Different country, same language
-
I have read the blog posts by Rand and other community members at YouMoz but i still have a question on trageting and domains / sub-directories usage.
Suppose, my business is located in France but my prospects are in US and UK as well. The issue is, they are not English speakers but French.
- If i use ccTLD, i don't think it will rank well in US and UK.
- gTLD will not be a good option for prospects in France.
What should i do?
Regards,
Shailendra
-
Once you do this its worth looking into Google's new HREFLANG tag which they announced in December 2011.
Its worth reading this example as John Doherty has done some testing (even though I can't see it in his source code).
You'll still want a non county specific domain such as .com as Mozo suggested.
I'll be implementing HREFLANG into my sites this year, it'll be interesting to see the results.
-
I would get a non country specific TLD like site.com and assign it to the USA.
This way you can even have your entire site in French and receive all French queries in the USA.
How to: Go to Google Webmaster Tools > Site Configuration > Settings > Geographic target, and click "Target users in" and select "United States.
-
Have you considered using an IP GEO redirection script? Using a redirection 301 for custom users does not hurt your site's SEO according to Google. This is what i use for specific niche products and my SEO is strong as ever. At least for the past 8 months anyway.
-
Hi Shailendra, we're going through some of the older questions that are marked unanswered and following up to see if you still need advice, or if you'd made a decision and can share any of the results with us. Thanks!
-
I haven't actually used that approach myself at any point, having always favoured individual domains. However, if you go down the route of a ccTLD for France and sub domain for the UK and US, then all that is going to happen is that the two sub domains will share page rank, rather than if you were doing all three.
Regards,
Andy
-
Agree but it's difficult for a sub-domain to compete with a main domain self as well as competitor. Wikipedia brings in lot of trust and authority that businesses rarely possess. Having said that, if i use ccTLD for France and sub-domain for US and UK, will that work for me? Will i be able to get rankins provided i spend optimum SEO resources on it?
-
So to confirm, you might want to target French speakers in the UK and US as well as France?
Just to check, have you had a watch / read of this?
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
"_Option B, of course, being subdomains. You can see Wikipedia doing this. They have en.wikipedia.org, de.wikipedia.org. You use that subdomain to segment the language and country targeting. The problem with subdomains, at least as I see it, is that sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes the subdomains don't inherit all the domain authority, trust, value that you might get from separate subdomains or from all of the content being on a single root domain. So, de.RogerMozbot.com, maybe that will be interpreted the same way that www.RogerMozbot.com or fr.rogermozbot, or ca.rogermozbot, but it might not. That can be a frustrating experience as well. _
Option C is probably the best way to do the domain authority collapse. We'll talk through some of the weaknesses here, too. But this is essentially saying, you know what, everything is going to be on RogerMozbot.com/DE. You can see some sites, Microsoft owns a wide variety of sites that do precisely this. They've got like an EN-US and an EN-UK, saying essentially that is our English language site targeting the UK and they do it all in subfolders, so the Microsoft.com domain is getting all of the domain authority assigned to it and hopefully that is passing through to these subfolders. In most cases, it is going to."
Regards,
Andy
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
-
.edu or country TLD, which one would be better?
Hi,we are working right know with an Education Instutition located Outside the U.S. I think they would be in a possition where they could get de .edu TLD. Right know they have good rankings in its own country cause they are working with their country specific TLD, and they rank well there. But, of course, a considerable percentage of their students are foreigners, so they are very interested in improving their interantional rankings (note that U.S is not a target market). I was wondering if it would be ok to recommend them to change to the .edu TLD, because all their competitors have that tld too. Whould that TLD increase their domain authority inmediatly? I know that .edu is well consider by google when it sends you a link, so it would be reasonable to think that having a .edu domain would be great, but as this domain is very related with the US and all their markets are outside the U.S, I am not sure about what recommend them. What do you think?? Thank you!!!
International SEO | | teconsite0 -
Two versions of a website with different languages - Best way to do it?
