International URL Structures
-
Hi everyone!
I've read a bunch of articles on the topic, but I can't seem to be able to figure out a solution that works for the specific case. We are creating a site for a service agency, this agency has offices around the world - the site has a global version (in English/French & Spanish) and some country specific versions. Here is where it gets tricky: in some countries, each office has a different version of the site and since we have Canada for example we have a French and an English version of the site. For cost and maintenance reason, we want to have a single domain : www.example.com
We want to be able to indicate via Search Console that each subdomain is attached to a different country, but how should we go about it.
I've seen some examples with subfolders like this:
Global FR : www.example.com/fr-GL
Canada FR: www.example.com/fr-ca
France: www.example.com/fr-fr
Does this work? It seems to make more sense to use : **Subdirectories with gTLDs, **but I'm not sure how that would work to indicate the difference between my French Global version vs. France site.
Global FR : www.example.com/fr
France : www.example.com/fr/fr
Am I going about this the right way, I feel the more I dig into the issue, the less it seems there is a good solution available to indicate to Google which version of my site is geo-targeted to each country.
Thanks in advance!
-
You have the instance that is the reason I took a liking to international SEO. In your instance, because of the annoyances of commonly used languages that are also countries ... I suggest ccTLDs or subdomains.
-
Subdomains - You will have to claim each subdomain in Search Console and target them to their specific countries and then use hreflang between the languages within the country subsites.
-
www.domain.com (main)
-
www.domain.com/fr (french)
-
www.domain.com/es (spanish)
-
ca.domain.com/en (Canadian, english)
-
ca.domain.com/fr (Canadian, french)
-
fr.domain.com (France)
-
ccTLDs - This does the geo-targeting for you. You will need to put the hreflang between the languages within the country sites.
-
www.domain.com (main)
-
www.domain.com/fr (french)
-
www.domain.com/es (spanish)
-
www.domain.ca/en (Canadian, english)
-
www.domain.ca/fr (Canadian, french)
-
www.domain.fr (France)
It does not matter which you use. But if you wanted to use the same root domain, the subdomains are a good way to go about that!
-
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
-
Changing site URL structure
Hey everybody, I'm looking for a bit of advice. A few weeks ago Google sent me an email saying all pages with any text input on them need to switch to https for those pages. This is no problem, I was slowly switching the site to https anyway using a 301 redirect. However, my site also has a language subfolder in the url, mysite.com/en/ mysite.com/ru/ etc. Due to poor work on my part the translations of the site haven't been updated in a long time and lots of the pages are in english even on the russian version etc. So I'm thinking of just removing this url structure and just having mysite.com My plan is to 301 all requests to https and remove the language subfolder in the url at the same time. So far the https switching hasn't changed my rankings. Am I more at risk of losing my rankings by doing this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ruhol0 -
WP URL issue - Concatenated URLs (LOTS of them)
WP is doing this somehow, and creating URLs for hundreds of pages that don't exist. HOW is this happening, and how do I stop It? I have many, many URLS like this: https://www.atouchofrust.com/terms-of-use/atouchofrust.com/vendor-news. Of note, atouchofrust.com/terms-of-use, and atouchofrust.com/vendor-news are both legit pages on the site. Why they are being concatenated is beyond my limited understanding of WP. Please, somebody, help. Cori
Technical SEO | | FlyingC0 -
Just saw a competitor jump in rank by double digits, questioning my url structure choice now.
Currently I have for our big keyword oursite.com/big-keyword/ and clicking on a material type will be oursite.com/big-keyword/material-type/ Our competition has **theirsite.com/big-keyword/ **and when you click on their material type **theirsite.com/material-type-big-keyword/ ** The also have 20 some pages, while we have around 652 as a eCommerce site as well, not sure why they jumped so high in rankings, while their backlink structure is so small still and they have a DA half of ours. I'm in the middle of a site redesign and very close to restructuring the urls the way they have it, since it really seems to have worked well. How do you feel about that?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
No Keyword in URL
SEOMoz (and other platforms) advise that I need to add my keyword to the page URL, however as far as I'm concerned it has been, so why don't these platforms see it. My home page URL is www.salesandinternetmarketing.com, but apparently I haven't added the keyword internet marketing to the URL, what advice can you give me please? Lindsay
Technical SEO | | lindsayjhopkins1 -
Spider Indexed Disallowed URLs
Hi there, In order to reduce the huge amount of duplicate content and titles for a cliënt, we have disallowed all spiders for some areas of the site in August via the robots.txt-file. This was followed by a huge decrease in errors in our SEOmoz crawl report, which, of course, made us satisfied. In the meanwhile, we haven't changed anything in the back-end, robots.txt-file, FTP, website or anything. But our crawl report came in this November and all of a sudden all the errors where back. We've checked the errors and noticed URLs that are definitly disallowed. The disallowment of these URLs is also verified by our Google Webmaster Tools, other robots.txt-checkers and when we search for a disallowed URL in Google, it says that it's blocked for spiders. Where did these errors came from? Was it the SEOmoz spider that broke our disallowment or something? You can see the drop and the increase in errors in the attached image. Thanks in advance. [](<a href=)" target="_blank">a> [](<a href=)" target="_blank">a> LAAFj.jpg
Technical SEO | | ooseoo0 -
Redirect everything from a certain url
I have a new domain (www.newdomain.com) and and an old domain (www.olddomain.com). Currently both domains are pointing (via dns nameserves) at the new site. I want to 301 everything that comes from the www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com. I've used this htaccess code RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.newsite.com$
Technical SEO | | EclipseLegal
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] Which works fine and redirects if someone visits www.olddomain.com but I want it to cover everything from the old domain such as www.olddomain.com/archives/article1/ etc. So if any subpages etc are visited from the old domain its redirected to the new domain. Could someone point me in the right direction? Thanks0 -
How much of a hit to changing urls?
Hi, We have a few pages that from an SEO perspective have poor URLs. We are planning on changing them (and 301 redirecting) the old page to the new page. I heard in the past, this can temporarily negatively impact your SERP rank etc. Since the old URLs are bad, even if there is a temporary negative hit, changing them in the long run it is better, but curious if anyone has any experience on what to expect.
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
URL Length
What is the ideal length for an item's URL. Theirs a few different options. A) www.mydomain.com/item-name B) www.mydomain.com/category-name/product-name C) www.mydomain.com/category-name/sub-category-name/product-name Please choose A, B, or C and explain why you made that decision. Looking forward to the responses.
Technical SEO | | Romancing0