Aytaç Aydın, who has millions of followers on YouTube, recently started work on an English language website. He asked me: “if I support the English site from my Turkish one, what effect will that have?” I said a question that deep can only be answered in a long article. Because; it was a serious question and it needed answering properly, and that is why we are sharing this piece with you.

For accurate targeting on your English site, do not forget to build the meta tag with our hreflang meta tag generator and add it to the site.

What Is Google’s Cluster Logic?

When Google built PageRank it also created a difference in value between links. That primitive cluster logic was so good that all the years since have gone into refining it. The algorithm has changed dozens of times, but the cluster logic never has.

Turkish is a cluster. American English sites are a cluster. English sites based in the United Kingdom are another cluster. When a link leaves one cluster and crosses into another, it gets multiplied by a coefficient of 0.1, meaning; its effect drops by 90%.

Under the Turkish cluster
– Holidays are another cluster.
– Alanya is another cluster
– Five star hotels in Alanya are another cluster.

Where the professionalism comes in is at the “intersections”. Holidays and travel have an intersection, and so do holidays and technology. Working inside those intersections is what makes an SEO effort less risky. So;

Say the site you are targeting and working on is a “hospital in Ümraniye” in cluster A2 X1 K5.

And the site you will take value from is a “bricks” site in cluster C3 T2 O8.

The professionalism here lies entirely in being able to find the intersection between 2 separate clusters that do not naturally sit together.

  • Are the bricks in your house affecting your health?

  • Do you know what the clay used in bricks does to your health?

So on 2 different projects we are trying to find the shared cluster.

And across 2 different languages?

To be plain about it: do not take or give links between Turkish sites and a project of yours in another language.

Reason 1: the AI also tries to work out who your audience is from the links you take. Take links from Turkish sites and it leaves you under google.com.tr. Take them from a UK English site and it leaves you under google.co.uk.

Reason 2: across genuinely disjoint clusters the effect drops by 90%, and on top of that the link gets marked “meaningless”, which pushes your risk score up.

How the ODP Separated Clusters

On every site edit and review screen there used to be a checkbox saying “tick here if this is a United Kingdom site”. Dmoz, better known as the Google Directory, drew the line between UK and US sites. Google does the same thing, only with automated systems.

Watch out for this

If you want your site showing on google.co.uk in the UK, take care that your “whois” details are British.

Make sure the postal address on the site is an address in the UK.

Make sure the area code of the phone number on the site is allocated to the UK.

Where you can, get the server into the same country as the one you are targeting.

For universal Google in English, your center of gravity should be America.

If you want to appear on universal Google, try to earn links of American origin. And when you do, check that the site you are getting the link from is based in America rather than somewhere like the UK, Australia or India.

It is not enough for the address and phone number of that site to be American. Look at whether its visitors are generally coming from America too.

All of this is seriously complicated, and unfortunately it is the part that has to be thought through from the very beginning. If a project in another language starts out wrong, it is very hard to put right afterward.

You can be trying to rank in the United Arab Emirates or Qatar, pull no visitors at all from there, and end up drawing a pile of traffic from Yemen.

Ways to Avoid the Mistake

Subdomains

By the basic dynamics of the internet, a subdomain counts as a different domain. Underneath it all, .uk or .tr is the domain, while co.uk and com.tr work on subdomain logic. If you want to win customers in Qatar for your construction firm:

qa.example.com

Write a headline specific to Qatar, and if you have worked there before, talk about it. Show that you know Qatar, describe what you achieved on those jobs and build trust. Then buy a piece of content from a news portal based in Qatar. That is all you need to do. Time will handle the rest.

An Example of Getting It Wrong

example.com.tr/ar

The mistake: targeting one region with a domain that belongs to another is a mistake. A .com.tr domain is specific to Turkey and cannot be a target in Qatar. On top of that, “ar” is far too broad a target. That means leaving it to chance: if someone in Yemen or Morocco links to your site, you will struggle to reach the audience you wanted in the organic results.

The Hreflang Tag

On multilingual sites, do not forget to add the hreflang tag to your meta tags so nothing takes you by surprise. To test whether your site has one:

On that page you can see whether your site has hreflang tags and, if it does, which ones. If you find none, you can build the right ones for your site with the hreflang meta tag generator our Türk SEM specialists use.

In our 2024 update, these tools will help you set your targeting up correctly from the start in your English language SEO work.

I wish you every success on the export road. We owe it to our country to keep working, keep succeeding, and do everything we can.