Two domains for different countries? or one big domain with folders?
-
I know this might sound as a newbie question or maybe not, here it goes.
I've had a client for the past 2 years, and we have accomplish many good things for his local website .com.ve (venezuela). It's been so good that he is opening a branch in Dominican republic .com.do.
The content, strategy and even the services are exactly the same, but the owner wants to have different site for each country. Of course he only wants to pay for one domain.
I do want to share our success ont the .com.ve with the other domains and he actually owns the "global" domain .com with his brand name.
So, what should I reccomend... Develop a second site and start from scratch? Migrate my blog from the .com.ve site to the .com site and give each country a separate folder? /ve /do?.
What it's the best scenario for me to have all the traffic we have earned transfer to the global brand and to have separate info for each country...
Thank you so much for your answer that I kno would be great.
Dan
-
I agree with you.
I think down here in venezuela people are not as aware as maybe other countries to figure out that the domain changed.
My main worry, as i told moosa is that the client does not have the resources to maintain both sites. I guess using the .com domain was the only way to combine both.
The Client it's offers several consulting services, business plans, financial planning, legal consulting etc.
thanks
-
Ok... thanks for your answer.... However the client does not have the manpower o resources to produce content for both sites.
What would you do in that case?
dan
-
Daniel,
I think it is more important to look at the UX instead of the SEO part.
You schould ask yourself the question what would the people prefer a .com site or a site from there own country. If the site is about information and such i think people will not mind. But if it's a E-commerce site than the visitors will be more likely to order at a national oriented site. ( talking from experience)
-
Daniel,
In my opinion this is very much depends upon what risks you are ready to take and how targeted people are going to react to it!
If you already have a stabled .com.ve website then my advice would be to go with separate domain that is .com.do instead of shifting to .com with country level sub folders!
Here the reasons why you should do that!
- Shifting from one domain to another will lose some of your page rank no matter if you do a proper 301 redirect!
- Shofting from .com.ve to .com/ve might hurt your rankings in search engines (no hard hit but still)
- You never know how .com.ve people will react to the new domain!
- Local domains build more trust!
Above are the reasons why i believe you should not switch to the .com versions. If this was the new website then i would have advised to go for single domain but in your case the %age of risk is greater!
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
-
Domain Transition: Leaving low quality content behind
We're in the initial stages of planning a domain transition / rebrand. We're considering 301'ing our low and high(er) quality content split to two different domains. One for the low quality, one for our high. Best practices normally tell you to not split your content between between multiple domains. However, what if the majority of pages on your site are thin/outdated, and attract low volume/long tail? Does it make sense to bring that low quality/volume content over the new domain, when you know you'll never have the resources (nor would it make sense to) mass improve the quality of these pages? I'm concerned the quality of these pages are affecting our overall domain authority. Some background on our site/business: Current site has 15,000+ pages. 98% of our site is a product directory of professional/enterprise business management software. While a small handful of our product pages have quality original long form content (maybe 50-100), most of the product pages are a combination of: thin, outdated, overly sales-y content provided directly from product developers, and/or catch only very low-volume/long tail organic traffic. 95% of our pages attract fewer than 20 visits/mo, 90% of our pages attract fewer than 10 visits/mo. We have a small business of about 10 employees. Most of which don't maintain our site. It's unrealistic for us to genuinely improve the quality of that many pages. Nor does it make sense to improve most of these pages, as they'll attract only very low volume keywords. Individually these low quality pages don't bring in many customers, but on aggregate they do. 70% of our organic conversions come from pages with less than 20 visits/mo. A few questions: Is this content negatively affecting our domain authority in any way? While I don't believe we've been hit with a penalty, Google knows that on average our pages aren't very helpful to many users, and I'm concerned that affects our ability to rank with pages that matter. None of the content was mass produced in any form of scraping efforts or anything nefarious like that. Would there be any negative/positive affect to offloading these low quality/volume pages to a different domain during the rebrand?
Branding | | dsbud0 -
Consolidate to one robust web property?
I am new at my company. I was brought on to generate more leads via their websites. Although, they aren't letting me do what I think is best. So I need help convincing them. Can you please help me prove them wrong? We are an online reseller/distributor. We sell our products under one brand. We sell a wide variety of widgets that are manufactured by several different companies. We have 9 unique web properties and 50 landing pages. Each website and landing page is on a unique domain, design, and purpose. I would like to consolidate everything to one robust, e-commerce website that will reside on our primary domain. My bosses are convinced that more websites are better because it will prevent our competitors from ranking above us. We can "block" them from ranking on all the main keywords. They are also convinced that domain name plays a major role in SEO. But I've got that part covered What do you think?
Branding | | reusabletranspack0 -
Avoid Keyword in New Domain Name?
