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鈥檙e 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.
What's the point of an EU site?
-
Buongiorno from 18 degrees C Wetherby UK
On this site http://www.milwaukeetool.eu/ the client wants to hold on to the EU site despite there being multiple standalone country sittes e.g. http://www.milwaukeetool.fr & http://www.milwaukeetool.co.uk
Why would you ever need an EU site? I mean who ever searches for an EU site? If the client holds on to the eu site despite my position it's a waiste of time from a search perspective is the folowing the best appeasment?
When a user enters the eu url or redirects to country the detected, eg I'm in Paris I enter www.milwaukeetool.eu it redirects to http://www.milwaukeetool.fr. My felling this would be the most pragmatic thing to do?
Any ideas please,
Cioa,
David -
The .eu domain termination is a generic, hence it is not bound to geo-targeting on Google Webmaster Tool. In that sense, it is an alternative to the .com domain termination, if the .com is not available.
It was created by the European Union has a way to "communicate" that the business owning the domain has an European nature and that it is based on a nation of E(uropean) U(nion) and that is primary market is the EU.
From an SEO point of view, it doesn't offer any really advantage with respect any other generic domain name:
-
you can't geo-target more countries with a single domain name
-
you can't geo-target political regions (or continents).
Hence, it is good to have it for defending your brand, and to use it if .com (or .net) have been already taken. But if you have a .com, then it is better to redirect the .eu to it.
-
-
I had that argument with a client once and i manage to persuade them not to go ahead with it as they had .com and .co.uk .
.com is international so i think it did make sense not to use .eu but in your case, if you don't have .com then probably you need to look at which countries you want to target. If your client is UK based and if they target client from all around EU, then it might make sense to use .eu as you have very little chance to target someone in Italy with co.uk or .com.fr domains. If you are targeting only UK and FR then, you don't need .eu. It will just duplicate your work.
-
Hello
I got the same situation with customers recently. The best I've found was to tell them:
"You're definitely right we cannot loose the .eu. So we gonna redirect it to the BESTDOMAINE.com as main website. So people will still find you and you'll get more customers and will keep the .eu."
Then you can provide some technical arguments explaining that if he sticks to this position he will loose business.
In my case it worked out
From 50掳 in Dubai
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
-
Homepage Slider How to Handle H1 and H2's
Working on a site with a slider on the homepage, I dislike them but owner wants to keep in place. Currently, the slider has 4 slides with different images but the same text, so the slider has 4 slides with 4 identical H2 tags and accompanying text. There is no H1 tag on the page at all. It seems to me that a better solution would be to change the first slide to be H1 (with the target keyword) and rework the text in the other slides as H2 tags to appeal to the user. This does mean that the H1 and H2 tags in the slider would be styled the same. Is this a sensible approach?
Web Design | | GrouchyKids1 -
Old site to new WordPress site - Client concerned about Yahoo Ranking
Hello, Back Story I have a client (law firm) who has a large .html website. He has been doing his own SEO for years and it shows. I think the only reason he reached out to a professional is because he got a huge penalty from Google last fall and fell very far down in rankings. Although, he still retains a #1 spot in Yahoo for his site for the keyword phrase he wants. I have been creating a new WordPress theme for the client and creating all new pages and updating the formatting/SEO. From the beginning I have told the client that when we delete the old site and install a new WordPress site (same domain name, but different page hierarchy) he will take a bump in the search engines until all the 301 redirects get sorted out. I told him I can't guarantee any time frame of how long the dip in SEO will last. Some sites bounce right back while others take longer. Last week, during a discussion, he tells me that if he loses his #1 ranking on Yahoo for any length of time he thinks he will go out of business. Needless to say I was a little taken back. When it comes to SEO I use best practice techniques, do my research, stay on top of trends but I never guarantee rankings when moving to a new site. I'm thinking of ways I can help elevate any type of huge SEO drop off and help the client. Here is what I was thinking of suggesting to the client and I would love some feedback. Main Question He has another domain he isn't doing anything with. It's pretty much his domain name with pc added. I was thinking about using that domain to create a simple 1-2 page WordPress website with brand new content (no duplicate content) aimed at attracting his keyword phrase. I would do as much SEO as I could with a 1-2 page site and give it a month or so to see if this smaller site can get into the top #10 in Yahoo, or higher. Then, when we move the site he will still have a website on the first page of Yahoo for his keyword phrase. I hope I explained it clearly 馃檪 I would be open to any suggestions anyone may have. Thanks
Web Design | | Bill_K0 -
From Google Sites to Wordpress - Anyone Ventured this SEO terrain?
We have a few sites in Google Sites - and they are ugly! We have a majority (40+) of websites in Wordpress. But we have a few websites just stuck on Google Sites, and since Google won't let you fully edit the HTML, add scripts, or implement any technology since 2000, we want to move. The sad problem - the Google sites are ranking well. We rank well in Manhattan, Atlanta, Dallas, and Philadelphia. The problem is - the sites do not give much room for growth - and the bounce rate is high because they are so ugly. Has Anyone moved from Google sites to Wordpress? Should we just stay with Google and bite the ugly bullet? My fear is that these sites will not allow for growth. It is hard to update them and even harder to make them look nice. To get a sample - beware: www.counselingphiladelphia.com Even another reason to leave: The slider is non-semantic and terrible SEO. Google won't allow a slider script with tags and a hrefs, so the only way to implement a slider is through a Google Docs Presentation that keeps sliding. I know - terrible SEO (#donthate) but we needed something. Any advice and thoughts would help! Thanks Mozzers!
Web Design | | _Thriveworks0 -
Does it do harm if you add a rel="canonical" tag on a page that doesn't need it?
If a page is clearly unique and there is obviously no canonical tag needed, does it hurt anything if one has been added?
Web Design | | jaychow0 -
Should the parent directory of the main site-navigation be clickable or not?!?
Highly discussed in our team is the question: Should all parent navigation items be clickable, or only the ones that have no child menu appearing on mouse over? At Starwood Germany, we 聽would like to adjust the main navigation for all our websites in order to improve consistency and user friendliness. At the moment, most of our websites feature both clickable non-clickable parent items, depending on whether the items have a corresponding child menu (appearing on mouse over) or not. See example here: http://www.imperialvienna.com/en Some of our team members believe it might be irritating and/or confusing for the user if some items are clickable while others are not. What do you think?聽Any thoughts and insights would be truly appreciated!
Web Design | | DFM_GSA0 -
Need to rebuild client's flash website
I am working with their web designer and need to figure out a way to rebuild their site which is currently all in flash. I was wondering if there was a way to do this without spending a ton of time in completely re-doing the site from scratch.
Web Design | | awalker840 -
The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?
Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: 帽 and 贸. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Dise帽o Web (web design) and Aplicai贸n iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX:聽 http://www.twago.es/expert/Dise帽o-Web/Dise帽o-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicaci贸n-iPhone/Aplicaci贸n-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicaci贸n-iPhone/Aplicaci贸n-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago
Web Design | | wdziedzic0 -
Combining web pages and it's affects on SEO?
We are looking into amending a website we are working on to try and combine 2 or 3 current pages onto one page. This site is similar to an estate agents site and currently has images, map, floor plan sub pages etc. Can anyone tell me, if we were to combine these pages and include the above details on one page, how that would affect the current search engine rankings?
Web Design | | SoundinTheory0
