Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
CcTLD + Subdirectory for languages
-
Hey,
a client has as .de domain with subdirectories for different languages, so domain.de/de, domain.de/en, domain.de/fr etc.
hreflang Tags are implemented, so each subdirectory of each language references to the other languages, so for domain.de/en it is:
My question is about the combination of ccTLD + language subdirectory. Do you think this is problematic for Google and should be replaced with .com + language subdirectory?
We have lots a high quality domains (from countries with corresponding languages) linking to .de/de and .de/en, some links on .de/fr & .de/es and 0 links pointing to .de/cn.
Thanks in advance!
Julian -
Thanks Gaston for your answer on this!
I will definitely not make a fast move here and will start with testing for sure.
Are there are more people who can contribute to this or have experience with this topic?
Thanks!
-
Hi Julian,
I have no experience in ranking websites with ccTLD on multiple different languages.
In my opinion, it might be harder for that website to rank on other countries, because of the ccTLD.As I don't have that much experience on this topic, I cant estimate the impact. But, if you can do it with not that much effort, I'd go with the .com domain and the corresponding subfolders.
Before migrating everything to a different domain, I'd suggest you trying with the new languages/countries to see if there is any faster/better rankings.
If you have the corresponding ccTLD for each country, I'd go with creating websites on its corresponding ccTLD. At least on every market that the company has business. If that's not possible, then I'd go with the .com/lang/Does it make sense?
I cant stress it enough, before doing any really big change/migration, test the hell out of it!Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston
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
-
Duplicate Content and Subdirectories
Hi there and thank you in advance for your help! I'm seeking guidance on how to structure a resources directory (white papers, webinars, etc.) while avoiding duplicate content penalties. If you go to /resources on our site, there is filter function. If you filter for webinars, the URL becomes /resources/?type=webinar We didn't want that dynamic URL to be the primary URL for webinars, so we created a new page with the URL /resources/webinar that lists all of our webinars and includes a featured webinar up top. However, the same webinar titles now appear on the /resources page and the /resources/webinar page. Will that cause duplicate content issues? P.S. Not sure if it matters, but we also changed the URLs for the individual resource pages to include the resource type. For example, one of our webinar URLs is /resources/webinar/forecasting-your-revenue Thank you!
Technical SEO | | SAIM_Marketing0 -
Google tries to index non existing language URLs. Why?
Hi, I am working for a SAAS client. He uses two different language versions by using two different subdomains.
Technical SEO | | TheHecksler
de.domain.com/company for german and en.domain.com for english. Many thousands URLs has been indexed correctly. But Google Search Console tries to index URLs which were never existing before and are still not existing. de.domain.com**/en/company
en.domain.com/de/**company ... and an thousand more using the /en/ or /de/ in between. We never use this variant and calling these URLs will throw up a 404 Page correctly (but with wrong respond code - we`re fixing that 😉 ). But Google tries to index these kind of URLs again and again. And, I couldnt find any source of these URLs. No Website is using this as an out going link, etc.
We do see in our logfiles, that a Screaming Frog Installation and moz.com w opensiteexplorer were trying to access this earlier. My Question: How does Google comes up with that? From where did they get these URLs, that (to our knowledge) never existed? Any ideas? Thanks 🙂0 -
Same URL for languages sub-directories
Hi All, I have a main domain and 9 different subdirectories for languages, example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages, but we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at lease for the main domain URLs? www.kornferry.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
Robot.txt : How to block a specific file type in several subdirectories ?
Hello everyone ! I need help setting up a robot.txt. I'm trying to block all pdf files in particular directories so I'm using this command. In the example below the line is blocking all .gif in the entire site. Block files of a specific file type (for example, .gif) | Disallow: /*.gif$ 2 questions : Can I use this command to specify one particular directory in which I want to block pdf files ? Will this line be recognized by googlebots ? Disallow: /fileadmin/xxxxxxx/xxx/xxxxxxx/*.pdf$ Then I realized that I would have to write as many lines as many directories there are in which I want to block pdf files. Let's say I want to block pdf files in all these 3 directories /fileadmin/directory1 /fileadmin/directory1/sub1 /fileadmin/directory1/sub1/pdf Is there a pattern-matching rule I could use to blocks access to pdf files in all subdirectories instead of writing 3x the above line for each subdirectory ? For exemple : Disallow: /fileadmin/directory1*/ Many thanks in advance for any insight you may have.
Technical SEO | | LabeliumUSA0 -
Does using a reverse proxy to make a subdomain appear as a subdirectory affect SEO?
Using a reverse proxy only makes it appear that a subdomain is really a subfolder. However, links in the end remain the same. Does this have any negative (or positive) impact on SEO? Does it make it difficult from the blog's (subdomain's) sitemap or robots.txt file to be properly read by search engines?
Technical SEO | | rodelmo41 -
Adding multi-language sitemaps to robots.txt
I am working on a revamped multi-language site that has moved to Magento. Each language runs off the core coding so there are no sub-directories per language. The developer has created sitemaps which have been uploaded to their respective GWT accounts. They have placed the sitemaps in new directories such as: /sitemap/uk/sitemap.xml /sitemap/de/sitemap.xml I want to add the sitemaps to the robots.txt but can't figure out how to do it. Also should they have placed the sitemaps in a single location with the file identifying each language: /sitemap/uk-sitemap.xml /sitemap/de-sitemap.xml What is the cleanest way of handling these sitemaps and can/should I get them on robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Redirecting Root domain to subdirectory by IP addresses (country specific)
We are using Wordpress Multisite. so www.mysite.com is our English website and www.mysite.com/sub is our Chinese website Can I redirect Chinese visitors who type "www.mysite.com" to "www.mysite.com/sub" ? so we want to force redirection to www.mysite.com/sub if our website is visited by Chinese IP Address. I've realized that this is called GeoIP Redirection. and our hosting company already has those database, I guess my job is just to simply insert some code in .htacess My question is, would it affect our SEO later on? and what .htacess code is the best practice here?
Technical SEO | | joony20080 -
What is the value of english links with foreign language anchor text for a foreign site?
I have a site in Spanish that is hosted in Spain with a .es TLD. I already have many Spanish-language links from websites in Spain, but I obviously want more and I'm finding I might need to look beyond typical Spanish sites. In talking to some of my link builders who work on my English/American sites, they are recommending that I build links on the normal article sites, blogs and web 2.0 sites that I normally build links on but that I make all the content English and insert the anchor text in Spanish. For example, if my site were about "weightloss", my keyword would be "perder peso" (in spanish). They are recommending that I have articles, reviews, etc written about weightloss in English with the anchor text "perder peso" worked into the English article. Most of the sites are English sites that are hosted in the US (article sites, web 2.0 properties, etc). My question is what is the value of these links? Does anybody have any experience with this?
Technical SEO | | jargomang0