Using a top level domain name and directing it to a subfolder

[Easigrass]

Hi, we have a large international network. Our main website sits on .com domain and is used by the UK market. We have an international site in a subdirectory .com/dk/ for Denmark for example.

We have also purchased the domain name www.ourcompany.dk/.

Should we be forwarding the domain name (www.ourcompany.dk/) to point to the subdirectory www.ourcomany.com.dk/ so in the browser it shows up as www.ourcompany.dk or should we be displaying it as www.ourcompany.com/dk/?

Are there any pros and cons to this method? Which one is best and are there any benefits in SEO. Ideally we want the .com domain name to have the best domain authority so would this impact it in any way?

Any tips would be great.

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Alex,

Sounds like you've already got the nav changes under control which is great!

Technically DA is based on your link profile so that won't change, though if you mean just the overall strength of the site, it will drop away from the SERPs once the 301 to the subfolder is in place.

In case you haven't already thought of it too, once that redirect is in place, consider reaching out to any valuable referring domains pointing to .ae and ask if they can update the link to .com/ae since the site has moved. This is some easy low-hanging fruit and a great way to drive links directly to subpages as I'd mentioned doing earlier.

You will retain most of the strength from these links using the 301 anyway but why sacrifice that 10-20% loss in strength if the referring sites are happy to update a single href?

[Easigrass]

Hi Chris, the dropdown for Artificial Grass will cover other items such as The Benefits, How To Lay Artificial Grass, The Range (this is where the products will move to) and then other items relating to the main heading "Artificial Grass".

I agree that moving users over to one main domain.com will be a huge hassle so won't look into that

Do you think that our current UAE (Dubai) domain might lose DA when the website is launched on the main.com site? At the moment the UAE is hosted on a different server and has a completely different look. We're about to finish the new UAE site (easigrass.com/ae/) and will be redirecting the UAE domain to easigrass.com/ae/

Thanks again Chris, its great to be able to chat about these things as I'm freelance!!

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Alex,

No problem at all, happy to help!

The naming convention creates an interesting problem. It makes perfect sense now but without understanding your range, it was very confusing. It's great to have an outside set of eyes on these things sometimes, especially since I'd expect most of your SEO target audience to be new users.

For starters, I'd consider changing the nav text from Artificial Grass to something like Our Range or Artificial Grass Range to make it clearer that this is a range, not locations; Artificial Grass is a little more ambiguous.

To further clarify this for people, you could also add a heading to the drop-down menu under that item. Something like "Select from our range below" or "Already know which product you need? Select from our range below" - something that suggests the items in this drop-down aren't locations, they're the different types of grass.

Search engines these days are quite clever so I'd expect that as long as you always reference "Easi-Mayfair" and don't allow variations like Easi Mayfair or just Mayfair, this should be clear enough.

the worry of current email addresses and redirecting the TLDs to the subdirectory.

Don't be too concerned about this. I can't imagine too many users would try to visit the domain used in your email address and even if they do, the redirect is in place and working correctly so they'll end up in the right spot. The .dk email addresses still work so changing all those users over to .com address is likely more hassle than it's worth.

[Easigrass]

Hi Chris, this is a great help thank you and I do take your advice onboard.

"Also, from a user perspective I'm a little confused as to why there are locations under "Find Local Branch" and what seems to be a different set of locations under "Artificial Grass"."

The above is a great point, especially for people who don't understand our products. They are actually product names for each type of artificial grass that we offer.

I am the main decision maker and am also swaying more to the one domain with subfolders option. The only problem I see at the moment is that of the current domain names that are active. Their email addresses are easigrass.com, easigrass.dk and easigrass.ae

You can see the three above examples here;

www.easigrass.com/
www.easigrass.com/dk/
www.easigrass.com/ae/

As you can see they're all very similar and I think you still feel that you are on the same website. Again my only issue is the worry of current email addresses and redirecting the TLDs to the subdirectory.

Thanks for the good advice also on the overuse of keywords, I think I've been an eager beaver with those!!

Alex

[ChrisAshton]

Hmm, ok. So you'll be handling the .com which targets the UK and each other location will be responsible for their own optimisation?

That does make it somewhat more viable, provided they are actually going to optimise their respective sites and do it properly.

If not, there's still no real reason why all locations couldn't exist in subfolders for all the reasons I mentioned above.

As a working example of a large site covering multiple locations with this subfolder model, check out HP. Below are 2 different location "home pages" depending on where you are.

http://www8.hp.com/au/en/home.html
http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/home.html

Depending on your position in the company/team, if I were in your shoes I'd be pushing to have all locations run from the subfolder model and setting the international standard that other locations must abide by to keep it all uniform. ie Each page must use the same template including styling etc and cover the same information on their equivalent pages.

As an example, since artificial grass is your product, you might add content to your UK page that offers sections about general information, size and colour options, photos of the product and shipping information for the UK in that order.

