International SEO question domain.com vs domain.com/us/ , domain.com/uk etc.
-
Hi Mozzers,
I am expanding a website internationally. I own the .com for the domain. I need to accommodate multiple countries and I'm not sure if I should build a folder for /us/ for United States or just have the root domain .com
OPTION 1:
domain.com/page-url -- United States
domain.com/de/page-url -- Denmark
domain.com/jp/page-url -- JapanOPTION 2:
domain.com/us/page-url -- United States
domain.com/de/page-url -- Denmark
domain.com/jp/page-url -- JapanMy concern with option 2 is there will be some dilution and we wouldn't get the full benefit of inbound links compared to Option 1 as we would have geo ip redirection in place to redirect users etc. to the relative sub-folder.
Which option is better from an SEO perspective?
Cheers,
Jeremy
-
Thank you for all of your responses - they have given me a lot of very specific help and a clear direction to move forward!
-
The use of subfolder or ccTlds (or subdomain) should not be decided because of SEO, but because of business reasons.
For instance, if Jeremy does not have already a consistent organic traffic from Denmark, maybe is better starting with a subfolder, which inherits some of the overall domain authority via internal linking, hence can obtain a first boost in organic visibility.
Once the business started having recognition and consistent and continuous traffic, Jeremy will be able to consider to migrate to a ccTld solution (if really needed).
On the contrary, let's say that Jeremy's company has physical offices in Copenhagen and it is an already known brand. Then in that case it would surely better to go for the ccTld way.
-
I do not agree.
The root is for your main market, and the subfolders for your international ones. It is so since the dawn of international SEO and it always worked well.
In GWT (Search Console), Jeremy should have to geotarget the root domain to USA (or maintain it not geo-targeted, so to target all markets but Danish and Japanese), and geotarget the dk and jp subfolders to Denmark and Japan.
-
Hi Jeremy,
option 1 is surely better, because you are quitting a level (or click).
Regarding redirecting users, you can maintain the redirection via GeoIP even if you put the USA "site" under the root and not in a US subfolder.
Said that, I strongly suggest you to order the redirection just when a user come for the first time on your site, so:
- To give users the freedom to visit also the others versions, which is less dumb then you may believe. For me, living in Europe, is a real nightmare when I cannot visit the "Spanish" version of a site just because I am travelling and I am visiting it from another targeted country;
- To not always redirect googlebot to the USA version because of its American IP. Even if Googlebot started crawling from countries other than the USA, from the logs' analysis I still see how the highest percentages of visits Googlebot does are from Mountain View.
Finally, correct a mistake you are doing in your URLs:
DE is for Germany (DE = Deutschland) and not Denmark. The name of the Danish subfolder should be DK.
I warn you about this because this mistake would probably end being replicated in the hreflang implementation, with obvious geotargeting issues.
-
Hi there
If you are trying to COUNTRY target, you should go for a ccTLD, but if you are going after a LANGUAGE target, you should do a subdirectory. You can learn more here.
I would also make sure you read the following resources:
International SEO
Country Targeting (Google & Bing)
Language Targeting (Google & Bing)All of the above resources will help you have more success in your international efforts.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
Apologies I did misunderstand - Option 2 - I find it is more customer friendly as well.
-
Hi Jeremy,
I think that John has misunderstood the question a little as you aren't talking about different domains, just what to do with the US / Home.
I would suggest you take option 2. because you are targeting internationally from a .com, it is important to be able to differentiate where you are as soon as you hit the site. Each sub-folder is a country.
And remember to use HREFLANG to help identify language / country.
-Andy
-
Hi John
Thanks for the quick reply! I'm actually talking about having the same domain name for both situations, just not sure if I should have brand.com with the domain root targeted to US traffic or brand.com/us/ with US targeted to US traffic
cheers,
Jeremy -
You will get caveated answers. But for me Option 1 - by a long way.
Many articles on it, but you need to focus all resources on one domain - that gets optimum results. Two domains = twice as much work as one, three domains = 3 times.
Look at cottonon.com - if you want to monitor a very successful version.
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
-
Redirection Question - Can Anyone Help?
Hi Community, I have 2 job boards. Job board A is a .co.uk domain. Job board B is uk.com domain. Job board A displays jobs in the UK but has an international jobs section. Job board B focuses entirely on international jobs. To cut a long story short we are shutting down Job board B as we are going to just be using Job board A in future. In terms of redirection, would it be best to: 1. 301 redirect job board B domain to Job board A. (www.jobboardb.uk.com -> www.jobboarda.co.uk) or 2. 301 redirect job board b to the international jobs section on job board a (as this is the most relevant place for the user to go I am thinking to go with option 2, but I read somewhere that it wasn't best practice. Any help is much appreciated.
International SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Redirect to 'default' or English (/en) version of site?
Hi Moz Community! I'm trying to work through a thorny internationalization issue with the 'default' and English versions of our site. We have an international set-up of: www.domain.com (in english) www.domain.com/en www.domain.com/en-gb www.domain.com/fr-fr www.domain.com/de-de and so on... All the canonicals and HREFLANGs are set up, except the English language version is giving me pause. If you visit www.domain.com, all of the internal links on that page (due to the current way our cms works) point to www.domain.com/en/ versions of the pages. Content is identical between the two versions. The canonical on, say, www.domain.com/en/products points to www.domain.com/products. Feels like we're pulling in two different directions with our internationalization signals. Links go one way, canonical goes another. Three options I can see: Remove the /en/ version of the site. 301 all the /en versions of pages to /. Update the hreflangs to point the EN language users to the / version. **Redirect the / version of the site to /en. **The reverse of the above. **Keep both the /en and the / versions, update the links on / version. **Make it so that visitors to the / version of the site follow links that don't take them to the /en site. It feels like the /en version of the site is redundant and potentially sending confusing signals to search engines (it's currently a bit of a toss-up as to which version of a page ranks). I'm leaning toward removing the /en version and redirecting to the / version. It would be a big step as currently - due to the internal linking - about 40% of our traffic goes through the /en path. Anything to be aware of? Any recommendations or advice would be much appreciated.
