Website Domains, Geographical targeting and Duplicate Content

[Zippy-Bungle]

My colleagues in Holland have 2 websites. I've copied and pasted their question - my comments are at the bottom

"www.ancoferwaldram.nl with NL, EN and FR language

www.ancoferwaldram.com with only EN language

The EN versions Google sees as “duplicate content” so we have to get rid of that.

I think we better use 1 website:

www.ancoferwaldram.com with NL, EN, FR and maybe other languages and deactivate www.ancoferwaldram.nl

Or keep the www.ancoferwaldram.nl with only the NL language?

Or keep the www.ancoferwaldram.nl with direct links to www.ancoferwaldram.com and no content?"

The focus is to get the site to rank in Non-eu countries for export. So given the .nl has higher DA (though only about 15) would it be better to have seperate .fr, .be, .com sites for specific languages and geo targeting. Or would it be better to keep everything on the same site? If so which domain?

i assume that the duplicate content can be resolved by stating which is the canonical version, once the domain strategy is resolved

welcome any thoughts here.

[JoomGeek]

Hello

I've worked on a big project like this. The best option is to go for TLD, but it's ususally not possible. In your case what I do recommend is

• Get .com as the main domain
• Create folder with language option if you feel it'll make a difference /en-us /nl-de otherwise just keep /[language]

We used it on ibremarketing.com and so far I'm very happy of the results !

[Boogily]

To me, this depends on a couple factors. How much effort can go towards this project, and is the content essentially the same, or does it vary per country.

If the content varies, and there is enough manpower to manage multiple sites in multiple languages, then have separate websites optimized for their unique content in their respective domains.

If the opposite is true, keep it all in one domain and use the /en, /fr, etc language settings afterwards. Obviously monitor anything that could be flagged as duplicate and use canonical accordingly. Keep in mind it could take more effort to get that site ranking around the world. That's my $0.02 at least, hope it helps

[MoosaHemani]

If I would be in the similar situation I will use the basics and go from there. Here are some of the basic, I would keep in mind:

-          Country level domain is always difficult to rank in other countries. For example, if you have a website with .co.uk domain, it will be difficult for this domain to rank on Google.com (US).

-          Country level domains are easier to rank on its particular country. If you website is .fr, its relatively easier to rank on Google FR as compare to a website that have a domain with some other TLD.

Keeping the above basics in mind, here are the options I have:

-          If I need one website deal with everything, then it’s better to have a general domain like .com instead of a country level domain so that it has a relatively better chance to rank in non-eu countries.

-          If we can afford and manage multiple website, country specific TLD will be easier to rank in those countries but in that case we have to limit our self to countries.

The options are at the front of you, now idea is to make a choice and go from there accordingly.