SEO international - ccTLD or Subdirectories / Hosting on 1 server (IP) in Netherlands
-
Hi All,
I do mingle me in discussion if it's better to have an Ecommerce site of a Brand X on seperate ccTLD's (Brand.nl / Brand.de / Brand.com or use subdirectories (brand.com/nl, brand.com/de, brand.com/fr etc.
I see a lot of comments on this, but i am missing one (maybe) essential part.
We are using Magento with multi ccTLD support. BUT the environment is hosted in the Netherlands. Will we be "penalized" on hosting in NL when using www.brand.DE or other countries?
Or is it MUCH better to host those ccTLD in country of Origin?
Because if it is, maybe we can better use subdirs because then we can use our builded authority of the root domain.
Hope someone have an answer on this one!
Thanks!
Jeroen
-
Hey Jeroen,
If you are going down the ccTLD route I would host each sites it's respected country, it's possible Google will apply some weight to the geo location of the IP address (you should also set the location in WMT).
But more importantly hosting in the same country is going to improve site load times which will help out (a tiny bit atm) with google and improve the user experience.
Hosting in another country is not going to get you "penalised" by Google but it's not going to send a signal (from the geo location of the IP address) that you are located in Germany - this may or may not affect your rankings.
I recommend you watch this video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
Hope that helps...
Keith
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
-
Question about International SEO
We've just recently launched our website in Canada and our web crawler is showing some pages with "&Country=CA", even if the current page already includes Country=CA. Why is this and how would we go about resolving?
International SEO | | nicole.nelson030 -
Hreflang on non 1:1 websites
Hi. I have a client with international websites targeting several different countries. Currently, the US (.com) website outranks the country-specific domain when conducting a search within that country (i.e. US outranks the UK website in the UK). This sounds like a classic case for hrelang. However, the websites are largely not 1:1. They offer different content with a different design and a different URL structure. Each country is on a country-specific domain (.com, .co.uk, .com.au, etc.). As well, the country-specific domains have lower domain authority than the US/.com website - fewer links, lower quality content, poorer UX, etc. Would hreflang still help in this scenario if we were to map it the closest possible matching page? Do the websites not sharing content 1:1 add any risks? The client is worried the US/.com website will lose ranking in the country but the country-specific domain won't gain that ranking. Thanks for any help or examples you can offer!
International SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0 -
International URL paths
Wanted to ask everyone a questions: So our company is going to be doing a website that is going to be full of videos. The url path will be country.domain.com/language/slug/content-id. We redirect the user when they go to the different country. So if you're in spain on a train to france your URL will change from es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id. Each country can listen to each video in all languages. My question is with hreflang tags and canonicals. Aside from targeting users in a certain country via Google Search Console, how do I eliminate duplication and tell Google which I'd like to show up via which country. In spain I would like es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to show in Google and would have hreflang tags on each of the es.domain pages but what about fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id since it would show the same content? I can't canonical to one of them since I need them to show in their respective country. How do I show the difference in language and country without showing duplication?
International SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
SEO When Teaching English To Russians
My girlfriend is from Saint Petersburg, Russia and now lives in Toronto, Canada. She's been teaching English to Russians for 3 years in person and on Skype, and now wants to start a website to get more 1-on-1 clients and sell online courses, which I have a lot of experience in. If you don't feel like reading my notes below, I'll summarize my main questions here: Would you lean to creating the site more in English or Russian language or both equally... with a .com or .ru or both (2 sites)... hosted in the U.S. or Russia? I've been reading a number of excellent threads about strategies and tactics for online marketing in multiple language (including some here on Moz), but am still confused about how best to approach this. Here are some notes: -Some prospects will search for her services in English and some in Russian (probably more in Russian). -If I build her a site primarily in English, she can take advantage of my experience in English keyword research, SEO, competitor research, and so on. If I build her a site primarily in Russian, I can still do those things, but not as efficiently or effectively. -If I were thinking first and foremost of our users, which is obviously a good place to start, the site would be in both English and Russian, but I've read that if a site has both English and Russian text, and is a .com instead of a .ru, that can really hurt its chances of ranking in Russia's Yandex search engine, which is used more in Russia than Google. Along the same lines, although most SEO sites are saying that it doesn't matter where you host a website these days, an exception seems to be that Yandex does reward sites that are hosted locally. Are these assertions true? -At first I assumed that organic search competition is lower in the Russian language, but I don't really know. I've also read that Yandex really rewards older domains and that it can be hard to beat them, which means competition may be quite high. So my questions again are: Would you lean to creating the site more in English or Russian or both... with a .com or .ru or both (2 sites)... hosted in the U.S. or Russia? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | smilinggardener
Phil1 -
SEO in foreign languages
Hi everyone, I currently run a website called Barquitos www.barquitos.com The site is an extension of a shop that is based here in Spain. Though because the town is particularly touristy we built the website to offer English and Spanish as language options on the site. English on Barquitos.com and Spanish through a sub domain es.barquitos.com. In an ideal world I want to rank the English version for English phrases on Google.co.uk, and the Spanish sub domain on es.barquitos.com. However, my Spanish is only at a reasonable standard, probably not good enough to look at writing quality content in Spanish. Is building up the Page Authority and Domain authority for the English main domain enough to rank the Spanish sub domain or do we need a focussed approach for both languages? Any tips or advice for helping to rank sub domains in foreign languages would be greatly appreciated. Thanks everyone Stu
International SEO | | Barquitos0 -
Hosting accounts
Hi folks, I would appreciate your thoughts on this. So, I work with a company who is based in Canada. I work in the US branch. There is little or no trouble for the website ranking well in Canada due to the lack of competition. That said, it is a bit more challenging here in the US due to extreme competition. My Question: Does having the site hosted in Canada make it any more difficult for the site to rank well in the US? As always, thanks so much. I love this place!!!
International SEO | | APICDA0 -
SEO in the UK
Will soon be starting to do SEO for a client in the UK and wondered if there was anything I should do differently for what I do in the United States?
International SEO | | hwade0 -
International (greek) characters in the URL
For one of our sites we are considering restructuring the urls. This is about a Greek site and we are toying between the following options: a) English URLS e.g. www.domain.com/cars b) Greek URLs e.g. www.domain.com/αυτοκίνητα c) "Greeklish" URLs (Greek words spelled with latin characters) www.domain.com/aftokinita Normally we would imagine option b is the best since it would reinforce the main and most relevant keyword that is already present within the page content. We see many people search in google using greeklish (e.g. they are lazy to switch the keyboard locale all the time). Since we would also like to capture this part of the SE traffic but cannot obviously write in "greeklish" within our main page content maybe option c is a good compromise?
International SEO | | achatzakis0