In October 2017, Google announced it had updated the way it labeled country services on the mobile web, the Google app for iOS and desktop Search and Maps.
At the time, it seemed this update was more of a minor change or inconvenience when trying to check international results. Instead of going to the version of Google for a particular country, the results were now based on your location or the location in your Google settings.
Google stated:
This seemingly minor change actually had a huge impact for websites operating in multiple markets.
Before the October update, if pages were duplicate or near-duplicate, they would be folded together in Google’s index, and only one version would show as it was selected as the canonical version. Often it would be the wrong language or country version of a page that was shown to users.
For example, if your pages were the same in the US and Australia, people searching in Australia might see the US version of the page. This wasn’t a problem with translated language versions, as they were not seen as duplicate. Now, Google is trying to show the best version of the page, even if they are folded together, by picking the version that best matches the users and respecting hreflang tags.
Before the change
Before this update, Google representatives said if pages were folded together because of duplicate content, they would not see the return links for the hreflang tags and that Google was folding the content for you. This was supposed to make your website “stronger” by having fewer but “stronger” pages.
In January 2016, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller was replying to a thread in the webmaster help forum talking about this issue.
John talked about this again in a Webmaster Central office-hours hangout on November 2016.
From the 1:27 mark:
As Google crawls and sees multiple versions of the same page, it determines it only wants one main version for its index and folds the others together. Here is how John Mueller described in a recent Reddit AMA how Google indexes just one version and folds the other into the same database record:
It’s really a duplicate content issue, and the pages are folded together in Google’s index, so it broke the hreflang tags because it can’t make the connections between certain pairs. How can an Australian page be an alternative to the UK page when the Australian page is folded and indexed as the US page?
There were a few commands to troubleshoot this at the time. If site:domain/page searches or searches for a keyword showed a wrong version, that was a good indication.
Info:domain/page would tell you the canonicalized version or the version the page was indexed as. If it showed a different page, then the folding was happening, and you’d probably end up with the wrong version showing in the SERPs.
You could also check the cache of the page in the SERPs or with the cache:domain/page command. One caveat on this was that the site may have some auto-redirecting logic based on internet protocol (IP) or browser language, and cache could have been inaccurate.
It came down to the pages being duplicate content, not that they had their hreflang tags wrong.
Here’s an example, check out info:https://google.com.au and you’ll see the Canadian version (ca).
It’s the same with the cache; cache:google.com.au would show the cache for the Canadian version of the page and indicate they were folded together, and the Canadian version became the main version.
At the time, people looking for Google Australia would likely have seen Google Canada. Then came the update that changed everything.
Changes since the update
The messaging from Google has changed since the update. Google is saying that signals are consolidated, and even if pages are folded together, hreflang tags will be respected, and the right version will show. Many of the same results that showed the incorrect versions before are now showing the correct local version.
Listen to what Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes said during an interview in November 2017 (after the update):
John Mueller, in another Webmaster Central office-hours hangout in March 2018, said:
We still have the same issues as before, with the info: and cache: commands showing the Canadian version of the page because they were folded together, but now, depending on your location or your Google search settings, you will see the correct version of the page, like in this search with my settings as Australia:
Even though the pages are folded together, where the hreflang tags would be broken before and the wrong page would be shown, now it all works as it should, and you see the version of the page that is right for you based on your location or settings.
In addition, where they were folding pages together before to make a stronger version of the page, now it seems they are consolidating signals to the set of pages. One new issue this seems to have caused is when you are looking for a particular version of a page, like searching for “Google Australia” while in a different country, you may end up with the canonicalized version showing.
So when I look for Google Australia, what I find is google.ca instead.
Conclusion
I’m not sure I fully trust the way this works now, and obviously, Google still has some work to do when searching for individual versions, but the change has solved a lot of headaches for SEOs.
I would recommend that you continue to localize the different versions of the pages and to differentiate them as much as possible, as this will provide a better experience to local users. This change has made it less likely for pages to show a different language or country version in the search results, and for that, I am happy Google made the update.
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