Shall I automatically redirect international visitors from www.domain.com to e.g. www.domain.com/es? What is best SEO practice?
-
We have chosen the one domain approach with our international site having different language versions in subdirectory of main domain:
www.domain.com/es
www.domain.com/it
etc.What is SEO-wise best practice for implementing international index pages. I see following options:
- entering www.domain.com will display without redirection the index page in language of user (e.g based on IP or browser) in www.domain.com
Example: www.booking.com - entering www.domain.com will always show English index page.
Additionally one may display a message in the header if IP from other country with link to other language version.
Example: www.apple.com - entering www.domain.com will always redirect automatically to country specific subdirectory based on IP
Example: www.samsung.com
Any thoughts/suggestions on what may be best solution from a SEO perspective? For a user I believe options 1) & 3) are preferable.
- entering www.domain.com will display without redirection the index page in language of user (e.g based on IP or browser) in www.domain.com
-
The solution you describe it's correct, so you can go with it.
-
good point. thanks Gianluca.
But in this particular case crawling would not be an issue since non-English language versions are in subdirectories which are accessable via country dropdown. US google spider seeing the EN version in the main domain is exactly as desired. So if crawling is not an issue, do you still see a problem with option 3). To address your point, I would also enforce that if someone clicks via country dropdown to English version, that this person would not be redirected again.
What do you think?
In case of websites following an international one domain strategy such as booking.com, redirecting to subdirectory may be most convenient for vast majority of users, since the name of the main domain is promoted to users in different languages.
-
Option 1 must be discarded.
Option 2, which is also what Amazon does, is the best one IMHO, even though should be also present a country selector html page, so that Googlebot can discover it and crawl it.
Option 3 is a no no, because you are pretending that someone is visiting your site just in his language, which may be not true. More over, this is also discouraged by Google for that same reason, and because googlebot IP is american... it would end always seeing the version assigned to US IPs.
-
Subdirectories can work very well. Those subdirectories can benefit from link juice above them. I would also consider different sitemaps for the different languages. Again, I like your third option from a user experience standpoint. Given the search engine's emphasis on that coupled with improved click through rates, you should do well as long as the content end of things is good.
-
Thanks.We believe in our case language versions in subdirectry over country specific TLDs is the better choice. My doubt is really just about how to best deal with international visits to www.domain.com.
-
There's a lot of good info out there on this subject. The ideal for ranking in a specific country would be to have domain.es with a hosting provider in Spain that has a local Spain billing address. Aside from that, I personally like option 3 in your list but provide links to other languages in case the user is on a VPN that confounds geolocation.
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
-
What is best way to display user reviews in languages different from the page language? (e.g. English reviews on a page in Spanish)
What is best way to display user reviews in languages different from the page language? (e.g. English reviews on a page in Spanish). For the user it would be useful to see these reviews but I am concerned about negative SEO impact.
International SEO | | lcourse
I would not want to invest into having them all translated by human translator. Any suggestions?0 -
How to handle different content on same domain internationally?
Dear community, I have encountered a unique situation and I am unsure as how to proceed, I have a U.S. based website for intentions of this question is www.musicstore.com. The customer has decided to offer their products up for sale internationally, however, has two business requirements, one is that his international presence differs with product offering and content then the domestic version and two, that they both live on the same domain of www.musicstore.com without any reference to offering a differing international presence. Many of his products are offered for purchase directly overseas, while not against his suppliers rules, it is frowned upon. All this said, now to my question. I'm currently running a Magento two website install. With GeoIP setting which version of www.musicstore.com is presented. Do I have to worry about different content being displayed on the same exact url even though the experience is completely location based? If it is a concern, any risks I should be concerned with. I could possibly do something along the lines of www.musicstore.com/in/ while this is not ideal for the customer, if it prevents many larger issues I'd steer the customer this way. I just want my customer to be able to sell his product internationally without upsetting his suppliers or making Google go, what does this site actually have. Hopefully I explained my question well enough for those who can help to understand. Please ask if you need any more information. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.