I'm working on a website for a Swedish artist and her page is in Swedish, everything is in Swedish on the site, even though it's not a lot of text on the site. We would like to have the site in English too, or another version of the site in English on a separate domain, what's the best way to proceed from here? The domain name is a .se (swedish domain), would it be better to create a another domain and host the english version of the site on a .com domain? Or will we bump into problems with duplicate content if we create a replica of the swedish site in english. We're using wordpress and I know that there's translation plugins out there, is that a good option? I'm a bit clueless on how to proceed and would love some help or guidance here.
International SEO | | Fisken0 -
How to fix the duplicate content problem on different domains (.nl /.be) of your brand's websites in multiple countries?
Dear all, what is the best way to fix the duplicate content problem on different domains (.nl /.be) of your brand's websites in multiple countries? What must I add to my code of websites my .nl domain to avoid duplicate content and to keep the .nl website out of google.be, but still well-indexed in google.nl? What must I add to my code of websites my .be domain to avoid duplicate content and to keep the .nl website out of google.be, but still well-indexed in google.nl? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | HMK-NL3 -
Best domain for spanish language site targeting ALL spanish territories?
hi, we're have a strong .com domain and are looking to launch a site for spanish speakers (ie latin america + spain). we already have various subdirectories for some foreign language sites (eg. ourdomain.co.uk, us.ourdomain.com, ca.ourdomain.com, ourdomainchina.com, ourdomainindia.com etc) we already have a B2B site ourdomain.com-es which will remain the same. I'm thinking best practice would be to launch translated copy for the following: ourdomain.com/es ourdomain.com/cl ourdomain.com/mx ourdomain.com/pt etc etc firstly is this the best option? secondly, i'm really interested to hear whether there is a less time/resource intensive route that would give us visibility in ALL spanish speaking territories? Also - if we go with just one of the above (eg ourdomain.com/cl) how likely are we to get traction in other spanish speaking territories? any help much appreciated!
International SEO | | KevinDunne0 -
Different Countries, Same Site
Hi All, I have recently been given the task of working on a website that sells products in the UK and America, at the moment the site does very well in the UK but does not perform very well in America which I believe is partly down to colloquialisms and difference in language. At the minute the site is a .com and is hosted in the United Kingdom, Does anyone have any useful tips on how to have 2 different versions of the site targeting different locations but using very similar language (Probably would be considered duplicate) Thanks in advance,
International SEO | | marcelo-2753980 -
Multi-lingual SEO: Country-specific TLD's, or migration to a huge .com site?
Dear SEOmoz team, I’m an in-house SEO looking after a number of sites in a competitive vertical. Right now we have our core example.com site translated into over thirty different languages, with each one sitting on its own country-specific TLD (so example.de, example.jp, example.es, example.co.kr etc…). Though we’re using a template system so that changes to the .com domain propagate across all languages, over the years things have become more complex in quite a few areas. For example, the level of analytics script hacks and filters we have created in order to channel users through to each language profile is now bordering on the epic. For a number of reasons we’ve recently been discussing the cost/benefit of migrating all of these languages into the single example.com domain. On first look this would appear to simplify things greatly; however I’m nervous about what effect this would have on our organic SE traffic. All these separate sites have cumulatively received years of on/off-site work, and even if we went through the process of setting up page-for-page redirects to their new home on example.com, I would hate to lose all this hard-work (and business) if we saw our rankings tank as a result of the move. So I guess the question is, for an international business such as ours, which is the optimal site structure in the eyes of the search engines; Local sites on local TLD’s, or one mammoth site with language identifiers in the URL path (or subdomains)? Is Google still so reliant on TLD for geo targeting search results, or is it less of a factor in today’s search engine environment? Cheers!
International SEO | | linklater0 -
I have a site that has 65 different versions of itself.
I've just started managing a site that serves over 50 different countries and the entire web enterprise is being flagged for duplicate content because there is so much of it. What's the best approach to stop this duplicate content, yet serve all of the countries we need to?
International SEO | | Veracity0 -
How to improve SERP rankings in other countries?
We have a .com website in English targeting global visitors. We have good rankings on Google USA for our targeted keywords But we do not rank well in APAC e.g. Sigapore and Australia. What could we do to get ranked in these countries? We received a recommendation to sign up for .sg and .au domains and replicate our Website for Singapore and Australia. But wouldn’t it contribute to duplicate content Issue? We are in software industry and do not have locale specific content. Please advise.
International SEO | | Amjath0