E-commerce : 1 site per country or 1 site per language?
-
I'm working with an European e-commerce; they already have a French website with a .fr domain.
They want to target the Belgium with a .be domain and the Nederland with a .nl domain.
Belgium = 50% dutch, 50% French.
Is it better to do 3 websites, one per country, or 2 websites, one per language ? Thinking to SEO, costs, VAT management, what is your opinion?
-
I hear the word 'cloak' and I immediately think 'bad'. Are you doing this in some way that won't get a site penalized? I'm genuinely curious.
-
My suggestion would be to have one site altogether. That is translated into multiple languages (i.e Belgium, French, etc) and have multiple domains. When the domain for the French site is opened into the browser the sites language and currency reflects that of France and the same with Belgium.
You can then cloak the domain to stay as the .fr or .nl whilst the user visits the site. Magento Community Edition supports this with the use of a plugin or two.
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
-
International Sites - Sitemaps, Robots & Geolocating in WMT
Hi Guys, I have a site that has now been launched in the US having originally just been UK. In order to accommodate this, the website has been set-up using directories for each country. Example: domain.com/en-gb domain.com/en-us As the site was originally set-up for UK, the sitemap, robots file & Webmaster Tools account were added to the main domain. Example: domain.com/sitemap.xml domain.com/robots.txt The question is does this now need changing to make it specific for each country. Example: The sitemap and robots.txt for the UK would move to: domain.com/en-gb/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-gb/robots.txt and the US would have its own separate sitemap and robots.txt. Example : domain.com/en-us/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-us/robots.txt Also in order to Geolocate this in WMT would this need to be done for each directory version instead of the main domain? Currently the WMT account for the UK site is verified at www.domain.com, would this need reverifying at domain.com/en-gb? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
International SEO | | CarlWint0 -
Duplicate Content - International Sites - AirBNB
Good morning Just a quick question. Why does AirBNB not get penalised for duplicate content on its sites. For example, the following two urls (and probably more for other countries), both rank appropriately in the google (UK and COM), https://www.airbnb.co.uk/help/getting-started/how-to-travel
International SEO | | joogla
https://www.airbnb.com/help/getting-started/how-to-travel Their are no canonical tags, no Alternative etc If I look at the following https://www.airbnb.co.uk/s/London--United-Kingdom
https://www.airbnb.com/s/London--United-Kingdom They both have alternative to point to the other language versions which I would expect. However they also both point to them selves as canonical. Would this not be duplicate content ? Thanks for your insights Shane0 -
E-Commerce - Country Domains versus 1 Domain?
Hi, Just wanted to get some feedback and opinions re the idea of segmenting our ecommerce site languages under various domains, like .jp for japanese, .it for italian etc... I do understand the geolocation benefits that this could bring us, but on the flipside, it would mean that we would need to grow our domain authority, link buiding per country domain, which is quite a bit of work. Has anyone ever considered or implemented this and any thoughts? Thanks!
International SEO | | bjs20100 -
Backlinks to URLs with Language Parameters (for Chinese version of website) and SEO?
Hey all, We run a large eCommerce site in Australia and are preparing to launch to the Chinese market. Our site has been fully converted to Chinese and displays the version of the site detected as default in the user's browser unless they manually select otherwise. This is done by appending the parameter "?la=zh" onto the end of the URL, so for example the Chinese version would be: **www.example.com/australia?la=zh ** This then forces the product catalogue to display the relevant language version. My question is, for SEO purposes and back links in particular, since they aren't really a "true URL" (i.e: strictly speaking they aren't different "pages", just the same page being populated with different characters), would getting links from Chinese websites to the URL "www.example.com/australia?la=zh" really be viewed as any different from just "www.example.com/australia"? Do they pass the same amount of juice and is the difference detected by the engines (thinking mainly about Baidu in particular but of course Google as well)? Feedback from anyone with experience in SEO for multi-lingual sites would be much appreciated, thanks.
International SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
Content in different languages
HI all, I need some advice about displaying content in different languages. Currently I 301 to the correct locale based on IP. e.g. German 301s from site.com to site.com/de En 301s from site.com to site.com/en Is this the best way or would it just be better to change the content based on browser and keep the URL the same? I have href="/hr" hreflang="hr" rel="alternate" /> tags implemented for all locales on site Thanks
International SEO | | Sayers0 -
SEO for Subdomains for different languages .com/fr, .com/es
Hi All, I was wondering how best to to approach optimisation of a site that exists on a single .com domain, but has different subfolders for different languages. The site is a .com and it has subfolders for French, Spanish, Russian and English. The business is situated in France and the vast majority of clients are French and English speakers. I've read that it's possible to geo target these subfolders using webmaster tools however I believe this is an inferior method of optimisation than having tld's. Just wondered if anyone had experience of htis and could provide any advice ? As they won't be rebuilding the site for another year or so I wondered if there were any quick wins? My second question is to do with how best to set these campaigns up within SEO Moz. would it be better to track at a subdomain or subfolder leverl (for different languages)? If someone could advise I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks, vantresca
International SEO | | vanvallejo0 -
SEO difficulty between languages?
Hello, I would like to know if there are certain factors that determine SEO difficulty between different languages or countries. Is doing SEO more difficult in Japan than in the United States? What would be some factors that could help determine the above? Thanks in advance,
International SEO | | SS-ose0 -
How to optimise you site in other countries eg Australia
We would like to rank better for specific keywords in Australia. We rank pretty well in our home tld .co.uk but would like to do so in .com.au I would appreciate your thoughts and recommendations.
International SEO | | seanmccauley0