Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Different domains for multilingual website
-
Hey guys,
A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language.
So for example:
word1word2.com for the english version
word3word4.com for the french version
word5word6.com for spanish version ....
Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/...
Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs.
Thank You.
-
The problem is that the domains have been online for years and they are all .com domains. So we will need to start fresh with new ccTLD domains.
Also, for the duplicate content problem, UK and US would be considered as duplicate content as both are in English, unless we create content for each website.
Thank you for your help Istvan.
-
Yes, that would be a signal. But the idea I have mentioned in my previous answer was to "host" different languages on different ccTLDs.
English version - .com or .co.uk (if you are targeting the UK)
French version - .fr
Spanish version - .es
We had 9 languages back that at that company and for each language we had different subfolders: /en/; /fr/; /it/ and so on... which gave us the possibility to geo-target each subfolder from Google Webmaster Tools, but we have seen our competitors next to us(and even before us) in most of the cases with their ccTLD version.
"Having different ccTLD's for each language but keeping the same site would result in duplicate content am I right?"
If you plan to keep the current versions + have new ccTLD versions then yes, you have a duplicate there. What you could do, if you migrate to ccTLD version is the create 301 redirects from the old URL to the new.
Istvan
-
Hello Istvan,
Thank you for your response. However, don't you believe that the newly implemented HREF Lang tag was done for to resolve this specific kind of problem?
Having different ccTLD's for each language but keeping the same site would result in duplicate content am I right?
Thank You.
-
Hi BruLee,
In your case I would advice you to check the article of Danny Dover. It might be a little-bit old - 2009 - but it covers the pros and cons of choosing how to host the different languages.
I have experience with the version where you have one big site and different languages are hosted on different subfolders, which was good, but we could have done better.
If you have enough resources to have better link building campaigns I would go with the different ccTLD for each language.
I hope this helped,
Istvan
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
-
Why has my website been removed from Bing?
I have a website that has recently been removed from Bing's index, but can't figure out why. The website isn't new, and it is indexed just fine on Google. These are the steps I've tried: The website is verified in Bing Webmaster Tools and successfully submitted the sitemap. I tested the URL to ensure that Bingbot is allowed to crawl the site I submitted URLs to Bing via the URL Submission tool There isn't a "noindex" on the site preventing it from being indexed When I do a URL Inspection, an error message comes up saying "The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing us from serving it to our users. We recommend you to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines." I contacted Bing to ask whether the website was removed in error, but received a reply that the website doesn't comply with Bing's quality guidelines, but they wouldn't go into detail as to which guidelines the website isn't meeting. The website URL is https://www.pardeehospital.org. Can anyone offer any advice or insight as to why Bing won't index our site? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lindsey.steinkamp0 -
Difference hummingbird and rankbrain
From my understanding hummingbird is the fact that google is able to parse sentences and link entites to understand the meaning of content in a better way than with just keywords and rankbrain is about user intent, google understands that they are various ways to mean the same thing. Is my understanding correct ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?
I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fulanito1 -
Targeting different countries with domain name
Hi currently have a eCommerce store .com.au targeting Australia. We want to start targeting the US market with the same products. I guess what would be the top choice in this case since our domain is location-specific to Australia and not a generic top-level domain (gTLD)? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Moving half my website to a new website: 301?
Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Is .ME domain is effective in SEO ?
I am always listening about TLD. com. org .net but what about the .me domain. Can this will be effective in SEO. Can i able to beat down my competitors, if i choose .me . I also have a .com or other TLD option but if i am making my name than .me is for me but i need your suggestion for the seo purpose. Is there really domain affective in term of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pnb5670 -
How do I list the subdomains of a domain?
Hi Mozers, I am trying to find what subdomains are currently active on a particular domain. Is there a way to get a list of this information? The only way I could think of doing it is to run a google search on; site:example.com -site:www.example.com The only issues with this approach is that a majority of the indexed pages exist on the non-www domain and I still have thousands of pages in the results (mainly from the non-www). Is there another way to do it in Google? OR is there a server admin online tool that will tell me this information? Cheers, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlaidler0 -
Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain
I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback. The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is: I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier? Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0
