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鈥檙e 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.
What's the point of an EU site?
-
Buongiorno from 18 degrees C Wetherby UK
On this site http://www.milwaukeetool.eu/ the client wants to hold on to the EU site despite there being multiple standalone country sittes e.g. http://www.milwaukeetool.fr & http://www.milwaukeetool.co.uk
Why would you ever need an EU site? I mean who ever searches for an EU site? If the client holds on to the eu site despite my position it's a waiste of time from a search perspective is the folowing the best appeasment?
When a user enters the eu url or redirects to country the detected, eg I'm in Paris I enter www.milwaukeetool.eu it redirects to http://www.milwaukeetool.fr. My felling this would be the most pragmatic thing to do?
Any ideas please,
Cioa,
David -
The .eu domain termination is a generic, hence it is not bound to geo-targeting on Google Webmaster Tool. In that sense, it is an alternative to the .com domain termination, if the .com is not available.
It was created by the European Union has a way to "communicate" that the business owning the domain has an European nature and that it is based on a nation of E(uropean) U(nion) and that is primary market is the EU.
From an SEO point of view, it doesn't offer any really advantage with respect any other generic domain name:
-
you can't geo-target more countries with a single domain name
-
you can't geo-target political regions (or continents).
Hence, it is good to have it for defending your brand, and to use it if .com (or .net) have been already taken. But if you have a .com, then it is better to redirect the .eu to it.
-
-
I had that argument with a client once and i manage to persuade them not to go ahead with it as they had .com and .co.uk .
.com is international so i think it did make sense not to use .eu but in your case, if you don't have .com then probably you need to look at which countries you want to target. If your client is UK based and if they target client from all around EU, then it might make sense to use .eu as you have very little chance to target someone in Italy with co.uk or .com.fr domains. If you are targeting only UK and FR then, you don't need .eu. It will just duplicate your work.
-
Hello
I got the same situation with customers recently. The best I've found was to tell them:
"You're definitely right we cannot loose the .eu. So we gonna redirect it to the BESTDOMAINE.com as main website. So people will still find you and you'll get more customers and will keep the .eu."
Then you can provide some technical arguments explaining that if he sticks to this position he will loose business.
In my case it worked out
From 50掳 in Dubai
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
-
301 Redirect all pictures when moving to a new site?
We have 30,000 pictures on our site. Moz will return 404's on some occasionally, but Google seems to ignore those. Should I 301 redirect all those images when we move to a new site lay-out? Appreciate your views!
Web Design | | Discountvc0 -
Having a second homepage for a site would affect my SEO?
Hello guys, One of our clients is planning to have a new landing page for any users hitting the site for the first time. (returning users will still see the current homepage based on cookies ... in other words, the site would technically have 2 home pages). According to this client, they are planning to do something like this: https://www.websitename.com/ (for returning visitors) https://www.websitename.com/newuser (for first time visitors) Our instinct is that is not great to have 2 home pages (that would affect the SEO campaign we are managing for this company) and we are not sure how to handle this. That's why we would appreciate your opinion regarding this topic: From an SEO perspective, do you think this is a good idea? If not, what would you guys do differentiate first-time visitors vs returning visitors without affecting SEO? Maybe just a pop-up? Thanks in advance for your help !
Web Design | | Robertnweil10 -
From Google Sites to Wordpress - Anyone Ventured this SEO terrain?
We have a few sites in Google Sites - and they are ugly! We have a majority (40+) of websites in Wordpress. But we have a few websites just stuck on Google Sites, and since Google won't let you fully edit the HTML, add scripts, or implement any technology since 2000, we want to move. The sad problem - the Google sites are ranking well. We rank well in Manhattan, Atlanta, Dallas, and Philadelphia. The problem is - the sites do not give much room for growth - and the bounce rate is high because they are so ugly. Has Anyone moved from Google sites to Wordpress? Should we just stay with Google and bite the ugly bullet? My fear is that these sites will not allow for growth. It is hard to update them and even harder to make them look nice. To get a sample - beware: www.counselingphiladelphia.com Even another reason to leave: The slider is non-semantic and terrible SEO. Google won't allow a slider script with tags and a hrefs, so the only way to implement a slider is through a Google Docs Presentation that keeps sliding. I know - terrible SEO (#donthate) but we needed something. Any advice and thoughts would help! Thanks Mozzers!
Web Design | | _Thriveworks0 -
Is it better to redirect a url or set up a landing page for a new site?
Hi, One of our clients has got a new website but is still getting quite a lot of traffic to her old site which has a page authority of 30 on the home page and has about 20 external backlinks. It's on a different hosting package so a different C block but I was wondering if anyone could advise if it would be better to simply redirect this page to the new site or set up a landing page on this domain simply saying "Site has moved, you can now find us here..." sort of idea. Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks
Web Design | | Will_Craig0 -
My Site Is Using A Lot of Hosting Bandwidth. Suggestions?
My website http://www.socialseomanagement.com/ is using tons of bandwidth. 聽I received a message from the hosting company saying I exceeded my monthly bandwidth and it has only been a few days. 聽Can anyone take a look and make suggestions? Thanks
Web Design | | JChronicle0 -
Site Activity, SEO, and behind login
I have a site that provides online education and as such, most of the user activity happens behind a login. This has me thinking about potential SEO impacts with a few questions that maybe someone could lend some light on: How important is activity (above just search activity) to the search engines Would it help to enter these pages, even though they're behind a login, into GA as we have with the front-end of the site Does a subdomain make a difference (right now we implement the course as a subdomain of the main site Lastly, as I was looking at compete.com, I am wondering how they get these use statistics?
Web Design | | uwaim20120 -
The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?
Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: 帽 and 贸. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Dise帽o Web (web design) and Aplicai贸n iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX:聽 http://www.twago.es/expert/Dise帽o-Web/Dise帽o-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicaci贸n-iPhone/Aplicaci贸n-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicaci贸n-iPhone/Aplicaci贸n-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago
Web Design | | wdziedzic0 -
Separate .mobi site or make .com site mobile friendly?
Our website now has enough mobile traffic to justify going mobile friendly, which it is not at this time. I am in favor of making a separate .mobi site designed specifically for mobile phones and smart phones for several reasons. It is cheaper, faster, and easier to accomplish. I think our mobile users will have a good experience though obviously not as much info as our full site. I would use ourdomain.mobi with link or a redirect for mobile users from from the main site. My top three choices for implementing that are http://allwebcodesign.com/setup/mobi-templates.htm#detailsarea
Web Design | | zharriet
Template that can be viewed by mobile or desktop. http://www.onbile.com/ http://www.networksolutions.com/mobile-website/index.jsp Does this seem like a good solution?1