Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Umlaut in domain
-
Hi,
My client wants to expand it's business to Germany and logically we need a domain name to match. We've found a great one and regsiterd several variants to it.
However I just found out that in Germany it is possible (while here it's not) to register a domain with an umlaut. My question is: will google assign more value to:
schädlinge.de than schadlinge.de when users search for schädlinge?
If yes, how large will the difference be? (I will use an umlaut in the title etc)
Kind regards,
Jason. -
Thanks for your response,
the new domain name will be purchased and used exclusively for the German store. I will try to obtain both with and without the umlaut, but the first only if responsibly priced.
(since the domain is just for ranking purposes) -
If you are mostly targeting Netherlands than buy a .NL extension not DE. Secure both if expanding.
I would prefer with the amlaut if it is a German site being targeted in Germany, so it is better because people typing into google.de will be using the amlaut and this is the proper spelling for this word. That is assuming you can get a domain name with amlaut characters registered.
Will it make a big difference in rankings, probably not much so if it's a matter of getting a available domain name for cheap or paying a lot of money to purchase it off of a seller I would go with the cheaper route.
You can also look for a alternative domain name that has schädlinge with the amlaut in it and is available.
You will of course be using the amlaut in the site content and can use it in directory and filenames as well so you're still showing Google and the user what they want to see.
Use the word with the amlaut in the title tag and the meta description.
-
I'm currently targeting Google Netherlands. Germany would be the expansion territory. It's a webshop that is going to offer it's products trough a separate German version of the dutch store.
could you please explain why it makes sense to purchase the schädlinge.de domain? (because it's registered by a domain farm and will probably be expensive)
I did find when searching for German terms with the umlaut, domains without them included score excellent (usually top 3.) This to me, would make sense since it was not always possible (even in Germany) to register domains with the umlaut included.
-
Jason
Yes, that changes. If you are targeting / going to target google.de eventually, it makes complete sense to acquire schädlinge.de.
I checked ranking data on Google.de for both schädlinge and schadlinge and what's interesting is that "schadlinge" is actually considered a mis-spell of schädlinge.
Are you currently only targeting Google US or other countries other then Germany?
-
Hi Nakul,
thanks for your swift reply. I don't quite understand your reasoning. Let me first clairfy that since the buisiness expands to Germany, we are looking to target google.de
I did find google understands my intent but searching for schädlinge or schadlinge yield in different results. The domain name is supposed to give a boost in rankings for en exact match with the searched keyword.
Could you please further clarify?
Thanks
-
Based on the SERPS in Google US for your keyword, it looks like you don't need it. Just using it in the page title should be enough. Further, if you do need it at a later date, you could technically have an inner page like schadlinge.de/red-schädlinge if needed and so on.
https://www.google.com/search?q=schadlinge
I hope this helps.
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
-
Images on sub domain fed from CDN
I have a client that uses a CDN to fill images, from a sub domain ( images.domain.com). We've made sure that the sub domain itself is not blocked. We've added a robots.txt file, we're creating an image sitemap file & we've verified ownership of the domain within GWT. Yet, any crawler that I use only see's the first page of the sub domain (which is .html) but none of the subsequent URL's which are all .jpeg. Is there something simple I'm missing here?
Technical SEO | | TammyWood0 -
Moving my domain to weebly
I am thinking of moving my html website to weebly. They offer a 301 redirect for my domain name. Is that ok for SEO?
Technical SEO | | bhsiao0 -
Umbrella company and multiple domains
I'm really sorry for asking this question yet again. I have searched through previous answers but couldn't see something exactly like this I think. There is a website called example .com. It is a sort of umbrella company for 4 other separate domains within it - 4 separate companies. The Home page of the "umbrella" company website is example.com. It is just an image with no content except navigation on it to direct to the 4 company websites. The other pages of website example.com are the 4 separate companies domains. So on the navigation bar there is : Home page = example.com company1page = company1domain.com company2page= company2domain.com etc. etc. Clicking "home" will take you back to example.com (which is just an image). How bad or good is this structure for SEO? Would you recommend any changes to help them rank better? The "home" page has no authority or links, and neither do 3 out of the 4 other domains. The 4 companies websites are independent in content (although theme is the same). What's bringing them altogether is under this umbrella website - example.com. Thank you
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Domain authority and keyword difficulty
I know there are too many variables for a certain answer, however do people take their domain authority into account when using keyword difficulty tool? I have a new domain which only has a score of seven at the moment. When using the keyword searching tool what is the maximum difficulty level keywords people would target initially? Obviously I would seek to increase the difficulty of the words over time but to start off its a hard choice between keywords which can be ranked for in a reasonable period of time and the keywords which are getting enough traffic to make the effort worthwhile.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Block a sub-domain from being indexed
This is a pretty quick and simple (i'm hoping) question. What is the best way to completely block a sub domain from getting indexed from all search engines? One item i cannot use is the meta "no follow" tag. Thanks! - Kyle
Technical SEO | | kchandler0 -
How to remove a sub domain from Google Index!
Hello, I have a website having many subdomains having same copy of content i think its harming my SEO for that site since abc and xyz sub domains do have same contents. Thus i require to know i have already deleted required subdomain DNS RECORDS now how to have those pages removed from Google index as well ? The DNS Records no more exists for those subdomains already.
Technical SEO | | anand20100 -
Using hyphenated sub-domains or non-hyphenated sub-domains? What is the question! I Any takers?
For our corporate business level domain, we are exploring using a hyphenated sub-domain foir a project. Something like www.go-figure.extreme.com I thought from a user perspective it seems cluttered. The domain length might also be an issue with the new Algorithm big G has launched in recent past. I know with past experience, hyphenated domains usually take longer to index, as they are used by spammers more frequently and can take longer to get out of the supplementary index. Our company site has over 90 million viewers / year, so our brand is well established and traffic isn't an issue. This is for a corporate level project and I didn't have the answer! Will this work? anyone have any experience testing this. Any thoughts will help! Thanks, Rob
Technical SEO | | RobMay0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0