A very good way to serve international content is to use country specific domains. For example, use yourcompany.com for the USA, yourcompany.de for Germany, yourcompany.fr for France, etc.

If you have a .de domain, it will be much easier to get high rankings on German search engines. In addition, a German website with German content is very easy to understand for website visitors and search engines.

It is much less confusing than a website that contains English, German, Spanish and other content.

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.

If you 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.

In general, 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. It's also easy to make mistakes that can lead to indexing problems if you use this method.

"If links are the reason why a site is ranking higher, then if you remove them the site will rank lower. Links aren't the only reason sites rank, obviously, so I wouldn't blindly focus on them.

Editor's note: Analyze your anchor links and the link context with the Link Profiler tool, analyze all other factors with the Top 10 Optimizer tool.

"We’re bringing free listings to the Shopping tab in countries across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Just as we don't charge sites to be part of the Google Search index, listings for participating retailers are eligible to appear in these results at no cost to them.

Paid listings will continue to appear in ad slots and will operate in the same way as Shopping ads do today. This change will take effect by mid-October 2020."

"Businesses are facing massive struggles during 2020 as a result of Covid-19. Knowing where best to spend limited resources is critical. So don’t be hasty in pulling your SEO budget. Consider what affect that might have on other marketing channels and your business as a whole first. [...] How the search engines rank and display results continues to change. If you are neglecting SEO budget you may not know about those changes, or adapt to keep up."

Editor's note: Optimize your web pages with the SEO tools in SEOprofiler.

"Submitting a URL doesn't reprocess the sitemap file, but that's fine -- the sitemap file will get picked up regularly and it'll setlle down. No need to manually resubmit the sitemap every time :). (FWIW most sites never submit URLs manually.)"