Best strategy behind moving country subdirectory to dedicated TTLD wo/ loosing organic search volume?
-
Community,
We are about to move one of our most popular country sub directories from brandname.com/de/.. to brandname.de . We have just purchased the domain so while the domain has been registered in 2009 the URL has zero domain authority.
What is the best strategy to execute the move while being cautious about loosing too much organic search volume the subdirectory is receiving right now?
Obviously it will take some time to build up DA on the TTLD so maybe it is a good idea to keep the country directory for a little longer and start on the TTLD with just a static landing page, place some links, wait until it receives some DA builds up and then perform the move.
Thoughts?
/TomyPro
-
Thanks for those references Ryan, I appreciate it. I will have a look tonight.
/Thomas
-
I will share the below articles. They address this exact topic and are presented very well. Review them and draw your own conclusions.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview
-
Ryan,
Thanks for your thoughts - I appreciate them, however I think this makes for a great SEO discussion.
The reason for moving to a CCTLD is mainly to increase search volume. We expect the search volume to go down in the intermediary but hope that it is a wise investment in the future. These are our reasons:
- Using a CCTLD will allow more SEO power in local search results for local keywords
- Using a CCTLD will allow us to host the site on a local physical server and separate IP
- Using a CCTLD should increase CTR in local markets
- Non-SEO Using a CCTLD should allow charging higher CPM rates
The reason for us doing this move is that over the years we have observed us being constantly outranked in local searches (e.g. Brazil) by sites that have
- less DA and mozRank
- local CCTLD (e.g. com.br)
- local server hosting
Their backlink profile was very similar to ours in a sense that both would get local backlinks from within the market yet we were not able to outrank them.
Do you have any quantitative data that would imply your statement of consolidating properties under one umbrella is the way to go for a highly internationalized offering that relies on local organic search volume?
Cost and Time concerns do not apply given the way our infrastructure is setup.
Looking forward to your and other SEO gurus comments.
Best /Thomas
-
Best strategy behind moving country subdirectory to dedicated TTLD wo/ loosing organic search volume?
Best strategy would be not to move it.
I'll make my prediction. You will move the site. You will lose ranking. You wont easily recapture your old ranking. You will then either move the site back or really wonder what you were thinking when you had this idea.
Your present DA is collected between your brandname.com site as a whole and the /de site. When you split the site, both domains will lose DA. That is one of the primary reasons the current best SEO practice is to condense sites into a single domain. There are also the cost and time benefits of maintaining a single site vs multiple sites. You are moving in the wrong direction. You may have good reasons, but I would recommend rethinking them.
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
-
Which search engines should we submit our sitemap to?
Other than Google and Bing, which search engines should we submit our sitemap to?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NicheSocial0 -
Search engine submission - Urgent
Is it necessary to submit a new site to search engines? I have a brand-new site I purchased a few days ago which I didn't think to check until after I purchased it, But it has not been indexed by Google!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman10
The domain was registered three months ago, and probably the website wouldn't have been designed until after that.
But I'm still left puzzling why the site is not indexed by Google. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.0 -
Search box within search results question
I work for a Theater news website. We have two sister sites, theatermania.com in the US and whatsonstage.com in London. Both sites have largely the same codebase and page layouts. We've implemented markup that allows google to show a search box for our site in its results page. For some reason, the search box is showing for one site but not the other: http://screencast.com/t/CSA62NT8 We're scratching our heads. Does anyone have any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Universal Search vs Local Organic
Hi, My web site has high rankings in universal SERP's. However, in my city organic search the competitors’ web sites that even don’t show up in universal Serp’s have higher rankings than mine. Not sure what I’m doing wrong. Thanks for any insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zlhe0 -
Why do SERP Results ( Rankings ) differ from country to country ?
Hi, I have been doing seo for this client based in Sri lanka for almost 8 months now. Since we started SEO we had set up geographic target setting to UK through google webmaster tools. At the moment Site is completely ranking higher on google uk & other countries except Sri Lanka . On Google.lk site doesn't even come within 1st 5 pages for keywords which are ranked on1st page in other countries ? What do you think about this ? How does it happen ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pyxle0 -
Should product searches (on site searches) be noindex?
We have a large new site that is suffering from a sitewide panda like penalty. The site has 200k pages indexed by Google. Lots of category and sub category page content and about 25% of the product pages have unique content hand written (vs the other pages using copied content). So it seems our site is labeled as thin. I'm wondering about using noindex paramaters for the internal site search. We have a canonical tag on search results pointing to domain.com/search/ (client thought that would help) but I'm wondering if we need to just no index all the product search results. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Should we move to a new domain??
Working with a company that is considering moving to a new domain and wanted some advice.They have 2 domains (they own both) and one is a shorter version of the other. The current domain is over 10 years old and has a domain authority score of 80. It is 9 characters long. The new domain (which they also own) has a DA score of 43 and is only 3 characters long. The debate is as much about branding as anything but there is a concern on how it will affect search. I was hoping for so advice and any pitfalls others may have experienced. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 2comarketing0 -
Setting a 404, best practices
Is it enough to just delete a page, or is it necessary to do something else to 404 a page correctly? Is there a great link to explain how to set http status codes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0