International SEO | | swarming0 -
Multilingual site - Best choice?
Quick question for a site that has the same content but in a different language (not machine translated) on seperate pages.
International SEO | | Crunchii
Say I have:www.mydomain.com (which is in English)
www.mydomain.com/ES (which is in Spanish)
www.mydomain.com/NL (which is in Dutch) I don't want to limit the ie. Spanish to only Spain so geotargeting isn't necessary What is the best/correct setup for the pages?0 -
Is this hurting our SEO: company1.uk.com, company1.ru.com, company1.de.com, etc...?
Hello I work for a company which is using this kind of subdomains, that look like domains such as company1.uk.com, company1.ru.com, company1.de.com, but they are obviously not. We also own company1.com where the main site in English lies. We are one of the leader portals in one financial sector, and I am wondering if our SEO can be hurted by these fake "domains". I understand that we get some effect from the other domains hosted under this domain, and they are probably not as high quality as ours and they are probably unrelated. **- Would you recommend us to stop using these and use subdomains? So change: "company1.de.com" and use "de.company1.com" instead? Should we expect an increase in traffic after this change?** Any help will be appreciated.
International SEO | | forex-websites0 -
International SEO: best practices for local variants of the same language?
We are translating our site into 17 different languages, including local variants of the same language (i.e. Mexican Spanish and Spain Spanish, Canadian English and British English, etc). Should we add all of these local variants to our site? We don't have the marketing / link building budget (or business need) to put these all on separate ccTLDs, so we are using country-specific subfolders instead (example.com/es/). The translations will be of exceptional quality. Our main goal is to pull in some additional traffic from these translations. If we add these local variants, do you think we can expect to see traffic from these different countries (additional traffic from Canada, England, etc)? Any advice / input would be appreciated.
International SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Russian SEO Specialist Needed
Hi All, Looking for a bit of help here. We are quoting for a big SEO project on a Russian website and need high quality Russian link builders to work on building the links to the website. As well as this, we need to have a little look at the on-page content (but that will be more of just straight translation stuff, nothing big). If you're a Russian link builder and could help me here then get in touch. I only want ethical, white-hat and relevant links being built to the website so if that's not what you do, please don't waste my time 🙂 Also, this should really go without saying but I'll mention it anyway... you MUST speak Russian! Look forward to hearing from you. Matt matt@wowinternet.net
International SEO | | MatthewBarby0 -
Country specific domains pointing to a .com site
Hello, I am new to seo so please be easy if this happens to be a "silly" question. My company has a .com site. We are expanding into global markets, focusing on specific countries right now. General question: Would I be penalized for duplicate content if I purchased country-specific domains and pointed them to the .com site? Thanks, Jim
International SEO | | jimmer0 -
Use country-specific domains or stick to already strong .com domain?
We run an online store with the majority of our customers coming from 4 different European countries. The site is accessible through TLD's of all of these countries. However our .com domain currently has the most links pointing to it and the highest domain authority. Unfortunately, we are unable to tell through which TLD visitors reach our site. The niche is rather competetive, and therefore I am unsure whether it would be worth it to solely use our .com domain for the English language, and try to rank for each of the seperate languages with its own country-specific domain. **Question/discussion: **Will it be worth the costs and time to spent to build links for the country specific domains in these countries, or should we focus on making our .com domain stronger and use it for all countries? I'm aware of the benefits of ranking with a domain in the country the user is in. Note: We have major duplicate content issues at this moment, due the content being available in different languages, on a handful of domains. On each domain, users can view the site in different languages. In addition, the language indication in the url is not very clear (?lang=x) so I believe this should be improved to make it easier for search engines to tell which language is presented. If I choose to use a different language for each TLD, then the language flag in the navigation on the site will point to a different domain, so each language is hosted on 1 domain and there is no more duplicate content. However, I'm afraid this will lead to lower rankings, as the (strong) .com domain will no longer host the content in different languages.
International SEO | | 1200wd0