International Websites - Hosting, Domain Names, & Configuration

[rx300]

What is the best way to configure a website that targets a number of countries and languages around the world?

For example, Apple has websites optimized for just about every country and language in the world (see: https://www.apple.com/choose-country-region/).

• When you choose the UK it takes you to: https://www.apple.com/uk/
• When you choose China it take you to: https://www.apple.com/cn/
• Etc.

When you go to apple.co.uk it forwards you to the UK version of the website. The same is true for apple.cn.

Is this the ideal way to set it up?

I have also seen websites that have each version of the website on its own TLD such as exampleBrand.co.uk and exampleBrand.cn - in this example they don't forward to the .com.

My concern with Apple's solution is SEO and hosting. Do consumers favor seeing their country's TLD in search results over exampleBrand.com/uk? For hosting, shouldn't the mainland China version of the website be hosted in China? Is it possible to just host a folder of a website in a certain country such as the cn folder for China?

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I was unable to find much info on this.

[gfiorelli1]

Apple is doing what is doing because it decided to go the subfolders way for their main website, but they obviously own also the ccTlds for brand protection and redirect them.

Once, though, it was using subdomains for its ecommerce part (now they are subfolders under each country section.

Actually, it is not correct to say that one solution (subfolders, ccTld or subdomains) is better than another. It all depends on the specific business needs and, secondly, on technological needs.

However, it is true that when a company is starting an internationalization of its business, a better option is going with subfolders, so to give them some strength via internal linking, while not forgetting to improve the popularity and authority of the country targeting subfolders with localized link building and digital PR campaigns.

On a middle/long term, though, and traffic and conversion metrics justify it, it may be better to move the subfolder to a unique domain name geotargeted to the marketed country. The reason of this choice can also be found out of the SEO world (i.e.: in the UK the marketing strategy is different than in the USA because of nuances of the same UK market or different seasonality).

Regarding hosting... having a site hosted in the country the site itself is targeting is not anymore a ranking factor in International SEO since when cloud hosting became mainstream.

However, it still remains a (tiny) geotargeting signal for Google, as they repeated sometimes on Twitter and Google Hangouts.

[gfiorelli1]

In the case of markets where Google is not the main search engine, but others like Baidu in China, Naver in Korea, Yahoo in Japan and Yandex in Russian speaking countries, then I would strongly suggest to go for ccTlds, because those search engines do not work the same way Google does (hence, SEO it's different. A good example of this is Naver).

[katemorris]

Hi!

It's actually all going to depend on your company/industry/audience. Apple does it the way they do as they need to do it that way as a global retailer that has the resources to market to different country markets.

https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-international-seo

Try that and let me know what questions you have. Inside that article is a link to a tool to help you figure out how best to set up your site structure.

[JohnMondt]

I would choose to do it with subfolders and not different TLDs for each country.  I found a pretty interesting post found below that can add some perspective:

https://moz.com/community/q/international-seo-domains-or-folders

His response is very thorough and answers your question much better than I ever could.