International SEO Subfolders / user journey etc
-
Hi
According to all the resources i can find on Moz and elsewhere re int seo, say in the context of having duplicate versions of US & UK site, its best to have subfolders i.e.
&
however when it comes to the user journey and promoting web address seems a bit weird to say visit us at: domain.com/en-us/ !?
And what happens if someone just enters in domain.com from the US or UK ?
My client wants to use an IP sniffer but i've read thats bad practice and should employ above style country/language code instead, but i'm confused about both the user journey and experience in the case of multiple sub folders.
Any advice much appreciated ?
Cheers
Dan
-
Thanks for your comments but im looking directly into subfolder option (since TLD not an option and sub-domain considered bad practice from what i can gather after many days research on Moz etc
As a result this is what ill issue to a clients development team in this circumstance is as follows for where sites preferred structure is sub-folders/directories:
-
Implement IP sniffing on the home page ONLY
-
Then have Sub-Folders named after the official country abbreviations which will create a better user experience than both country and language i.e. domain.com/us/ as opposed to domain.com/en-us/ or domain.com/en-gb/ etc etc. This way it will only manipulate the homepage crawling and not site-wide indexing issues.
3) Target these folders to the correct countries in Google’s and Bing’s Webmasters Tools. Use the official country and language codes in the Hreflang mark-up as per point 4.
-
Set up site maps for each subfolder and rel="alternate" hreflang= according to Google guidelines. Here's a great tool to help with correct implementation: http://www.themediaflow.com/resources/tools/href-lang-tool/
-
Specify the content language/country by adding the 'country-language' meta-tags in the html head
6) Link between each country/language version in a crawl-able and visible manner (for SE and Users)
7) Create individual profiles in GWT & Bing Webmaster Tools for each country/language sub-folder and geo-target accordingly
Create individual profiles within GAnalytics for each country/language version and configure to track internal activity between different versions
9) Localise content so has US currency, contact details, spelling etc
10) Other localisation techniques ( such as marking up contact details with schema places code)
Note RE: HrefLang & Canonicalisation:
An extra advantage of using hreflang is that it will provide a degree of canonicalisation. Should canonical tag be employed in the future never so across language versions if site expand into non English versions. More info here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igbrm1z_7Hk
-
-
Hey Dan,
The challenges with international sites are many and varied. The 'best' international strategy really depends on your resources
Here's how I see the advantages / disadvantages of each approach:
Subfolders - ranking may be 'easier' as domain authority is consolidated, but URLs are ugly
The sub-folder approach is often utilised where there's insufficient resource to market and maintain separate international ccTLDs (e.g. .co.uk, .com, .fr etc). The advantage with the subfolder approach is that you're consolidating domain authority - so the links to /en-uk/ (NB do use en-uk NOT en-gb incidentally) pass authority to /en-us/ and vice versa.
You're building one strong site, rather than trying to build two, three (or more) strong sites. However, as you've identified URLs get long and a bit ugly.
ccTLDs - Arguably nicer for users, but might not rank
Conversely, whilst ccTLDs (.co.uk, .com, .fr etc) are nicer from a user's perspective, you may struggle to rank if you're not able to spend sufficient time and resource on marketing and building links to these domains.
If you have the time and resources, I'd probably go down the ccTLD route, but if you don't, then the subfolder route is probably best.
IP redirects
In terms of the IP sniffers etc - be careful
Googlebot typical crawls from the US, and as such is likely to be redirected by your sniffer too. Essentially you're in danger of making any non-US versions invisible as far as Google are concerned. For that reason rather than doing a hard redirect I prefer Amazon's approach - if you visit Amazon.com from a UK IP you'll see a message which says: "Shopping from the UK? Visit Amazon.co.uk.".
That way users get the nudge to direct them to the right site and the bots can still crawl and index all of your content.
-
I want to start by saying I am not a user experience expert! I can tell you that from an SEO perspective, building international sites with subfolders can be advantageous because those international sites will inherit the main domain's authority and you can have one linking strategy that can benefit all areas of the site.
As for the user journey, I can provide some ideas for what we've done in the past with our clients. The first would be to have a window display on the main domain.com page that will allow a user to choose their country, and that will then forward them to the appropriate area of the site.
Another tactic we used was to purchase domain names that are unique for each country/language that would then redirect to the appropriate area of the site. We would typically only use these domains in offline marketing material (brochures, business cards etc..) and that way you can tell your prospective customers to visit you at domainuk.com instead of domain.com/en-gb/.
I hope this helps!
