeted at readers in Spain and also South America.

Posted by Dr-Pete

Last year, Google expanded the Knowledge Graph to use data extracted (*cough* scraped) from the index to create answer boxes. Back in October, I wrote about a failed experiment. One of my posts, an odd dive
into Google’s revenue, was being answer-fied for the query “How much does Google make?”:

Objectively speaking, even I could concede that this wasn’t a very good answer in 2014. I posted it on Twitter, and
David Iwanow asked the inevitable question:

Enthusiasm may have gotten the best of us, a few more people got involved (like my former Moz colleague
Ruth Burr Reedy), and suddenly we were going to fix this once and for all:

There Was Just One Problem

I updated the post, carefully rewriting the first paragraph to reflect the new reality of Google’s revenue. I did my best to make the change user-friendly, adding valuable information but not disrupting the original post. I did, however, completely replace the old text that Google was scraping.

Within less than a day, Google had re-cached the content, and I just had to wait to see the new answer box. So, I waited, and waited… and waited. Two months later, still no change. Some days, the SERP showed no answer box at all (although I’ve since found these answer boxes are very dynamic), and I was starting to wonder if it was all a mistake.

Then, Something Happened

Last week, months after I had given up, I went to double-check this query for entirely different reasons, and I saw the following:

Google had finally updated the answer box with the new text, and they had even pulled an image from the post. It was a strange choice of images, but in fairness, it was a strange post.

Interestingly, Google also added the publication date of the post, perhaps recognizing that outdated answers aren’t always useful. Unfortunately, this doesn’t reflect the timing of the new content, but that’s understandable – Google doesn’t have easy access to that data.

It’s interesting to note that sometimes Google shows the image, and sometimes they don’t. This seems to be independent of whether the SERP is personalized or incognito. Here’s a capture of the image-free version, along with the #1 organic ranking:

You’ll notice that the #1 result is also my Moz post, and that result has an expanded meta description. So, the same URL is essentially double-dipping this SERP. This isn’t always the case – answers can be extracted from URLs that appear lower on page 1 (although almost always page 1, in my experience). Anecdotally, it’s also not always the case that these organic result ends up getting an expanded meta description.

However, it definitely seems that some of the quality signals driving organic ranking and expanded meta descriptions are also helping Google determine whether a query deserves a direct answer. Put simply, it’s not an accident that this post was chosen to answer this question.

What Does This Mean for You?

Let’s start with the obvious – Yes, the v2 answer boxes (driven by the index, not Freebase/WikiData)
can be updated. However, the update cycle is independent of the index’s refresh cycle. In other words, just because a post is re-cached, it doesn’t mean the answer box will update. Presumably, Google is creating a second Knowledge Graph, based on the index, and this data is only periodically updated.

It’s also entirely possible that updating could cause you to lose an answer box, if the new data weren’t a strong match to the question or the quality of the content came into question. Here’s an interesting question – on a query where a competitor has an answer box, could you change your own content enough to either replace them or knock out the answer box altogether? We are currently testing this question, but it may be a few more months before we have any answers.

Another question is what triggers this style of answer box in the first place? Eric Enge has an
in-depth look at 850,000 queries that’s well worth your time, and in many cases Google is still triggering on obvious questions (“how”, “what”, “where”, etc.). Nouns that could be interpreted as ambiguous also can trigger the new answer boxes. For example, a search for “ruby” is interpreted by Google as roughly meaning “What is Ruby?”:

This answer box also triggers “Related topics” that use content pulled from other sites but drive users to more Google searches. The small, gray links are the source sites. The much more visible, blue links are more Google searches.

Note that these also have to be questions (explicit or implied) that Google can’t answer with their curated Knowledge Graph (based on sources like Freebase and WikiData). So, for example, the question “When is Mother’s Day?” triggers an older-style answer:

Sites offering this data aren’t going to have a chance to get attribution, because Google essentially already owns the answer to this question as part of their core Knowledge Graph.

Do You Want to Be An Answer?

This is where things get tricky. At this point, we have no clear data on how these answer boxes impact CTR, and it’s likely that the impact depends a great deal on the context. I think we’re facing a certain degree of inevitability – if Google is going to list an answer, better it’s your answer then someone else’s, IMO. On the other hand, what if that answer is so complete that it renders your URL irrelevant? Consider, for example, the SERP for “how to make grilled cheese”:

Sorry, Food Network, but making a grilled cheese sandwich isn’t really that hard, and this answer box doesn’t leave much to the imagination. As these answers get more and more thorough, expect CTRs to fall.

For now, I’d argue that it’s better to have your link in the box than someone else’s, but that’s cold comfort in many cases. These new answer boxes represent what I feel is a dramatic shift in the relationship between Google and webmasters, and they may be tipping the balance. For now, we can’t do much but wait, see, and experiment.

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