International SEO question domain.com vs domain.com/us/ , domain.com/uk etc.
-
Hi Mozzers,
I am expanding a website internationally. I own the .com for the domain. I need to accommodate multiple countries and I'm not sure if I should build a folder for /us/ for United States or just have the root domain .com
OPTION 1:
domain.com/page-url -- United States
domain.com/de/page-url -- Denmark
domain.com/jp/page-url -- JapanOPTION 2:
domain.com/us/page-url -- United States
domain.com/de/page-url -- Denmark
domain.com/jp/page-url -- JapanMy concern with option 2 is there will be some dilution and we wouldn't get the full benefit of inbound links compared to Option 1 as we would have geo ip redirection in place to redirect users etc. to the relative sub-folder.
Which option is better from an SEO perspective?
Cheers,
Jeremy
-
Thank you for all of your responses - they have given me a lot of very specific help and a clear direction to move forward!
-
The use of subfolder or ccTlds (or subdomain) should not be decided because of SEO, but because of business reasons.
For instance, if Jeremy does not have already a consistent organic traffic from Denmark, maybe is better starting with a subfolder, which inherits some of the overall domain authority via internal linking, hence can obtain a first boost in organic visibility.
Once the business started having recognition and consistent and continuous traffic, Jeremy will be able to consider to migrate to a ccTld solution (if really needed).
On the contrary, let's say that Jeremy's company has physical offices in Copenhagen and it is an already known brand. Then in that case it would surely better to go for the ccTld way.
-
I do not agree.
The root is for your main market, and the subfolders for your international ones. It is so since the dawn of international SEO and it always worked well.
In GWT (Search Console), Jeremy should have to geotarget the root domain to USA (or maintain it not geo-targeted, so to target all markets but Danish and Japanese), and geotarget the dk and jp subfolders to Denmark and Japan.
-
Hi Jeremy,
option 1 is surely better, because you are quitting a level (or click).
Regarding redirecting users, you can maintain the redirection via GeoIP even if you put the USA "site" under the root and not in a US subfolder.
Said that, I strongly suggest you to order the redirection just when a user come for the first time on your site, so:
- To give users the freedom to visit also the others versions, which is less dumb then you may believe. For me, living in Europe, is a real nightmare when I cannot visit the "Spanish" version of a site just because I am travelling and I am visiting it from another targeted country;
- To not always redirect googlebot to the USA version because of its American IP. Even if Googlebot started crawling from countries other than the USA, from the logs' analysis I still see how the highest percentages of visits Googlebot does are from Mountain View.
Finally, correct a mistake you are doing in your URLs:
DE is for Germany (DE = Deutschland) and not Denmark. The name of the Danish subfolder should be DK.
I warn you about this because this mistake would probably end being replicated in the hreflang implementation, with obvious geotargeting issues.
-
Hi there
If you are trying to COUNTRY target, you should go for a ccTLD, but if you are going after a LANGUAGE target, you should do a subdirectory. You can learn more here.
I would also make sure you read the following resources:
International SEO
Country Targeting (Google & Bing)
Language Targeting (Google & Bing)All of the above resources will help you have more success in your international efforts.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
Apologies I did misunderstand - Option 2 - I find it is more customer friendly as well.
-
Hi Jeremy,
I think that John has misunderstood the question a little as you aren't talking about different domains, just what to do with the US / Home.
I would suggest you take option 2. because you are targeting internationally from a .com, it is important to be able to differentiate where you are as soon as you hit the site. Each sub-folder is a country.
And remember to use HREFLANG to help identify language / country.
-Andy
-
Hi John
Thanks for the quick reply! I'm actually talking about having the same domain name for both situations, just not sure if I should have brand.com with the domain root targeted to US traffic or brand.com/us/ with US targeted to US traffic
cheers,
Jeremy -
You will get caveated answers. But for me Option 1 - by a long way.
Many articles on it, but you need to focus all resources on one domain - that gets optimum results. Two domains = twice as much work as one, three domains = 3 times.
Look at cottonon.com - if you want to monitor a very successful version.
