Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Subdomains vs ccTLD in International SEO

International SEO

1496

edwardlewis last edited by

I'm interested to see if anyone has any additional thoughts or recent experience on subdomains vs ccTLD for International SEO.

An article I found on this site is from March 2011, so just wanted to check if this is still relevant?

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
edwardlewis @RobertFisher last edited by

Thanks for the links.. some new bedtime reading
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
RobertFisher last edited by

Edward,

On the whole this is ok, but there are newer things to consider like the change for targeting multiple languages using hreflang: From GWMT.

The best for Folders/subdomains/ccTLD's is the chart (near end of page) with pros and cons in GWMT here

I think you will find both up to date and exceedingly helpful.

Best to you,

Robert
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 2

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

International website sharing with .com/.au/.uk

I have a small business in the United States and would like to copy our main website for my international partners. My website is a .com. I think that their domains will end in their country codes: .au and .uk. We are open to using different domains. We plan to share blog articles and other content, but do not wish to be penalized for duplication. I have tried to read articles on this topic, but am unfamiliar with a lot of the terms. Is there any way to do this simply? Many thanks, Steph
International SEO | | essential_steph

0
SEO When Teaching English To Russians

My girlfriend is from Saint Petersburg, Russia and now lives in Toronto, Canada. She's been teaching English to Russians for 3 years in person and on Skype, and now wants to start a website to get more 1-on-1 clients and sell online courses, which I have a lot of experience in. If you don't feel like reading my notes below, I'll summarize my main questions here: Would you lean to creating the site more in English or Russian language or both equally... with a .com or .ru or both (2 sites)... hosted in the U.S. or Russia? I've been reading a number of excellent threads about strategies and tactics for online marketing in multiple language (including some here on Moz), but am still confused about how best to approach this. Here are some notes: -Some prospects will search for her services in English and some in Russian (probably more in Russian). -If I build her a site primarily in English, she can take advantage of my experience in English keyword research, SEO, competitor research, and so on. If I build her a site primarily in Russian, I can still do those things, but not as efficiently or effectively. -If I were thinking first and foremost of our users, which is obviously a good place to start, the site would be in both English and Russian, but I've read that if a site has both English and Russian text, and is a .com instead of a .ru, that can really hurt its chances of ranking in Russia's Yandex search engine, which is used more in Russia than Google. Along the same lines, although most SEO sites are saying that it doesn't matter where you host a website these days, an exception seems to be that Yandex does reward sites that are hosted locally. Are these assertions true? -At first I assumed that organic search competition is lower in the Russian language, but I don't really know. I've also read that Yandex really rewards older domains and that it can be hard to beat them, which means competition may be quite high. So my questions again are: Would you lean to creating the site more in English or Russian or both... with a .com or .ru or both (2 sites)... hosted in the U.S. or Russia? Thanks in advance!
Phil
International SEO | | smilinggardener

1
How to set up international SEO for english speaking countries

Hi, My company have offices around the world. However they also provide different services and products depending on the region. For example our offices in the USA, UK and Australia all provide different services to each other. My question is, how do I set up my WordPress website up to cater for these different countries and services? I think the simple answer would be to build a separate website for each, but this would be too costly and we don't have the resources to maintain all three. Many thanks for your time, Tom
International SEO | | CoGri

0
Shabaka domain - Impact on SEO

Hi All, I heard about shabaka domain names recently and am not sure if getting a shabaka top-level domain with arabic content help from a SEO stand-point? Currently my Arabic website is on this domain: http://www.tcf-me.ae/ Do you think it is a good idea to get a shabaka domain to target the GCC countries on our Arabic website? Or does it not matter? Thoughts? Thanks in advance for your help.
International SEO | | LaythDajani

1
Impact changing domain from ccTLD to .com

I've got a couple of clients who have an international market for their products or services. Both of these clients have a .co.uk domain. For one site the US market is the major audience, the other it's european countries. At the moment, neither of these clients have translated page or content targeted to a specific country. There are no plans at this stage to create such content. Google considers the .co.uk to be targeted to the United Kingdom. The assumption is that by changing this to .com it will increase their international reach. For both the domains, referral and direct traffic is much more diverse than organic (which as you'd expect is heavily UK weighted - but there is some international organic traffic) Does anyone have any experience making such a change? How did the change affect your international reach/visibility? Does anyone have any metrics that they'd like to share that could be used to make a case to clients? (Note, I'm not interested in how you'd go about handling the domain change - I'm happy/confident about doing this.)
International SEO | | DougRoberts

0
Looking for content writers for multi-language SEO

Hi All, I'm currently doing a lot of work for a UK client who has multiple sites outside the UK (all part of the same business). We're currently discussing the option of us handling all of his SEO for his German, French, Spanish and Italian sites too, but we only have access to one person in the office who can speak French and Spanish. They're currently booked up on other jobs that we can't really move them off, so I'm looking for options of outsourcing some of the content writing. My question is, does anyone know of any high quality content writing services that have writers available to write for the countries languages above? We're going to focus initially on their on-site strategy and building up their high quality content. At the moment, they don't have much relevant content on their website, so we're going to initially look at this. Moving forward, we'll be looking at their off-site strategy and trying to find areas to submit high quality articles, look at guest blogging and PR opportunities. Any tips anyone has on this side (in terms of outsourcing to native speakers) would be quite useful too! Many thanks,
Lewis
International SEO | | PinpointDesigns

0
International targeting

Hi I have a UK based website using a .com, we also own the .co.uk which points to the .com. We get IRO 40,000 UVs per month and we have good domain authority. I now want to launch the site in America however if I seperated the sites out and used the .co.uk for the UK and the .com for the US I would decimate my UK rankings. Am I able to target both the US and the UK under the one domain, or will the fact that I host in the UK ultimately impact on any rankings I may achieve in the US?
International SEO | | danielparry

0
Subdomain hosted in a different country - what are the implications?

Hello, We are looking at creating an eCommerce section to a website and we are just weighing up the options: Magento - host on hour own server - great but it can often be very slow when hosting a shared server. Shopify - hosted solution but hosting is in the US and we are in the UK and shop will be hosted on a subdomain as a result Build our own solution - time consuming and costly There are two issues that have arisen from this situation.... Is it worse for SEO to host your store in a different country or to host in your country but your store potentially run slower? I'm swaying to the side of the argument that says give your users a good and fast experience instead of worrying about where you host the store. Bearing in mind that the main website will be hosted in the UK anyway and it is just the subdomain that will be hosted in the US. Just wondered if anybody has had experience with this or if I'm missing something? All feedback greatly appreciated! Thanks, Elias
International SEO | | A_Q

0