International SEO | | MaxSydenham0 -
Local SEO in Canada
I am trying to do some local optimization for some clients in Canada and it got me thinking, are there different best practices and different sites I want to use when working in Canada?
International SEO | | rbrianforrester0 -
How do I get a UK website to rank in Dubai?
We are trying to get a UK-based children's furniture website to rank in Dubai. We have had a couple of orders from wealthy expats in Dubai and it seems to be the correct target market. Does anyone have any specific knowledge of this area? We are promoting the same website as for the UK market. Also does anyone know any user behaviour stats on expatriates using search engines? Do they carry on using the version of Google they are used to, or do most change to the local version of Google? Thanks in advance
International SEO | | Wagada0 -
Best way to enter Canada, SEO-wise?
We are thinking of splitting our e-Commerce site into a Canadian site w/ localized content, a potential French version and for additional relevance w/ localized currency. What would be the best way to go about this if we were wanting to gain traction as soon as possible on the organic side? Split the domain into domain.com and domain.com/ca/ (subfolders) Split the domain into ca.domain.com and domain.com Or split the domain into domain.com & wirelessemporium.ca Also, what are some key best practices we need to keep in mind to avoid duplicate content issues, etc?
International SEO | | eugeneku0 -
International Link Building - France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland
I've got a partner agency (non-SEO) in Europe who wants to send some additional SEO business our way, but I don't currently have a system in place geared specifically towards international, country specific link building. Does anyone know of any resources (blogs, lists, tools) specifically geared towards getting links from country specific TLDs for France, Spain, Germany, Italy and Switzerland? (.fr, .es, .de, .it and .ch are the TLDs.) .co.uk sources would also be handy. A list of potential link building sources in those countries would be most helpful. I fully understand the SEO elements in play for international SEO, I just don't have any decent resource lists for those specific countries. Sites in those countries that accept guest blog posts, language specific infographic sites, foreign PR platforms, high-quality non-penalized directories...really anything would be awesome! Thanks in advance folks!
International SEO | | Point_It0 -
How can I replicate India SERPs from US
I was recently checking out our analytics keywords stats and I am seeing traffic noted as google organic traffic coming from India. When I do a search on http://www.google.co.in/ for those terms using a "incognito" browser with no cookies, and not logged in I don't see our site in the first 100 results. The same thing happens on google.com if I try to set the account in india. I am trying to see if this might be an issue with an adwords campaign not getting auto-tagged (auto-tagging is turned on in adwords), or if there is something else going on. The keyword campaign gets many more clicks than analytics shows for this organic option so perhaps it is an odd rare occurrence. I am glad to have the traffic, but I want to be sure it is actually tracking correctly as organic, or if PPC is not tagging for some reason 😉 Any suggestions or thoughts?
International SEO | | SL_SEM0 -
Targeting specific Geographic areas. Use 1 large.Com or several smaller country specific TLDs?
Hi, I have a small number of exact match domains, both country specific TLDs and also the Generic TLD dot com and dot net. They are: ExactMatch**.Com**
International SEO | | Hurf
ExactMatch**.Net** ExactMatch**.Co.Uk**
ExactMatch**.Ca**
ExactMatch**.Co.Nz**
ExactMatch**.Co.Za** We have already successfully launched our UK site using the exact match .co.uk and this is currently number 2 in the UK SERPS for the Google, Yahoo and Bing. They are/will be niche specific classified ad sites, which are Geographically targeted by country (to Engish speakers in the main) and each region is likely to have a minumum of 2,000 unique listings submitted over the course of a year of so. My question (FINALLY) is this: Am I better to build one large global site (will grow to approx. 12,000 listings) using EXACTMATCH.Com with .com - targeting US users and then geo-targeted sub directories (ExactMatch.Com/Nz etc) - each sub dir targeted to the matching geographic area in webmaster tools, or use the ccTLDs and host each site in the country with perhaps (each site growing to approx 2,000 listings) I could use the ccTLDs just for marketing/branding onlyand redirect these to the specific sub directory of the .com site? I am aware that there is one main ccTLD that I cannot get .Com.Au (as I am not a resident of Australia - and it is already in use.) so I was wondering if the single site with .Com/AU/ etc might help me better target that country? If I use each ccTLD as separate sites I suppose I could use the largely redundant .net to target Australia? Your thoughts and advice would be most welcome. Thanks! An additional bit of intormation (or two) the .com is circa 2004. The product advertised is a reasonably bulky (perhaps 6kgs boxed) physical product and therefore the seller is unlikely to want to ship globally - will this make them shy away from a global site - even one divided into global sub sections? FYI Seller can specify in their listing Will Ship To ....... I would be open to looking at using the front page of the .Com site as a page which visitors select the country they wish to buy/sell on. (IF it is the general consensus that it is better to create one large site.) Consider also please how the end user is likely to percieve the benefits to them of one LARGE SITE versus TARGETED SITE - I know the .Com would be divided into geographic sub directories, but I am not sure if they won't see an additinal benefit to the ccTLD - Does this add a degree of reassurance and relevance that a .com/ccTLD cannot provide? I suppose I am biased by the fact that ebay use ccTLDs? Thanks again - and please forgive my tone which may suggest I am playing devil's advocate here. I am very torn on this issue.0