CcTLDs 301 redirected to subfolders
-
My client has an international website and currently has a mixture of ccTLDs, subdomains, and subfolders for the country specific pages. We are trying to change this however they want to have ccTLDS because of the SEO benefit but 301 redirect them to subfolders because of the simplicity of management that subfolders provide.
I believe that if they are really just working with subfolders, why don't they just use subfolders and use Google Webmaster Tools and XML Sitemaps to help Google understand each targeted country. My questions are:
1. Does having aht ccTLD example.ca 301 redirected to example.com/ca really benefit anything?
2. This client tends to spell out the name of the country even with country specific TLDs, and they can't change it, will this affect SEO? Ex: example.ca/canada.
3. What the best practice? example.ca/canada/en-ca/city or example.ca/canada/city/en-ca?
Thanks!
-
The example.ca ccTLD would definitely have an advantage over the example.com/ca directory.
I have not heard nor experienced that there is any benefit to the .com domain with regard to ranking in other countries just because a ccTLD for that country redirects to it. However, if the ccTLD has lots of country-specific links the 301 would be applying those links to the .com domain and in this way it could help the .com domain rank better in that country. Using cross-domain rel href lang tags should have about the same effect though (i.e. consolidating link signals).
It is not a best practice to have your home page exist in a sub directory (e.g. example.ca/canada) and I would instead put it in the root (i.e. example.ca/). However, if you are going to be 301 redirecting that domain to example.com/ca/canada/... it doesn't really matter.
Best practice would be to put the language directory first, before the file name, such as: example.ca/en-ca/filename.
Be sure to read up on recent rel href lang attribute implementation:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077For "default" pages:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.htmlSpecifiying the language in sitemaps:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865There are so many things to consider when choosing whether to go with separate ccTLDs or a single site that it is difficult to give a clear answer regarding which is best. For this client, given development preferences, scalability issues, cost, consolidation of page-rank, consistent branding, etc... it may very well be the best choice to consolidate the sites. For another business my advice might be different. To reiterate what I started with though: All other things being equal I think a ccTLD would outrank a .com site with a country-specific directory in that country. But all things are NEVER equal.
Good luck!
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
-
Does replacing of external redirects impact SEO?
Previously I have asked about the replacing of internal redirects with actual live pages. The answer is, yes it'll work but may not be huge impact. Now I am concerned with external redirects. We have enough number of external redirecting links. I am thinking to replace them with actual landing pages. Will this improve SEO? Thanks, Satish
International SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How To Proceed With Int'l Language Targeting if Subfolders Not An Option?
I’m currently working with my team to sort out the best way to build out the international versions of our website. Any advice on how to move forward is greatly appreciated! Current Setup: Subdirectories to target languages - i.e. domain.com/es/. We chose this because… We are targeting languages not countries Our product offering does not change from country to country Translated site content is almost identical to the english version Current Problem: Our site is built on WordPress and our database can’t handle the build out of 4 more international versions of the site. The database is slowing down and our site speed is being affected for multiple reasons (WordPress multilingual plugin being one of them). **What to do next? **My developers have said that we cannot continue with our current subdirectory structure due to the technical infrastructure issues I’ve mentioned above (as well as others I’m yet to get full details on). Now I’m left with a decision: Change to a subdomain structure Change to a ccTLD structure Is there an option 3? From what I’ve read it does not make sense to build out language targeted sites on a ccTLD structure because that limits the ability for people outside of the targeted country to find the content organically. I.e. a website at www.domain.es is targeted to searchers in Spain so someone in Columbia is less likely to find that content through the engines. Is this correct? If so, how much can it hurt organic discovery? What’s the optimal setup to move forward with in this case? Thanks!
International SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
Subfolders and 301's
Hello all, Quite simply, I'm stuck. Well, I think I am. We are about to launch a whole new International side of our website. We're an education job board www.eteach.com for schools in the UK and a little internationally. Now that the business is growing we want to make our brand more global. All the big bosses wanted to create a brand new website called www.eteachinternational.com. I managed to persuade them to not to do that and instead use a subfolder approach off of our well established and strong domain www.eteach.com (phew). However, now I'm getting a little lost in making sure I don't duplicate my content. We have a staffroom section on our website which basically has lots of relevant content for people searching how to become a teacher, e.g. www.eteach.com/how-to-become-a-teacher. We also want this same content on the international subfolder, as it will still be relevant content for international teachers. However... Do I have to completely re-write the content (which I'm trying to avoid as it will be very similar) or can I put in a rel=canonical to the already existing pages? So basically (I know this HTML isn't right, it's just for visual's sake!): www.eteach.com/international/how-to-become-a-teacher rel=canonical --> www.eteach.com/how-to-become-a-teacher I understand this gives all the authority to the original page, not the international one, but I'm fine with that (unless anyone can suggest anything else?)
International SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Internationalization and 302 redirects
Hi, We're thinking in an internationalization process for a travel webpage. We'd like to use one domain (.com) in TV and press marketing and have several domains with each country ccTLD domain. We've shown that for example Tripadvisor makes a 302 redirect if you connect to tripadvisor.com and you are in another country. But we've detected aswell, that if you use the Browser Agent Google Bot, it didn't. It appears to be a cloaking, but really they're redirecting the users to the best places for them, and detecting Googlebot for not make the redirect, they ensures that it indexes well all the place. Booking.com makes something similar but with the same domain, detecting if you're Googlebot or not. Do you think that this is a danger thing if you're not as big as Tripadvisor? They makes this redirection by level server, could be safest to do with javascript? if we do with javascript, Google will take this path instead of read the page? Thanks!
International SEO | | robertorg0 -
301 redirect .com to .nl
Hi guys, We have two job websites: one international job website (.com, PR5) and one Dutch job website (.nl, PR0). We have decided to focus on our Dutch job website and want to 301 redirect the international website to the Dutch website. Will this give us the boost we are hoping for on the Dutch site? Or does a .com redirect to .nl work different than a .nl to .nl redirect for example. We're hoping that the international juice will boost our Dutch website of course. Looking forward to your thoughts!
International SEO | | rodjer0 -
GeoIP and redirects
I have been looking at an ecommerce site that uses a GeoIP module to take users to the relevant store, eg: domain.com/uk domain.com/us
International SEO | | edwardlewis
domain.com/euro
domain.com/row After using the SEO Moz site crawler, the GeoIP module is using 302 redirects to take users to the relevant page. So, domain.com 302s to domain.com/uk and so on. What is the impact of this in terms of SEO? Only the US version of the site was crawled by the site crawler, presumably because this was due to the US version of the site being shown based on the IP address. Links to the other stores are clearly placed in the header of the site but they weren't crawled. Thanks in advance 🙂0 -
Sudden drop in rankings after 301 redirect
We recently merged our old webshops to one big webshop. The new webshop is mutlidomain/multilanguage so the English version is at the .com extension and the germand version at the .de extension etc. etc. We redirected the 2 best old webshops to the .com extention with a htaccess 301 redirect. The other old webshops we divided over the other extensions. We redirected the 200 most importent pages with a page to page redirect and redirected the other indexed pages to the new index page. (300K) Everything went well and the new website started indexing. All extentions are doing well and even the .com version had very good rankings for a few days. After a few days we almost lost all rankings to the .com version. We did always clean seo, had 100% unique content written by our own writers and translated by our own translators. Our old webshops have very good branche related backlinks and i can`t find anything else then the 300K redirects to the homepage that might be the problem. Hope somebody will help us, or know someone we can hire to check our webmaster account, and check everything we did.
International SEO | | snorkel0 -
Site structure for multi-lingual hotel website (subfolder names)
Hi there superMozers! I´ve read a quite a few questions about multi-lingual sites but none answered my doubt / idea, so here it is: I´m re-designing an old website for a hotel in 4 different languages which are all** hosted on the same .com domain** as follows: example.com/english/ for english example.com/espanol/ for **spanish ** example.com/francais/ for french example.com/portugues/ for portuguese While doing keyword search, I have noticed that many travel agencies separate geographical areas by folders, therefor an **agency pomoting beach hotels in South America **will have a structure as follows: travelagency.com/argentina-beach-hotels/ travelagency.com/peru-beach-hotels/ and they list hotels in each folder, therefor benefiting from those keywords to rank ahead of many independent hotels sites from those areas. What **I would like to **do -rather than just naming those folders with the traditional /en/ for english or /fr/ for french etc- is take advantage of this extra language subfolder to_´include´_ important keywords in the name of the subfolders in the following way (supposing the we have a beach hotel in Argentina): example.com/argentina-beach-hotel/ for english example.com/hotel-playa-argentina/ for **spanish ** example.com/hotel-plage-argentine/ for french example.com/hotel-praia-argentina/ for portuguese Note that the same keywords are used in the name of the folder, but translated into the language the subfolders are. In order to make things clear for the search engines I would specify the language in the html for each page. My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´ although most travel agencies do it in their site structure. Any Mozers have experience with this, any idea on how search engines may react, or if they could penalise the site? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | underground0