Website Target in Europe
-
Hi, I am planning a site to target in Europe and I expect to translate my site into ten different languages namely English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Greek, Portuguese, Dutch and Swedish.
I am doing some study of this case in targeting different countries for SEO, most of the advise are the following:
a. Build 10 different websites and target different geographical location in Google Webmaster
b. Get 10 different country specific domains for 10 different websites
I would like to hear any suggestion if there is anything better than this ? I had all the materials and translation ready but building 10 different websites or getting 10 different domains are very time consuming and costly.
I would be appreciated if any one had any advise for me to make the website more management friendly.
Thank you.
Tom
-
I really think the biggest factor is whether all the content is going to be exactly the same but translated in dif. languages or you are creating a product or service that spans 10 different countries.
For example; if you are creating a site about how to stop smoking or about the same products and you translate that to 10 different languages then I suggest using Ryan's approach.
If however you are creating something country specific, like a directory for businesses in each specific country then I would simply run with 10 domains (if you're lucky enough to find the same name with each ccTLD for the countries you're targeting)
I'm guessing that if you are willing to make the effort to redo the content in so many languages then the financial payout should warrant spending the money to buy 10 domains + hosting etc.
If you specified the topic of your site someone who's already done it might offer better advice, hope this helps
-
If you were to ask for the best possible SEO performance without consideration to other factors, then the 10 website approach, one for each ccTLD and hosting in its local country would be my recommendation.
Realistically speaking, a single .com address can be provided and you can target each individual country from the same domain with sub-folders i.e. mydomain.com/uk/. Some advantages of a single domain:
-
certificates only need to be purchased once (i.e. Verisign, TRUSTe, etc) and they will apply to the entire site
-
the site only has to be built once and not 10x
-
maintenance of a single site is much easier then maintenance of 10 sites
-
the hosting, domain acquisition costs, etc. are all preferable with one site
As long as your site is properly translated (i.e. human translation which is properly adjusted for each country) and the appropriate SEO adjustments are made, the site can compete. Keep in mind it is preferable to translate for countries, not languages. In other words, there is a difference between Spanish for Spain and Spanish for Mexico. Be sure to properly account for each country's individual dialect, currency, units of measurement, etc.
The ccTLD is one signal used by search engines to help determine relevancy. The hosting location is another. I lack experience with the .eu domain so I cannot comment on using that tactic. I feel the high costs and time requirements of producing 10 sites, hosting 10 sites, etc. outweigh the SEO advantages.
-
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
-
Website relaunched: Both old pages and new pages indexed
Hi all, We have recently made major changes to our website and relaunched it. We have changed URLs of some pages. We have redirected old URLs to new before taking website live. When I check even after one week, still the same old and new pages also indexed at Google. I wonder why still old pages cache is there with Google. Please share your ideas on this. Thanks
International SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Best way to interlink 25 different language versions of a website?
I have a website which has 25 different language versions on 16 different domains. Hreflan are setup to point to different language versions. In the footer we have deeplinks to the 25 language versions. Site is not spammy but in small niche and many language versions have very few other external links. For some time this site had lost rankings for reasons that are unclear till now. I see that large international sites such as booking.com, tripadvisor, apple all use different approaches to interlink their language versions. Interestingly Tripadvisor is nowadays loading the links to their other language versions dynamically only upon click so that these links do not show up in source code, deviating from their former implementation of static deeplinks to all language versions. Matt Cutts mentioned back in 2013 “If you have 50 different sites, I wouldn’t link to all 50 sites down in the footer of your website, because that can start to look pretty spammy to users. Instead you might just link to no more than three or four or five down in the footer, that sort of thing, or have a link to a global page, and the global page can talk about all the different verions and country versions of your website.” But in their webmaster guidelines google recommends: "Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the German version of your page can get to the right language version with a single click." I assume for SEO anyway these links have no value, but for user experience it would certainly be better to provide somewhere deeplinks to other language versions. Also the fact that language versions are on different domains and have few external backlinks may increase a bit the risk in our case. I guess in doubt I would prefer to be safe and load deeplinks only upon click same as tripadvisor. Any thoughts/suggestions on best interlinking in our specific case?
International SEO | | lcourse0 -
Webmaster tools International Targeting
Hello there, If we have country specific websites such as: usa.domain.com (For the US) uk.domain.com (For the UK) fr.domain.com (For France) Should each of the above sub-domains be set up separately in webmaster tools? With "target users in" for each of the specific countries? Thanks
International SEO | | roberthseo0 -
Geographic Target set up in Google webmaster tool
Hi, When i launched my web site 3 months ago ( I'm am very new to SEO) I have set up the geographical target section in Google webmaster tool for US. Now, I'm thinking to change it to some other geo target to see if i can get more traffic. However, recently few of my prompted keywords got really well in Google US ranking. Here are my Questions: if i will change the geo settings in webmaster tool will effect the ranking i already managed to achieve in US? In the list of all the countries in Google webmaster tools what does is mean "unlisted"? Can i select more than one country to target and if I can how? Thanks!! Raviv
International SEO | | Indiatravelz0 -
Best Practice for International Website with Two Versions
I have a client in the medical industry, and the company's product has been approved in various countries in Europe yet is awaiting approval in the US. That means we can share certain information in some countries that we cannot share in the US. Therefore, we plan to use an initial landing page that will ask what country the user is in (using a drop-down list to choose from if not located in the US) and then push him or her to the appropriate version of the site. Here is my question: What is the best way to ensure search engines can crawl the site beyond this landing page? Thanks for your time.
International SEO | | mollykathariner_ms0 -
Will Google punish me cuz my websites content are almost the same?
If I have almost the same contents for my three e-commerce websites, say A.com,B.uk,C.ca. They're promoted in US, GB, Canada which are all English speaking. Will my site be punished because they're almost the same to Google?
International SEO | | SquallPersun0 -
Geo-targeting a sub-folder that's had url's rewritten from a sub-domain
I have a client that's setting up a section of his site in a different language, and we're planning to geo-target those pages to that country. I have suggested a sub-folder solution as it's the most cost effective solution, and it will allow domain authority to flow into those pages. His developer is indicating that they can only set this up as a sub-domain, for technical reasons, but they're suggesting they can rewrite the url's to appear as sub folder pages. I'm wondering how this will work in terms of geo-targeting in Google Webmaster Tools. Do I geo-target the sub domain or the sub folder i.e. does Google only see urls or does it physically see those pages on the sub-domain? It seems like it might be a messy solution. Would it be a better idea just to forget about the rewrites and live with the site being a sub domain? Thanks,
International SEO | | Leighm0 -
Internationally targetted subdomains and Duplicate content
A client has a site they'd like to translated into French, not for the french market but for french speaking countries. My research tells me the best way to implement this for this particular client is to create subfolders for each country. For ease of implementation I’ve decided against ccTLD’s and Sub Domains. So for example… I'll create www.website.com/mr/ for Mauritania and in GWT set this to target Mauritania. Excellent so far. But then I need to build another sub folder for Morocco. I'll then create www.website.com/ma/ for Morocco and in GWT set this to target Morocco. Now the content on these two sub folders will be exactly the same and I’m thinking about doing this for all French speaking African countries. It would be nice to use www.website.com/fr/ but in GWT you can only set one Target country. Duplicate content issues arise and my fear of perturbing the almighty Google becomes a possibility. My research indicates that I should simply canonical back to the page I want indexed. But I want them both to be indexed surely!? I therefore decided to share my situation with my fellow SEO’s to see if I’m being stupid or missing something simple both a distinct possibility!
International SEO | | eazytiger0