Top Level Domains
-
Howdy Everyone,
I have a website that will span multiple countries. The content served will be different for each country. As such, I've acquired the top level domains for different countries.
I want to map the cop level domains (e.g. domain.co.uk) to uk.domain.com for development purposes (LinkedIn does this).
I'm curious to know whether this is adviseable and if mapping a country-specific TLD to a subdomain will maintain local SEO value.
Thanks!
-
Thanks guys, great insights!
- I do have multiple ccTLDs for the same site. The content for each, however, will be significantly different.
- By 'domain-mapping' I meant actually getting into the DNS records and mapping the ccTLD URL to a sub-domain
- Rel canonical redirect: I'm assuming that the .com.uk would be the canonical page? If this page is the canonical page, and the com/uk/ is the 'discounted' page, what happens if the rest of the site uses the .com/uk convention? (In other words, is it advisable to have this inconsistency [both from a usability, index point-of-view]?)
@Gary
I think this is a very interesting point. I agree with both of you that if I saw a billboard for domain.com/uk, I might think it to be slightly odd. However, I'm not sure if consistency trumps familiarity or not.
Further down the rabbit-hole:
I will have multiple languages (let's say en, fr, es). I want this to utilise sub-directories (I want to avoid super-fancy AJAX whatnot. I HATE Google's help page URLs, for instance).
domain.com/us/en/
domain.com/us/es/The idea here is that the site rank for multiple languages, within a country (without creating super-duper long URLs). Any ideas/tips?
Maybe a quick outline might help:
1 - Main (sort of a splash/navigation page)
1 - USA
1 - EN
2 - ES
2 - UK
1 - EN
3 - France
1 - FR
2 - EN
-
Gary has a point that considering offline marketing is important in many situations. Seeing .co.uk instead of /uk definitely gives a more local feel.
Great response anyway, to follow on from that:
If you want to use www.domain.co.uk in offline marketing then you may want to consider using a rel canonical redirect. It may be a bit more time consuming to set up (there are different ways you could go about doing this) but it may help from a conversion point of view. Probably minimal I admit, but people generally don't like being redirected.
Either way, I wouldn't worry about what domain they use as a linking source if your redirects are set up correctly.
-
I agree that directories would be a better way to organise your content.
I would aim to get people to use www.domain.com/uk etc. as a linking source, but potentially still use www.domain.co.uk in offline marketing and use 301 redirects to www.domain.com/uk. If that makes any sense?
The TLD will certainly have offline local value even if it doesnt have SEO benefit.
-
If I read your first paragraph right, you have multiple ccTLDs for the same company? That will make your SEO efforts a lot more difficult and is only really appropriate in rare cases (Amazon for instance).
To make your life a lot easier, I would suggest using directories instead. i.e. domain.com/us, domain.com/au, domain.com/uk as more PageRank passes from the root level to these directories than from root level to the subdomain. Then it comes down to geo-targeting.
To sum up:
Directories > Subdomains > Unique Domains (purely in terms of SEO).
When you say you want to map the top level domains, do you mean redirect domain.co.uk to uk.domain.com? afaik, redirecting .co.uk to uk.domain would not retain any local UK SEO value directly - other UK signals may come with the redirect though.
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
-
Cross domain canonical issue
Hello fella SEOs! I have a very intriguing question concerning different TLDs across the same domain. For eg: www.mainwebsite.com, www.mainwebsite.eu, www.mainwebsite.au, www.mainwebsite.co.uk etc... Now, assuming that all these websites are similar in terms of content, will our lovely friend Google consider all these TLDs as only one and unique domain or will this cause a duplicate content problem? If yes, then how should I fix it? Thnx for your precious help guys!
Technical SEO | | SEObandits1 -
Multiple sub domain appearing
Hi Everyone, Hope were well!. Have a strange one!!. New clients website http://www.allsee-tech.com. Just found out he is appearing for every subdomain possible. a.alsee-tech.com b.allsee-tech.com. I have requested htaccess as this is where I think the issue lies but he advises there isn't anything out of place there. Any ideas in case it isn't? Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
SEO for sub domains
I've recently started to work on a website that has been previously targeting sub domain pages on its site for its SEO and has some ok rankings. To better explain, let me give an example...A site is called domainname.com. And has subdomains that they are targeted for seo (i.e. pageone.domainname.com, pagetwo.domainname.com, pagethree.domianname.com). The site is going through a site re-development and can reorganise its pages to another URL. What would be best way to approach this situation for SEO? Ideally, I'm tempted to recommend that new targeted pages be created - domainname.com/pageone, domainname.com/pagetwo, domainname.com/pagethree, etc - and to perform a 301 redirect from the old pages. Does a subdomain page structure (e.g. pageone.domainname.com) have any negative effects on SEO? Also, is there a good way to track rankings? I find that a lot of rank checkers don't pick up subdomains. Any tips on the best approach to take here would be appreciated. Hope I've made sense!
Technical SEO | | Gavo0 -
I've consolidated other domains to a single one with 301 redirects, yet the new domain authority in MOZ is much less that the redirected ones. Is that right?
I'm trying to increase the domain authority of my main site, so decided to consolidate other sites. One of the other sites has a much higher domain authority, but I don't know why after a 301 redirect, the new site's domain authority hasn't changed on over a month. Does MOZ take account of thes types of things?
Technical SEO | | bytecgroup2 -
Domain Forwarding Implications
Hi, I am working with a client who is planning to rebrand the company and set up a new domain. What is the best way to maximize and pass the authority from the existing sites (there are 2)? Each site already has many inbound links and have been around for a while. Should I set up 301 redirects for all of the pages? Should I set up domain forwarding? If I do this, what are the implications from an SEO perspective? Please advise. Thank you, Erin
Technical SEO | | HiddenPeak1 -
Domain with more Languages
Hey folks! I was wondering what you would do. I do have a Website. The website is provided in 8 other languages. Right now every language has it's own Domain name. The domain name is always the country in the language. I'm thinking about combine everything to one domain and hope to get some great linkjuice from the other 7 domains. So it would be www.example.com/en/ www.example.com/fr/ and so on. How do you handle that. Would this have a big positive impact on that one domain I'm forwarding to?
Technical SEO | | leitpix
I really think so!0 -
Sitemap with References to Second Domain
I have just discovered a client site that is serving content from a single database into two separate domains and has created xml sitemaps which contain references to both domains in an attempt to avoid being tagged for duplicate content. I always thought that a sitemap was intended to show the files inside a single domain and the idea of multiple domains in the sitemap had never occurred to me... The sites are both very large storefronts and one of them (the larger of the two) has recently seen a 50% drop in search traffic and loss of some 600 search terms from top 50 positions in Google. My first instinct is that the sitemaps should be altered to only show files within each domain, but am worried about causing further loss of traffic. Is it possible that the inclusion URLs for the second domain in the sitemap may in fact be signalling duplicate content to Search Engines? Does anyone have a definitive view of whether these sitemaps are good, bad or irrelevant?
Technical SEO | | ShaMenz0