Best strategy behind moving country subdirectory to dedicated TTLD wo/ loosing organic search volume?
-
Community,
We are about to move one of our most popular country sub directories from brandname.com/de/.. to brandname.de . We have just purchased the domain so while the domain has been registered in 2009 the URL has zero domain authority.
What is the best strategy to execute the move while being cautious about loosing too much organic search volume the subdirectory is receiving right now?
Obviously it will take some time to build up DA on the TTLD so maybe it is a good idea to keep the country directory for a little longer and start on the TTLD with just a static landing page, place some links, wait until it receives some DA builds up and then perform the move.
Thoughts?
/TomyPro
-
Thanks for those references Ryan, I appreciate it. I will have a look tonight.
/Thomas
-
I will share the below articles. They address this exact topic and are presented very well. Review them and draw your own conclusions.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview
-
Ryan,
Thanks for your thoughts - I appreciate them, however I think this makes for a great SEO discussion.
The reason for moving to a CCTLD is mainly to increase search volume. We expect the search volume to go down in the intermediary but hope that it is a wise investment in the future. These are our reasons:
- Using a CCTLD will allow more SEO power in local search results for local keywords
- Using a CCTLD will allow us to host the site on a local physical server and separate IP
- Using a CCTLD should increase CTR in local markets
- Non-SEO Using a CCTLD should allow charging higher CPM rates
The reason for us doing this move is that over the years we have observed us being constantly outranked in local searches (e.g. Brazil) by sites that have
- less DA and mozRank
- local CCTLD (e.g. com.br)
- local server hosting
Their backlink profile was very similar to ours in a sense that both would get local backlinks from within the market yet we were not able to outrank them.
Do you have any quantitative data that would imply your statement of consolidating properties under one umbrella is the way to go for a highly internationalized offering that relies on local organic search volume?
Cost and Time concerns do not apply given the way our infrastructure is setup.
Looking forward to your and other SEO gurus comments.
Best /Thomas
-
Best strategy behind moving country subdirectory to dedicated TTLD wo/ loosing organic search volume?
Best strategy would be not to move it.
I'll make my prediction. You will move the site. You will lose ranking. You wont easily recapture your old ranking. You will then either move the site back or really wonder what you were thinking when you had this idea.
Your present DA is collected between your brandname.com site as a whole and the /de site. When you split the site, both domains will lose DA. That is one of the primary reasons the current best SEO practice is to condense sites into a single domain. There are also the cost and time benefits of maintaining a single site vs multiple sites. You are moving in the wrong direction. You may have good reasons, but I would recommend rethinking them.
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
-
Should I use the Change of Address in Search Console when moving subdomains to subfolders?
We have several subdomains for various markets for our business. We are in the process of moving those subdomains to subfolders on the main site. Example: boston.example.com will become example.com/boston And seattle.example.com will become example.com/seattle and so on. It's not truly a change of address, but should I use the change of address tool in GSC for all of these subdomains moving?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Wrong Search words coming in search console
Hey there, My website All good but, in webmaster Search console some bad Queries(search terms) coming which is totally different from website. I want to make sure, is that harmful for my website traffic, as well as keywords Ranking?? How should i stop them to be crawl, ?? can any help for this query.?? i have attached screenshot of that, please check & help out, http://prntscr.com/cmusoq Thnx in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojaverify060 -
How does Googlebot evaluate performance/page speed on Isomorphic/Single Page Applications?
I'm curious how Google evaluates pagespeed for SPAs. Initial payloads are inherently large (resulting in 5+ second load times), but subsequent requests are lightning fast, as these requests are handled by JS fetching data from the backend. Does Google evaluate pages on a URL-by-URL basis, looking at the initial payload (and "slow"-ish load time) for each? Or do they load the initial JS+HTML and then continue to crawl from there? Another way of putting it: is Googlebot essentially "refreshing" for each page and therefore associating each URL with a higher load time? Or will pages that are crawled after the initial payload benefit from the speedier load time? Any insight (or speculation) would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner1 -
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Links / Metadata around Recent Posts etc in Wordpress / Blog - Good SEO Practice?
Hello In a Wordpress blog ( or part of an ecommerce site that runs under wordpress ) it is good to show recent posts in the sidebar on most pages. Obviously the posts aren't going to be relevant to every post , so my questions are: Is having these on the page hurting SEO for the page? Is there good metadata structure to put in there? ( like rel="nofollow" or similar ) Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear
Thanks for your time
Marty0 -
Site: inurl: Search
I have a site that allows for multiple filter options and some of these URL's have these have been indexed. I am in the process of adding the noindex, nofollow meta tag to these pages but I want to have an idea of how many of these URL's have been indexed so I can monitor when these have been re crawled and dropped. The structure for these URL's is: http://www.example.co.uk/category/women/shopby/brand1--brand2.html The unique identifier for the multiple filtered URL's is --, however I've tried using site:example.co.uk inurl:-- but this doesn't seem to work. I have also tried using regex but still no success. I was wondering if there is a way around this so I can get a rough idea of how many of these URL's have been indexed? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrappleAgency0 -
Automotive part / OEM / Manufacturer numbers
Hi All, What's the best way to optimise pages for OE / Manufacturer Part numbers? Disclaimer: All part numbers in this post are fictional. I dont want this post out ranking my client for real part numbers 🙂 Take this for Throttle Body for example: WOODYS S-AB-Q.123.53G This is the main part number from WOODYS (the manufacturer). However, these are all variations of exactly the same product: Woodys 2.78972.11.0 Woodys 2.78972.16.0 Woodys 2.78972.20.0 Woodys 2.78972.26.0 Oh, and car brands use OE numbers for these parts, such as: VWA 9808e40923G VWA 9808e40923L VWA 9808e40923M VWA 9808e40923P VWA 9808e40923Q These internal part numbers are vitally important as most of my clients customers are garages/mechanics so they're very likely to search on OE numbers. So, would you suggest: Optimising 10 different pages for the same product (using the part numbers in the URL, Title and H1). The problem is there's no unique content for these pages, only the part number varies, so this would likely get penalised for dupe content, or not enough unique content. Optimising one page for all terms. If so, how do you suggest doing this to ensure all part/OE numbers rank well and part numbers are prominent in the SERPS?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowoody
Could Schema.org help here by marking up these EO numbers with the isSimilarTo property of the Product type? I'm trying to ensure these part number get equal presence in the SERP snippet when searched for, even though I can't physically include all these numbers in the Title tag, URL and H1 of one page. 3. Something else? Thanks, Woody 🙂1 -
Best Structure for Multi-Language/International Website
We are getting ready to do a total redsign of our website, which is a multi-language global website (www.hurco.com). Today we use an ip address lookup to determine country of origin and redirect to say hurco.de for Germany. The main reason for this was that our German division was afraid that their potential customers were going to the hurco.com site and seeing product that was not available to them. Is there a better way from an SEO standpoint to structure our website? Should we have all hurco.com traffic goto a country selection page and let them go there manually? Other good practices we should follow? Would you structure the entire site as //www.hurco.com/en-us or /en-canada (language and country) and then have all international domains 301 redirect to the proper one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fassnachtp0