Multiple Regional Domains - such as .co.uk / .de etc for one brand
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Hello,
We are in the process of building up our version 2 for our site, currently we have only one domain (i.e. xxxxx.com). Our target audience is distributed among various regions and speak different languages, we would like to know which will benefit us more:
a) by having one root domain and then having folders based on automatic IP detection, for example the customer opening a website in Japan would see the domain as: www.xxxx.com/jp.
B) or is it better to have different domains so in the above case it will be www.xxxx.co.jp.
The content on the site will be different based on the regional demand, so of course the language will be Japanese and the content will also be aligned with the Japanese community.
We plan to start with 5 different markets (UK/US/AU, Japan, China, Germany, Spanish speaking countries).
We would appreciate if you can suggest us the best route to achieve the best results.
Thank you,
SK
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I have done this before for a huge site in 7 languages and had many a debate over the years with Matt Cutts on it.
The short answer is multiple TLD's
Reason:Matt Said in a video and for the life of me I am unable to find it. That if they allow sites to rank in every country then people will just create content for them to get extra traffic, if they created a tool in WMT people would just tick every country saying their site was relevant. The only sure way was if they created a TLD and put some hard work into it.
doing xyz.com/jp/ is an option and then targeting a "Geographic target" in "Site Settings" but it will not get the same power as a TLD specific to that Geographic location. TLD are a very strong indication of location.You will have to setup sub folders in WMT like separate sites and target each directory with the "Geographic target".
Also, this is something I have been saying all day long, separate sites are good because you never know when Google is going to slam you with a penalty for a silly reason. You would lose all your locations in one go if they are on the same domain. But only have one site down if it happened.
Also have a good read about "hreflang" this will help you make a few decisions as this is new since the time I worked on the Multi-regional site.
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I think it's easiest to have 1 domain and use subfolders for location targeting. I believe that this way your domain as a whole will benefit from all the link building. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to indicate which subfolders will target which country.
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Hi SK,
Have a flight to catch soon and thought of quickly pointing you here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
Best,
Devanur Rafi
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