Search engine optimization

All localized websites are optimized for search engine indexation. Indexing localized sites will provide additional traffic and international sales while preserving SEO performance of the domestic site on the domestic market.

Glopal localization is processing pages on the server-side, ensuring that search engine crawlers can discover localized content and visit links without having to execute JavaScript. This is maximizing number of pages that can be indexed within the set crawling budget.

Managing crawling

Robots.txt

Localized sites include the robots.txt file for controlling search engine crawling.

By default, the robot.txt file will contain the same rules as those present in the robots.txt file on the domestic site. In addition, each individual site can be closed for crawling, with Glopal replacing the original file content with a global Disallow rule.

Upon merchant’s request, the robots.txt file will provide search engines bots with a dedicated rule whether to index or not index a localized site.

Sitemap

If the original site contains the standardized sitemap XML file, localized sites will contain the same sitemap with all links rewritten for the localized site. This will ensure optimal indexation of all pages contained within the localized site.

Resources

Each localized site content will be crawled and indexed independently, fetching the source content from the original site. If hosting the origin site on a self-managed platform (like Magento), please plan hosting resources accordingly, allowing for the multiplicity of crawler load as search engine crawlers discover and index content on every localized site.

HREFlangs

Localized sites

Glopal ensures that the correct HREFlang tags are applied to all localized websites and the required HREFlang tags are injected in the domestic site.

Many languages have variations based on the region in which the language is widely spoken. German, for example, has a German variation along with an Austrian variation. In line with ISO conventions, these variations are classified under a specific language ISO convention. The language ISO for Austrian German as an example is de-AT whereas the language ISO for German German is de-DE. Glopal will apply the correct tags to each language variant in scope.

Localized sites can be configured to keep additional HREFlangs present on the origin site.

Glopal always adds a self-referencing canonical tag to each site. This will ensure that the localized sites are not being seen as duplicate content.

Origin site

Glopal provides a small JavaScript snippet to be added to the origin site. This snippet is enabling Geo-localization feature and country selector functionality to international visitors of the origin site, but it is also adding matching HREFlangs for the localized sites, linking them to the origin content.