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
-
Is it worth maintaining multiple international websites
Hi I work for a British company which has two well established websites - a .co.Uk for the UK, and a .com for the US and rest of the world (in language directories). The Uk site is hosted in the Uk, the .com in US. The websites do reasonable well in Google on both sides of the Atlantic. The company is a small but quite well known brand. The company is now thinking of redirecting the .co.Uk to the .com as it would be cheaper to maintain. What would you advise? Thanks.
International SEO | | fdl4712_aol.com2 -
International SEO & Duplicate Content: ccTLD, hreflang, and relcanonical tags
Hi Everyone, I have a client that has two sites (example.com & example.co.uk) each have the same English content, but no hreflang or rel="canonical" tags in place. Would this be interpreted as duplicate content? They haven't changed the copy to speak to specific regions, but have tried targeting the UK with a ccTLD. I've taken a look at some other comparable question on MOZ like this post - > https://moz.com/community/q/international-hreflang-will-this-handle-duplicate-content where one of the answers says **"If no translation is happening within a geo-targeted site, HREFLANG is not necessary." **If hreflang tags are not necessary, then would I need rel="canonical" to avoid duplicate content? Thanks for taking the time to help a fellow SEO out.
International SEO | | ccox10 -
Has any one seen negative SEO effects from using Google Translate API
We have a site currently in development that is using the Google Translate API and I am having a massive issue getting screaming frog to crawl and all of our non-native English speaking employees have read through the translated copy in their native language and the general consensus is it reads at a 5th grade level at best. My questions to the community is, has anyone implemented this API on a site and has it a) helped with gaining traffic from other languages/countires and b) has it hurt there site from an SEO standpoint.
International SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
Is using JavaScript to render translations safe for International SEO?
Hello World! Background: I am evaluating a tool/service that a company wants to use for managing the translated versions of their international/multi-lingual websites: https://www.transifex.com/product/transifexlive/ Transifex is asking webmaster to "simply add a snippet of JavaScript" to their website(s); the approved translations are added by the business in the back-end; and the translated sites are made live with the click of a button (on/to the proper ccTLD, sub-domain, or sub-directory, which is specified). CONCERN: Even though I know Google reads JavaScript for crawling and ranking,
International SEO | | SixSpokeMedia64
I am concerned because I see the "English text" when I view the source-code on the "German site", and I wonder if this is really acceptable? QUESTION: Is a service like this (such as Transifex using JavaScript to render translations client-side) safe for indexing and ranking for my clients' international search engine visibility, especially via Google? Thank you!0 -
Search visibility increase with international SEO
Hi Moz Community, I am wondering if there is any tool and/or any sort of standard increase in search visibility I can assume that we will have with our website if we expand to start targeting Spanish with our site. At the moment we receive about 6000-7000 visits a day with 75% of that coming from the US and UK. I am wondering is there any way to make a rough assumption on visibility that will increase by launching a new Spanish speaking website. It would be a subdirectory, not a subdomain or gTLD. I am struggling to find a concrete answer on this and i'd like to make a semi-accurate forecast of the traffic we can expect based on the increase in search visibility that our Spanish language site will provide us. Thanks
International SEO | | Brian_Dowd0 -
International subdomains?
I have a US based site and recently got a backlink from the German version of IGN (de.ign.com). Does that carry the same weight because it is the same root domain?
International SEO | | garyislearning0 -
How do you submit US based news on Google News US from the UK?
How do you go about submitting US news (based in the UK) to get indexed on Google News and show up in the US rather then the UK?
International SEO | | CameronT0 -
Site Spider/ Crawler/ Scraper Software
Short of coding up your own web crawler - does anyone know/ have any experience with a good bit of software to run through all the pages on a single domain? (And potentially on linked domains 1 hop away...) This could be either server or desktop based. Useful capabilities would include: Scraping (x-path parameters) of clicks from homepage (site architecture) http headers Multi threading Use of proxies Robots.txt compliance option csv output Anything else you can think of... Perhaps an oppourtunity for an additional SEOmoz tool here since they do it already! Cheers! Note:
International SEO | | AlexThomas
I've had a look at: Nutch
http://nutch.apache.org/ Heritrix
https://webarchive.jira.com/wiki/display/Heritrix/Heritrix Scrapy
http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/overview.html Mozenda (does scraping but doesn't appear extensible..) Any experience/ preferences with these or others?0