Country specific domains are the best way to serve international content. For example, use yourcompany.com for the USA, yourcompany.de for Germany, yourcompany.fr for France, etc.

It's much easier to get ranked on German search engines if you have a .de domain. Customers from Germany also tend to trust German website with German content more. If the local website for Germany only contains German content and a German domain then it is very easy to understand for website visitors and search engines.

A website that contains English, German, Spanish and other content is more difficult to understand for both search engines and website visitors.

Another way to present international content is to let your website visitors choose the appropriate version. Your homepage contains a country and language selector to let users choose their favorite version.

After the selection, the user should be redirected to a web page that has a unique URL, i.e. each language version should use unique URLs. For example www.example.com/en/page, www.example.com/fr/page, www.example.com/de/page, etc.

If you decide to use this method, it is important that your web pages use the x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation for the country selector page, which was specifically created for these kinds of pages.

This method is more confusing than the first method. It's easier to make mistakes that can lead to problems with search engines.

Instead of letting your website visitors choose, you can also redirect them based on their location and their language settings. You can do this with 302 redirects or by dynamically serving the right HTML content.

This method also requires the x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation and you must also make sure that the language pages have individual URLs.

Automatic redirects can be annoying. For example, if a person from the US is on vacation in Europe, it is not good if the US version cannot be accessed then. It's also easy to make mistakes that can lead to indexing problems if you use this method.

The ranking monitor in SEOprofiler enables you to check the rankings of your web pages in 169 countries. You can check your rankings from all 99,000+ locations that are supported by Google. If you want to know how your website is ranked in a particular region, the Ranking Monitor is the right tool for you.

In addition, Googlebot must be able to access the different language versions of your web pages. You can test this with the website audit tool in SEOprofiler.

Google's Gary Sullivan said on Twitter that they are aware of the problem: "I know the team really is working to better deal with this type of stuff. I also know that as that's been heard before. But I do expect improvements should be noticeable in the near future."

Google's Gary Illyes said on Twitter that it wasn't Google's fault if Googlebot slows down your website: "If you have a page that uses a considerable amount of server cpu when accessed - maybe because database queries? -, you need to fix/optimize that. if Googlebot uses up your server quota because it fetches that page, that's on you, not on Googlebot"

Editor's note: You can check the speed of your web pages with the website audit tool.

"Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that you should not block Googlebot from crawling 404 pages on your website. [...] It’s better to redirect outdated URLs to new pages on your website. Use the website audit tool in SEOprofiler to check the 404 pages on your website. The website audit tool also shows the redirects on your website."

"There are tangible benefits to granting a nested business its own separate GMB listing instead of using secondary hours. Fortunately, the criteria are fairly clear-cut: secondary hours are best used when a single business has unique services that are available outside of standard operating hours, wheres as nested locations are intended for multiple businesses which share an address."