We are looking to rebrand our domain name. Our existing domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. We own www.metro-manhattan.com and were hoping to use this domain. The company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc. Is the fact that the new domain contains "Manhattan" a negative? I know that the fact that it has a hyphen is weak. Manhattan is part of such keywords as "Manhattan office space". Regarding the company name, is the fact that it contains the target phrase "Manhattan office space" bad? Our company name may sound like exact match anchor text and I am not sure what to do about this if anything. I would really prefer to keep our name but it is necessary to change it to improve SEO we will do so. Would it be better to change to a new name like "Integrity Real Estate" which does not contain target phrases or keywords ("real estate" is not a major target phrase as it is to generic) ? Or how something like www.mmos.com for the domain and leave the company name alone? How would I go about finding a company that would assist is in creating an SEO friendly domain name and perhaps a new corporate name if necessary? Thanks, Alan
Branding | | Kingalan10 -
Experience/suggestions in redirecting old URLs (from an existing site) to new URLs under a new domain
Please share your experiences/suggestions in redirecting a set of pages (10,000 or more pages/URLs) from an existing domain to new URLs under a new domain. Thanks in advance!
Branding | | esiow20130 -
Moving Blog from www.topic.domain.com to www.domain.com/blog
Hi Fellow Mozzers, Just started off here on seomoz.org and am super happy to have joined the community! I've recently started a new job as web optimization manager for an education company. There is a lot to do and one of my first tasks is to figure a better strategy for our current blog. I've convinced our management to move our blog from topic.domain.com to domain.com/blog. My research has shown that this is a better strategy so that our blog can receive the DA of our root domain, get more people to click through our site, and even receive more natural searches (PLEASE, someone correct me if I'm wrong on this). Anyway, our blog is currently hosted as a Wordpress blog and we're wondering if it's more worthwhile to build a blog platform ourselves or continue using Wordpress. I am not a technical guy and don't know the backend stuff to make it happen, but my concern is primarily for the optimum search capacity. Also, our bloggers frequently put links to different portions of our website - does this hold any negative SEO value in terms of too much internal linking? I personally wouldn't assume so, but then again I could be wrong. Finally, we also track our main website using Google Analytics- currently, the only tracking we have installed on our blogs is the default provided by Wordpress (yes yes I know, but that's why i'm here -- to fix these weaknesses). I'm assuming we will be able to better track using GA when the switch is made. So, I guess my questions are: (1) Is my research correct in that it's better to have our blog hosted as domain.com/blog over topic.domain.com (2) Are there any best practices in making this switch and/or any negative implications with continuing to use Wordpress or should we build our own platform (we have the internal resources to do so, but would prefer to take the easiest and best route in terms of SEO and community building). (3) Will it still be just as easy to track using GA. Thank you!! Pedram
Branding | | CSawatzky0 -
Buying a used domain - redirecting, pluses etc?
Hi, I have a 6 year old domain which has been the basis for my main business website operation. http://www.kent-website-designer.co.uk/ Im in the process of cleaning up some messy sitewide footer kinks that come to the notice of Penguin update. I think I can clear up a lot of links but obviously need to add some better links for the future to improve. Ive gone from #1 to #60. I was thinking of a rebrand as the EMD isnt doing much good anymore in benefits plus the drop in rankings and also Google definately favouring brand links over concentrated anchor texts. So maybe the time is ideal. The design needs a refresh anyway.... I have found a 1999 .co.uk domain which has some non keyword related 1999 links to it...nice. Its a very reasonable price. Its not going to have inbounds from my related markets, not ideal but it has no negative stuff either. Also its a very simple but rememberable name like Google or Yahoo. Great for branding. Its parked but Waybackmachine shows indexing back to `99 and google cache has some content on it. However OSE shows low domain / page authority. Im thinking of redirecting my current domain to the new one, passing some of the positives of age and titles...and replicating the site through 301`s. Is this worth doing in anyones opinion? Only thing with my domain isany branding words are anchor text words too. I cant win.
Branding | | xtopher660 -
Domain name with a hyphen
I am looking at starting a brand new website and purchasing a domain to see my hair product. My question is that domain i am wanting to purchase if a 2 word .com domain but it is not being currently used and it is up for auction for 10K. I am looking a purchasing a domain name that is the same 2 words but a has a hyphen between the 2 works. My assumption is that if I start building content, concentrating on seo (keywords, link building, etc) and brand building that I should not have any problems with my hyphen in the domain. I am looking for feedback and insight from the SEO professionals! Thank you guys in advance. UPDATED 1-29-13 Here is the scenario and I am looking on how you would handle it. **name = my brand name I am looking to purchase a domain within the year: namehair.com I currently am using: namehairbrand.com I have purchased: name-hair.com My concern is if I began my SEO efforts and the brand grows extensively then the person who owns "namehair.com" will raise the price even more than the current price of 10k. I plan on purchasing that domain name within the next 18 months or so and then direct the traffic to the domain "namehair.com". If I put all my efforts into "namehairbrand.com" and then submit to Google that I have changed domains - will I get my butt kicked by Google? Thank you guys - you are really helpful!
Branding | | dsmolinski0 -
Blog - separate domain or current website?
I have created a business blog purely to gain higher rankings for particular keywords which then has links pointing to the product that I am trying to sell. My question... Is it better to have this blog hosted on the same domain or shall I move it to a separate domain which will help with backlinks? Any advice would be appreciated?
Branding | | petewinter0