Managing international sites, best practises

[OffSightIT]

This question follows on from my earlier question http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-replace-my-co-uk-site-with-my-com-site-in-the-us-google-results

My client owns www.blindbolt.co.uk for the UK site and www.blindboltusa.com for their US site. They will shortly be having a new site for Australia.

They have just acquired www.blindbolt.com and have expressed an interest in using this as the main hub for all of their sites, i.e. http://uk.blindbolt.com, http://aus.blindbolt.com.

The current, existing sites (e.g. www.blindbolt.co.uk) could be 301'd to the new locations.

Could I have your thoughts please on whether to go down this route of having international subdomains , vs keeping the sites on separate top level domains? What should I take into consideration? Is google smart enough to return different subdomain results in different countries?

Many thanks!

[Dr-Pete]

It's really tough to predict. I think Eyepaq covered the basics well - you'll consolidate your link-juice, but you may harm your UK-specific ranking slightly. Whether the consolidation offsets the loss really depends a lot on your link profile, how Google treats your UK site (sometimes, English content, even across countries, is seen as partially duplicated), and your market focus.

If 80%+ of your market is US-based, you're not ranking that well in the UK, and you don't have the resources to really push two domains, my gut reaction would be to favor consolidation. If you have two separate marketing efforts int he two countries and half or more of your sales are UK-based, then you'd be taking a real risk.

I would check out the newish rel="alternate" hreflang="..." option:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

It's specifically for helping same-language content rank correctly across regions, and Google seems to be pushing it publicly.

[DeptAgency]

Recently there was a blog posted on the Youmoz Blog which is worth reading. I think the main idea of this post is that the best strategy for international SEO depends heavily on the company, and the resources they are willing to invest.

The main distintion is made  between:

subfolders of one international domain (.com/us/ .com/au/  etc.):

This is the easiest way to maintain different websites. (low cost, easy to use). However, you will also have the most difficulties ranking the right page in the right country.

seperate country specific domains (.co.uk .au .com)

If there are resources available for maintaining separate websites, building domain authority and creating content for all of them, this would be the best option.

subdomains (au.blindbolt.com etc.)

This is the middle way. Harder to maintain than subfolders but not neccissarily more expensive.

I'd advise you to read the blog carefully and also to study hard on best practices in international SEO, since a lot of people have difficulties ranking the right pages in the right countries.

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[OffSightIT]

Thanks very much eyepaq, some very interesting points.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

[eyepaq]

Hi,

You can select in Google Webmster tool a geo location for each subdomain. (e.g.. for uk.blindbolt.com you can select Uk and so on.) . Google will know and it will act accordantly with your settings - I've tested this personally and it works well.

However, a dot com domain with a subdomain even if targeted as geo location with Web master tools won't behave as good as a dot co.uk for UK. Also CTR in serps will also be affected as especially in Asutralia a co.au domains ill get more clicks just because of the domain type - dedicated for Asutralia.

Another reason for not going with subdomain is that even if you 301 www.blindbolt.co.uk to the subdomain for dot com you will still lose some link juice and you will have some down times as far as traffic levels.

The positive thing about it, but with a gambling twist is that if google won't treat the subdomains as separate domains (that can happen based on user behavior and additional factors) links to the dot com domain will affect in a positive manner the entire domain and so all countries.

Hope it helps.