Multiple Regional Domains - such as .co.uk / .de etc for one brand
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
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
-
How to avoid duplication across multiple country domains
Here's the scenario: I have a client currently running one Shopify site (AU) They want to launch three more country domains (US, UK and EU) They want each to be a standalone site, primarily so the customers can purchase in their local currency, which is not possible from a single Shopify site The inventory is all from the same source The product desscriptions will all be the same as well Question: How do we avoid content duplication (ie. how will canonical tags work in this scenario)?
International SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
What are the SEO implications of having a website hosted in Singapore (as a subdomain of the global website) when the website is targeting the UK audience?
What are the SEO implications of having a website hosted in Singapore (as a subdomain of the global website) when the website is targeting the UK audience? Will it be hard to get it to rank? Will there be problems with search console?
International SEO | | ToniFarrington-Allthingsweb0 -
Will hreflang with a language and region allow Google to show the page to all users of that language regardless of region?
I'm launching translations on a website with the first translation being Brazilian Portuguese. If I use the following hreflang: If a user is outside of Brazil and has their browser language set to just Portuguese (Not Portuguese (Brazil)) will Google still serve them the Portuguese version of my pages in search results?
International SEO | | Brando160 -
Spanish word as English domain name
hi anyine any issues with using Spanish, and other non English words, as domain names when trying to rank in Google uk. We launched a number of websites a while back but finding it hard to get much traction in Google uk. We are getting a reasonable number of impressions but cannot seem to get very high in the rankings. All the names are foreign words for their service. Our homeware website, for example, uses the basque word for furniture as its name. other than potential branding issues of having domains people might struggle to spell, is there any serp issues we would face with these names. thanks
International SEO | | Arropa0 -
Google does not index UK version of our site, and serves US version instead. Do I need to remove hreflanguage for US?
Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
International SEO | | lcourse
We have another US domain with identical content but USD prices which is indexed fine. When I search in google for site:mydomain I see that most of my pages seem to appear, but then in the rich snippets google shows USD prices instead of the GBP prices which we publish on this page (USD price is not published on the page and I tested with an US proxy and US price is nowhere in the source code). Then I clicked on the result in google to see cached version of page and google shows me as cached version of the UK product page the US product page. I use the following hreflang code: rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.domain.com/product" />
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.domain.co.uk/product" /> canonical of UK page is correctly referring to UK page. Any ideas? Do I need to remove the hreflang for en-US to get the UK domain properly indexed in google?0 -
License Details across multiple regional brand sites
Hi guys! I have a quick question. Our team are currently having a debate regarding whether we should display our licensing details as text across all our brands in multiple regions (roughly 50 sites). My argument is that if you are required to have a license to be able to operate legally that Google would EXPECT to be able to crawl those details in order to provide their (Google) users with reliable results as opposed to rogue operators. The other side of the argument is that it will tie all the sites together and that would be a huge risk (as Google will perceive it as a network)- also that it would be seen as duplicate content? Would really appreciate any feedback on what is the best to do in this case. Thanks!!
International SEO | | RedSearch010 -
Sub Domains in WM Tools
Hi Mozzers, Does anyone know if you can set a specified territory for a sub domain in WM Tools? I know you can do it at domain level but can you do it for a sub folder such as US.example.com or UK.example.com I can't see it anywhere in the interface? Thanks
International SEO | | Bush_JSM0 -
What eCommerce Regulations are there when selling in the UK?
I was informed last night that in a month from now one of my clients is launching some campaigns with a daily deal partner in the UK (Great Britain & New Zealand). (Yes, first time I'd heard of it) Regardless of the timeline, our team is now tasked with making sure we have their site ready for selling in the UK. I just want to make sure we're crossing all our T's and dotting the I's. (We're based in the U.S. and selling all physical products, no digital) A couple questions came to mind: Are we required to display the product prices in the local currency? - I thought this was kind of silly, but the daily deal partner thought this was required. VAT - Is it seriously 20% in United Kingdom? And is that flat across the whole area? Would make it a lot easier than the US with 1,000's of different tax rates. Any other rules or regulations that come to mind would be greatly appreciated Thanks in advance for your response! Have a great day, Kevin
International SEO | | Webfor0