Subdomain or New Domain or Directory path?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I have a dilemma here. I have one of my clients that has its American website and would like to promote its business in canada(2 locations only vs more than 40 in the u.s).
What would be the best SEO decision here for the 2 Canadian locations:
- should i go for a new root domain? if yes why (www.example.ca)
- a new subdomain? if yes why (ca.example.com)
- or just following a directory path solution under the american site? (www.example.com/canadiancity)
Thanks
Ty
-
Agree with Justin, and would add a twist.
Consider buying the example.ca for the 2 Canadian cities and use them in your Canadian marketing. Just make sure they're 301-redirected to the appropriate directories on the main site. We Canadians do like to know that US-based companies actually have info that's specifically for us Also means that the call-to-action can be example.ca instead of example.com/city which might get a little cumbersome.
Google Webmaster Tools will let you geo-target a directory, so helpful to do that as well.. Getting links from other .ca sites is also a bit of a signal to SEs that the destination page is for the Canadian market.. Getting Canadian user reviews citing the Canadian directory would also likely help the localization process
Paul
-
Personally I would go for option 3, creating a /directory for the Canadian site, as the search weighting your root domain has will in part get passed onto the /directory as it is seen as another page on your root domain.
By going for a root domain or even a sub-domain you will effectively be starting your SEO efforts from scratch.
That said, there is some argument that a local domain would potentially rank better on local searches, however if you set up the directory route correctly by ensuring you have the localised address and phone number on the landing page, get inbound links to point to this page, social mentions etc that should to large degree counter that argument.
One other thing to consider is that all your SEO efforts on the /directory will help your domain authority and search weighting for the parent domain.
Rand did an great whiteboard friday a while back which explains the pro's and con's of the above options, so I would definitely check that out for a more in-depth explanation
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
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
-
Creating two websites from one and building up traffic to the new domain quickly
A client has an existing successful website that sells niche products - they are well known in their marketplace. They have two sets of key customers, let's call them (a) and (b), that need addressing in different ways to maximise sales. (a) is the more specialist end of the market, where people have complex needs - there are fewer of them but repeat business is likely, and we can talk to them in more technical language. (b) is the layman's end of the market - there is a vast pool of potential customers but they'll be more casual buyers and need to be addressed more in layman's terms. So what they want to do is to take their existing website, and essentially split it into two different websites, one for each market. The one that will use the existing domain, with all the links that have built up over the years pointing to it, will be the site for the more specialist end of the market (a). The domain name suits it better, which is why he wants to use the existing domain with that site and not the other. (b) will be a brand new domain. The client will write new product descriptions across the board so that the two sets of product information are not duplicate. I'd rather he didn't do this at all, because of the risk involved, and the difficulty of building up the traffic to the new site, which is after all the one with the best chance of mass market sales. But given that the client has decided that this is definitely what he wants, does anyone have any thoughts on what the action plan should be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | helga730 -
Blog subdomain not redirecting
Over the last few weeks I have been focused on fixing high and medium priority issues, as reported by the Moz crawler, after a recent transition to WordPress. I've made great progress, getting the high priority issues down from several hundred (various reasons, but many duplicates for things like non-www and www versions) to just five last week. And then there's this weeks report. For reasons I can't fathom, I am suddenly getting hundreds of duplicate content pages of the form http://blog.<domain>.com</domain> (being duplicates with the http://www.<domain>.com</domain> versions). I'm really unclear on why these suddenly appeared. I host my own WordPress site ie WordPress.org stuff. In Options / General everything refers to http://www.<domain>.com</domain> and has done for a number of weeks. I have no idea why the blog versions of the pages have suddenly appeared. FWIW, the non-www version of my pages still redirect to the www version, as I would expect. I'm obviously pretty concerned by this so any pointers greatly appreciated. Thanks. Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Should I redirect my Google Update Effected Domain to brand new Domain?
Hey Moz experts, I had a domain which was really doing better but after the Humming Bird update my traffic was decreased up to 90%. There are plenty of posts on my existing blog, Now what should I do? I mean should I redirect it to a brand new domain or Copy all the posts to a brand new domain and delete my existing domain? Note that the Old domain has PR1, DA 19 and PA 30.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imran20780 -
Redirect multiple domains to a primary domain
Hello that such I make the following query imagine we have three domains on the same thematic or category primary domain: domain-antiguo1.com (3 years) (200 Backlink), domain-antiguo2.net (10 years) (1000 Backlinks) and domain-antiguo3.com (6 years) (500 Backlinks) and decide to redirect all these domains favorite one: domain-principal.com The three domains registered refeccionar this google webmaster, has its respective income sitemap and google webmaster area change of address to the main domain the three domains are my property It would have a penalty for doing this practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globotec0 -
Sub Domain or New Domain?
Hi All, We have a client that has a business with three different services. 2 of these services compliment each other in a really obvious way, but the 3rd, while related is not such a obvious complimentary service. For this reason, service 3 kind of weakens the content of the website SEO wise for the two main services. Also, internally at the business it is run by an entirely different team so it feels culturally somewhat different. So, the client wants to pull all the content about service 3 and put it on a different website. Which would you chose as a domain for this new site: service3.existingdomain.co.uk or www.service3+brandname.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey0 -
New website from scratch and redirects or maintaining domain?
Hi friends, I have to face a big challenge. My client has an online store with about 250 products. The store is based on a web service provider whose CMS gives critical duplicate content issues. My client is considering to rethink the store from scratch and choose a CMS that offers more guarantees. I have two options: Starting the store from scratch with new domain and make redirects (whole domain or page to page?) Maintaining the domain, careful to keep the current structure of the URL, which is currently pretty bad I hope you could help me. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sergio_redondo0 -
Domain Choise
Hello, Im working a e-commerce shop, and my question is about choosing the domain. Presently the website is not performing good with the domain www.casaobjecto.com, that is the brand name of the shop. Now I have made my analysis about keywords and conclude that it would be very interesting to have a domain name with the main keyword that im targeting. The domain is available. If I choose the maintain the www.casaobjecto.com as main domain and the other keyword domain pointing to that site, whats the influence that can take in the keyword im looking for? Or should I replace the target keyword domain (becomes the main domain) by the brand domain name? Whats the best choice? Tks in advance, Pedro M Pereira
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0 -
Subdomain v. subdirectory v. other domain for blogs
I have a good amount of content on our main domain ( http://m00.biz/w4Ljfr ) let's say for discussion it's doctors.com and as you can see, much of it is in subdirectories. Traditionally this was the approach. Now I have some other content on subdomains but it's primarily directories and databases. Now I see that Google is giving subdomains their own SER as if they are a separate site and competitors are locking in the top few results merely by having their content on subdomains. Now I have an opportunity of doing two things: 1. Current content: moving all the content of the past few years on their own subdomain (forum, blog), and I'll be moving forum software anyways. Not sure about our own guide, which has been up there for a while. 2. New content: putting up some new blogs/magazines such as "Doctor's Handbook." Let's say that is a common phrase. I can choose between the following: (a) www.doctors.com/handbook/ (b) handbook.doctors.com/ (c) www.doctorshandbook.com I've got a bit of a quandary here, not sure of the best course of action and am curious to hear from many of you who have handled situations like this before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | attorney0