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
-
International SEO Two Subdomains Showing Up in Google Search Results
Hi I have a client that is having two subdomains showing up SERP when you Google their name. Here are the details. They have two subdomains us.companyname.com and en.companyname.com us.companyname.com is for the US and has completely different products and content than en.companyname.com en.companyname.com is the site designed for Europe and it is in English. How can I make it so that only the us. version shows up in the search results? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | JohnWeb120 -
International SEO errors
Hello, In a muddle here. A website has a .co.uk and a .com version. They want to target the UK market and the USA market respectively. The content for the UK version has been localised for the UK audience (e.g. spellings etc) but the content is the same in both sites. There are errors in .co.uk version in webmaster tools : International Targeting | Language > 'en' - no return tags__URLs for your site and alternate URLs in 'en' that do not have return tags.**Q 1) What does this mean?**I can see that both the .com and .co.uk version has only this in place:**2) Should they actually have respectively?**3) Do they also need rel=canonical from the .co.uk to the .comAny help would be appreciated.
International SEO | | AL123al0 -
International Sites and Duplicate Content
Hello, I am working on a project where have some doubts regarding the structure of international sites and multi languages.Website is in the fashion industry. I think is a common problem for this industry. Website is translated in 5 languages and sell in 21 countries. As you can imagine this create a huge number of urls, so much that with ScreamingFrog I cant even complete the crawling. Perhaps the UK site is visible in all those versions http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/GB/ Obviously for SEO only the first version is important One other example, the French site is available in 5 languages and again... http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/en/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/FR/ And so on...this is creating 3 issues mainly: Endless crawling - with crawlers not focusing on most important pages Duplication of content Wrong GEO urls ranking in Google I have already implemented href lang but didn't noticed any improvements. Therefore my question is Should I exclude with "robots.txt" and "no index" the non appropriate targeting? Perhaps for UK leave crawable just English version i.e. http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/, for France just the French version http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ and so on What I would like to get doing this is to have the crawlers more focused on the important SEO pages, avoid content duplication and wrong urls rankings on local Google Please comment
International SEO | | guidoampollini0 -
Language Usage for SEO in Hong Kong
Hi guys, I was wondering if you could help me with an SEO query for language usage in Hong Kong? Specifically, I'm aware that in mainland China it's preferred to use simplified Chinese. However, in Hong Kong, if you want to rank well in Google and Yahoo! HK, should you be use traditional or simplified Chinese in your web content? Any guidance would be much appreciated.
International SEO | | ecommercebc0 -
Huge spike in referral traffic from international domains
We have recently experienced a huge spike in referral traffic from .fr domains (we are in the UK). They all lead to our 404 page. Its been going on for the last 3 days, and its still happening with about 20 visitors browsing the site from these domains at any one time, staying approx 3-7 seconds and then bouncing. The top domain appears to be a parked page. We cant see any obvious links or ads coming from any of these .fr domains and they are quite irrelevant to our sites industry anyway, which leads me to believe these may not be real visitors. Any advice on what may be causing this? And how to stop it? Needless to say none of these referrals have converted.
International SEO | | Silkstream0 -
International SEO - Setting up reporting
What would you consider to be a best practice for setting up international keyword tracking? Both in MOZ and in Google Analytics? Would you set them up by language? IE Spanish, French, German... Or by country? Mexico, Spain, US Spanish, French Canadian, French... ect... *Our website is set up with our countries in subdomains. We currently are in about 10 different countries and plan on expanding globally. Any advice helps! Much thanks!
International SEO | | ScentsySEO0 -
Site Spider/ Crawler/ Scraper Software
Short of coding up your own web crawler - does anyone know/ have any experience with a good bit of software to run through all the pages on a single domain? (And potentially on linked domains 1 hop away...) This could be either server or desktop based. Useful capabilities would include: Scraping (x-path parameters) of clicks from homepage (site architecture) http headers Multi threading Use of proxies Robots.txt compliance option csv output Anything else you can think of... Perhaps an oppourtunity for an additional SEOmoz tool here since they do it already! Cheers! Note:
International SEO | | AlexThomas
I've had a look at: Nutch
http://nutch.apache.org/ Heritrix
https://webarchive.jira.com/wiki/display/Heritrix/Heritrix Scrapy
http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/overview.html Mozenda (does scraping but doesn't appear extensible..) Any experience/ preferences with these or others?0 -
Does it matter whether you use /en vs /uk
I have a global site targeting many countries including the UK which is the only English language site. Does it matter whether I use /en or /uk for the UK sub-folder? If I already have /en in place, but my Google UK listings are struggling, will it benefit me to switch to /uk? I honestly don't think it matters too much, but given the choice would've gone for the /uk I'm trying to weigh up whether it is worth the effort of changing it.
International SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0