I am launching an international site. what is the best domain strategy
-
Hi Guys,
I am launching a site across the US, UK and UAE. Do I go **test.com/uk test.com/us test.com/UAE -- **or do I go us.Test.com UAe.test.com us.test.com? Which is best for SEO?
-
Suggesting subfolders without considering the peculiarities of the site jusrt because it's a "best practice" is not the ideal thing to do. Even if subfolders have sure advantages, their use can be not technically affordable or even good for effectiveness.
-
As always, it depends.
Is your site an ecommerce site with thousand hundreds if not more products. Or a news site? Then, maybe, the best thing to do should be using country code level domains, because - apart better for geotargeting - the technical maintaining of three complete ecommerce/news sites under in a subfolder system is not the most agile (especially if the site is custom made).
If the case if the one described above, but the ccTLDs are not available, then subdomains can be an alternative.
If your site is not an very technically complex ecommerce or news site, then use subfolders, but consider, if you see that one of the subfolders has very good metrics (sessions, conversions) to move it to a ccTLDs in the middle/long term.
-
There are positives and negatives to using different strategies. Moz's education section has three articles on international SEO: International SEO, Hreflang, and CcTLDs. I'd suggest going through them and also reading any further resources that they cite.
Good luck!
-
Also, if we want to target GCC countries with arabic content, what domain strategy should we apply..
We already have www.tcf-me.com (for english) and www.tcf-me.ae for arabic (But now we not only want to target UAE (Ae) but the entire GCC..
-
Figen we are in the same situation asking the same questions..
How do you tackle duplicate content?
-
Use sub domain (Etc. us.domain.com - fr.domain.com - de.domain.com) if your site will be different languages .
if your site will be only english use this : domain/us - domain/uk .
Be careful about duplicate content
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
-
Should I submit a sitemap for a site with dynamic pages?
I have a coupon website (http://couponeasy.com)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | shopperlocal_DM
Being a coupon website, my content is always keeps changing (as new coupons are added and expired deals are removed) automatically. I wish to create a sitemap but I realised that there is not much point in creating a sitemap for all pages as they will be removed sooner or later and/or are canonical. I have about 8-9 pages which are static and hence I can include them in sitemap. Now the question is.... If I create the sitemap for these 9 pages and submit it to google webmaster, will the google crawlers stop indexing other pages? NOTE: I need to create the sitemap for getting expanded sitelinks. http://couponeasy.com/0 -
Site that's 301 redirected is ranking for brand
We own a number of foreign TLD domains for our brand. They are all 301-redirected to our main .com branded domain. One of them is appearing in our branded search results, outranking out main .com page. To be clear, this is despite there being a 301 redirect from it to the .com page. Any ideas on what is going on here?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ipancake0 -
Using a geolocation service to serve different banners in homepage. Dangers? Best Practices?
Hello, our website is used by customer in more than 100 countries. Becasuse the countries we serve are so many, we are using one single domain and homepage, without country specific content. Now, we are considering to use an geolocation service to identify the customer location and then to change the contents of one banner in the home page accordingly. Might this be dangerous from a SEO perspective? If yes, any suggesiton on how can we implement this to avoid troubles and penalties form the Search Engines? Thanks in advance for any help,Dario
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Darioz0 -
Goddady's Domain Masking and 301's
I have a client who's 7 domains and single website (instantpages®) exists within the clutches of GoDaddy. They own 6 kewyord rich domain names that 301 redirect with masking to the main branded domain. In effect, what this provides is the ability to add a title tag and meta description for a keyword rich domain name that displays content through an iframe. So really it's not duplicate content but this practice sets off my spidey sense that this is not a best practice regarding SEO. I want to suggest for the client to drop the idea of masking and do a straight 301 redirect to main branded domain. I'm sure that is fine but these domains are Not similar variations but actually vary widely: massage-city.com, city-massage.com, city-acupuncture.com, acupuncture-city.com, city-chiropractic.com, chiropractic-city.com etc ---- Doesn't Google frown on redirecting 6 domains to a single domain if they vary widely? Words of wisdom appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | superZj0 -
Redirecting old domains for SEO ranking?
It's been a while since I read anything seriously out of the box on SEO but I thought I would see what others thought of the bold assertions made in this article. Most of it revolves around buying expired domains and using a 301 to point them, and their juice, to new sites. This guy makes a living doing this so he has to know a bit more than the average Joe but I'm wondering where the other shoe is and when it drops.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Highland0 -
Can I Point Multiple Exact Match Domains to a Primary Domain? (Avoiding Duplicate Content)
For example, lets say I have these 3 domains: product1.com product2.com product.com The first 2 domains will have very similar text content, with different products. The product.com domain will be similar content, with all of the products in one place. Transactions would be handled through the Primary domain (product.com) The purpose of this would be to capitalize on the Exact match domain opportunities. I found this seemingly old article: http://www.thesitewizard.com/domain/point-multiple-domains-one-website.shtml The article states that you can avoid duplicate content issues, and have all links attributed to the Primary domain. What do you guys think about this? Is it possible? Is there a better way of approaching this while still taking advantage of the EMD?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ClearVisionDesign0 -
Branded Anchor Text, Exact vs. Non-exact Match Domain
Hello, For NLPCA.com, when you search for "NLP California" in Google,the letters "nlp" are bolded in the SERP URL and so is "ca". See here. This is because "ca" is an abbreviation for "California" Thus, this is not an exact match domain but it is close. What should our branded anchor text be? I want to change the anchor text profile to 98% branded anchor text. The 3 names our company goes by are NLP California NLP Institute of California NLP and Coaching Institute Let me know if we should not use one or more of these names for branded anchor text.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
2 sites in one niche?
Hello, Can you be penalized for having 2 ecommerce sites in the same niche? Is there a way to do it white-hat? Please explain.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0