International SEO issues for multiple sites
-
We currently have 3 websites:
We also own Oursite.com, and that URL currently redirects to Oursite.fr.
We are considering a complete site redesign and a possible merge of the 3 sites.
Assumptions:
** the 3 sites currently receive organic search traffic to varying degrees
** Oursite.ch is almost identical to Oursite.fr in terms of the site content
** Our target market is NOT the USA for English-language searches. It is the UK.With a re-design, we see our options as follows:
- Merge the 3 sites and make Oursite.com the "main site" and then have subfolders as follows:
- /uk
- /fr
- /ch
- Keep the 3 sites as they are.
We see Option 1 as the best in terms of saving time when updating the site, and saving money paid to the site developers (1 site vs 3 sites).
We see Option 2 as the best in terms of ability of the site to rank, as well as confidence of searchers when seeing our site in the search results (in other words, a person searching in France would be more likely to buy and/or submit a form on our site if they saw Oursite.fr vs Oursite.com/fr).
I guess we're looking for some suggestions/guidance here. Are we missing any big issues? Does anyone have experience with an issue such as this?
Thank you in advance...
-Shawn - Merge the 3 sites and make Oursite.com the "main site" and then have subfolders as follows:
-
My 10 pence ...
I recently advised a client on a similar issue - they're going international and were trying to work out the benefits of ccTLDS vs subdomains vs subfolders (e.g. yoursite.fr vs fr.yoursite.com vs yoursite.com/fr).
They were particularly concerned about which approach would lead to higher rankings (rather than which would cost more / take longer etc).
After some fairly thorough research on the subject, I summarised the issue into two main points:
1. There is no right or wrong way. Amazon / Apple / Wikipedia (for example) all do it differently and it works out fine for them. Right / wrong case studies are very difficult to find, and there's a lot of fence sitting by almost everyone.
2. There is however a tradeoff between geo-targeted relevancy and amount of work needed to promote the sites:
- A well optimised, country specific ccTLD will out perform a subdomain / subfolder in a straight fight, but there's no cross-over in your campaigns. You need to work each campaign from scratch. More work, but greater reward if you can pull it off.
- On the other end of the scale, sub-folder campaigns will all help each other as all links are pointing to the same domain (so perhaps less work needed). However, their potential is not quite as great as the ccTLD approach.
- The sub-domain approach sits between them, but towards the subfolder end of the scale (some crossover, but slightly less potential).
I'm sure the above is old news to you, but it helped my client to visualise that trade-off. Either way, I based my personal recommendation to them (and now to you) on budget / resource.
- If you have the budget / resources to run separate campaigns competitively, play the long game and go for separate domains.
- If you want a slightly more cautious approach, perhaps have a smaller budget than you'd like, go for the sub-folders.
Finally, I must admit, I am an armchair commentator here, having never gone through one of these properly before. This really is my interpretation of the consensus of SEO opinion.
Do let me know which way you decide to go.
Rob
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate Title Issues using # anchor tags
Our homepage navigation uses anchor tags (?TabNumb=1#, ?TabNumb=1# etc) rather than directly linking to different pages to decrease load time (and simplify the build process I owuld imagine). These anchor links are showing up as duplicate titles in Moz. I am pretty sure if I were to use noindex or rel tags, that could have a negative affect on my search results. Any way to tackle this outside of a complete redesign of the structure? http://www.dedoose.com/about-us/?TabNum=2# as an example
Web Design | | sbnjl0 -
Prismic.io CMS and SEO?
Looking for community feedback: Some of our In house developers want to use Prismic.io over Wordpress for it's alleged ease of organizing and "deploying" content. It's essentially a repository for content from which you make API calls to. It's a rather new platform. There a few posts in Quora around SEO but looking to see if anyone has had experience with platform. My concern is around page load times, excessive server requests, and content viewed as code. Any thoughts/ experiences would be much appreciated!
Web Design | | ArcherMalmo0 -
Address On Every page for e-Commerce site?
For a primarily e-commerce site, should you have your address on every page (in the footer, for example)? Or is it enough to just have it on the contact page? Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Site as one page - SEO implications
We may be inheriting a site and will be asked to do SEO for it. We will have control over the development of the site, so this structure is what it is. My question is - how significant of an impact do you think this is going to have and can you think of any workarounds that may help? Basically, the user experience of the site will feel similar to multiple pages. However, this site will, in essence be one page and pull various content through javascript from different locations. I have not seen the site yet (and believe it is still in development), but this is how it has been explained to me. Any thoughts? My first thought was to add a blog to add page depth to the site and expand the content. Any other thoughts are welcome and appreciated. Thanks. (I know this is limited information, I'm sorry. It's just about all I have to work with right now, and I was a little concerned and was hoping for a second opinion)
Web Design | | AdamWormann0 -
WIX? is it any good for SEO
Hi people. I have just built my website www.bellagiolimousines.com.au using WIX. I am in the process of optimising for SEO, and after reading a couple of older posts i.e 2012; I read that some SEO consultants do not like WIX. However with their recent upgrades, I was hoping if anyone else has had any recent experience with WIX? I have spent a considerable amount of time building this site, and I don't want to waste anymore time in optimising it, if I am not going to receive a top 3 organic SERP. Hope to hear from someone real soon!
Web Design | | Giorgio680 -
SEO For Lead Generation
From an SEO point of view, is it okay to have a sites focus to be Lead Generation? We will do a small amount of blogging and we'll also have longer form sales pages on the site... but the main focus would be lead generation pages that we'd target for the SERPs. TO ME... this seems fairly spammy. If we had 50-60 landing pages with only 100-300 words of copy on them. If this is "okay" then how much should we altar up these landing pages in terms of content? None of them will be direct copies... but I just want to make sure that we stay above a ratio that would be good for SEO. Then lastly... How many main terms can we expect to target with a landing page? Should we focus each landing page to a keyword, or can we target a few and still rank effectively?
Web Design | | lifeseo0 -
Mobile Site Pages: Word Count Help
Hi there I am doing a mobile website for a client and they asked me what the dieal word count would be per page. They are SEO conciosu but we are not doing SEO on this site. I would just like to know a general rule of thumb. Regards Stef
Web Design | | stefanok0 -
SEO Considerations for a Platform Change
We are getting ready to move our e-commerce platform from Zencart to Magento as the original Zencart framework is pretty dated. while I'm excited to move to a more modern platform, I'm terrified at the potential SEO risk involved with doing so given that all URLs will likely be different and we're considering updating many product listings. Almost all of the site's traffic is organic, so maintaining rankings is extremely important. I'd love any advice, but especially that related to: Best way to redirect all new URLs sitewide The prudence of heavily editing product listings at the same time of redirecting the URL (i.e. updating product descriptions) Site structure: Should I strive to keep the new site link structure as similar to the old as possible? Resources or guides on transitioning a site from a SEO perspective Other major facets I'm missing I appreciate any help or sights you can offer! Thank you....
Web Design | | AndrewY0