You can then use that as a template that must be followed for /dk/, /uae/ etc. The aim here isn't to be a control freak but to maintain a certain standard of quality and continuity; the last thing you want is for any use who jumps from one location to another to feel as though they just arrived on a new website. Much like in the HP example, it's actually pretty hard to tell you're on a different subfolder until it comes to shipping or price information.

Also, I hope you don't mind but I had a 30 second skim over your website. While it's generally a pretty good site, it is a little too keyword-heavy and this isn't something you want to replicate across multiple subfolders.

Looking at the page title for the home page as an example, it's Artificial Grass Lawn, Astroturf, Fake Turf | Easigrass.

The fact that it starts with "Artificial Grass Lawn" is already a signal to users who see your site in the SERPs that it's probably quite spammy and should be avoided.

There are a few other similar elements on the site too, even the location page URLs:

http://www.easigrass.com/uk/glasgow-artificial-grass/

Just easigrass.com/uk/glasgow would be sufficient. Having 25+ pages with artificial-grass in the URL isn't ideal.

I also found 5x 404s and a bunch of internal links pointing to redirected pages. If you want to look into these, Screaming Frog's SEO Spider is a great option for that.

Also, from a user perspective I'm a little confused as to why there are locations under "Find Local Branch" and what seems to be a different set of locations under "Artificial Grass".

Rand actually just did a Whiteboard Friday that covers some of this if you'd like some more info

[Easigrass]

Ok thanks. The position we are in now is this;

easigrass.com has a growing international network. They have resources all over the world as there is on the ground office locations with teams. What I do from HQ is have their local version of the company site created for them and added to a subdirectory.

So far we have UK (easigrass.com main site), Denmark (about to launch), UAE (about to launch), Netherlands (Near completion) and Ireland (Near completion).

The IT squad has already bought the domain names for each international site. The only active international site is the UAE which currently sits at www.easigrass.ae and has a DA of 19.

I'm in charge of the global presence of Easigrass and I'm trying to emulate what a great website in the USA have done - www.rotorooter.com They have a similar network of cities and they also work in Canada.

I won't be handling any of the international sites SEO, only the UK market. They will have their own team for his.

Does moving the websites to their own local server now seem more of a sensible idea now that you know this?

Thanks again.

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Alex,

The answer depends on whether or not there are any valuable backlinks pointing to your .dk domain.

If the answer is no then there isn't really going to be any value in doing the redirect since there is no strength to pass. On the other hand, if it does have a strong backlink profile then yes, you could point it to the subdirectory.

As for splitting the subfolders out to their own domains, I'd recommend against doing this too. While it's true that you can offer more geo-specific signals by having each location hosted in their respective countries and on the correct TLD (.dk, .co.uk etc), it increases the amount of work exponentially.

If you split your single .com site into 5 different websites for example, that's now a total of 6 domains to plan, manage, produce unique content and build links for. It's great in theory but what usually ends up happening is people end up with 1 moderate site and 5 rubbish ones because they just don't have the resources to optimise them all!

Basically, unless you have a large pool of resources at your disposal, there isn't really any way that you can leverage that .dk domain to help your .com unless it has a good link profile.

What you can do to strengthen your .com is take a very close look at your .com's onsite elements and optimise them as well as you can (good nav structure, high quality content, fast page speed, compelling page titles and meta descriptions etc) then get to work building quality backlinks. Bonus points if you can earn some that point directly to the landing pages in each of those location subdirectories.

[Easigrass]

Hi Chris, thanks for your help. I think our main goal really is to have the .com site as strong as possible, so do you think we should just redirect all international domains like .dk to their folder on the main .com site and have it show up as mycompany.com/dk/ instead of trying to show it as mycompany.dk?

The other option i guess is that we move the site from the subdirectory over to it's own hosting within that Denmark location so it can stand on it's own two feet.

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Alex,

There are a couple of misconceptions here that I'll explain in a moment but in short: doing this isn't going to help you

so in the browser it shows up as www.ourcompany.dk

Redirecting from one domain to another will actually take the user to that second domain rather than showing the second website but keeping the original URL. What I mean by this is if you redirect example.com to website.com then visit example.com, after a moment you'll see the URL change to website.com.

In your particular instance, directing www.ourcompany.dk to your .com domain would just take the user to the .com. Also, a redirected URL won't rank so you'd have to be driving traffic directly to the .dk site via social media or something for anyone to even hit that redirect.

The only time this would offer you any benefit would be if you had a great backlink profile on the .dk domain since you'd be transferring ~80-90% of that link strength.

There are options available to do what you're looking to (display the .dk address but the .com site) like iframes but both of these methods would also see your .dk site ignored by search engines since it would be a weak duplicate of your .com.

I hope that helps, let me know if I can clarify anything for you here