SEO international - ccTLD or Subdirectories / Hosting on 1 server (IP) in Netherlands
-
Hi All,
I do mingle me in discussion if it's better to have an Ecommerce site of a Brand X on seperate ccTLD's (Brand.nl / Brand.de / Brand.com or use subdirectories (brand.com/nl, brand.com/de, brand.com/fr etc.
I see a lot of comments on this, but i am missing one (maybe) essential part.
We are using Magento with multi ccTLD support. BUT the environment is hosted in the Netherlands. Will we be "penalized" on hosting in NL when using www.brand.DE or other countries?
Or is it MUCH better to host those ccTLD in country of Origin?
Because if it is, maybe we can better use subdirs because then we can use our builded authority of the root domain.
Hope someone have an answer on this one!
Thanks!
Jeroen
-
Hey Jeroen,
If you are going down the ccTLD route I would host each sites it's respected country, it's possible Google will apply some weight to the geo location of the IP address (you should also set the location in WMT).
But more importantly hosting in the same country is going to improve site load times which will help out (a tiny bit atm) with google and improve the user experience.
Hosting in another country is not going to get you "penalised" by Google but it's not going to send a signal (from the geo location of the IP address) that you are located in Germany - this may or may not affect your rankings.
I recommend you watch this video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
Hope that helps...
Keith
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
-
International Market
Hello Moz friends, I am new to the tool and I was wondering if anybody has a best practice for international markets. I used to work with a different tool before and handling international markets has definitely been a challenge for it. What is the best way to set up campaigns/ keyword lists? By country? By topic? How helpful is the keyword explorer and reporting for international markets? I really appreciate your help.
International SEO | | LisaGerecht0 -
International Targeting: What Does Google Consider an Equivalent Page?
Hi All, We are working with an international brand that owns several domains across the EU and in North America. Our team is in the process of setting up international targeting using sitemaps to indicate alternate language pages. This is being done to prevent North American pages from being served in the UK, Spain pages from being served in Portugal, or any other combination of possibilities... Currently we are mapping duplicate or “equivalent” pages and defining them as rel="alternate" on their respective sitemaps. The problem is, it’s not always explicitly clear what Google considers “equivalent.” 1. In this instance, URL structures vary by domain,
International SEO | | MetaPaul
2. in most cases the content is similar (but unique),
3. the landing page templates vary is design and functionality,
4. and lastly, services often contain nuances that make them slightly different from one another (Professional Liability Insurance vs Professional Indemnity Insurance). All things considered, these pages are offering the same service, but are vastly different (see above). Q: Is it appropriate to use these attributes to serve the correct language / regional URL to searchers? Q: Is there a rule of thumb on what should be considered an "equivalent" page? Thanks All, Paul3 -
What is the best way to manage multiple international URLS
Hi All Our company is looking to expand into Europe (we are a UK based company) and we are planning to copy over our current .co.uk site to a .com one and create 301 redirects to maintain our SEO rankings. With the .com domain we were looking to use this as our main ecommerce site and then create sites for different countries in Europe. What we are unsure about is the best way to execute this in terms of the domain. Would it be best to have it setup as a domain structure such as: UK = www.example.com/gb/
International SEO | | MartinJC
Ireland = www.example.com/ie/
France – www.example.com/fr/ and so on. Or would we be better served creating sub domains for each country, example www.gb.example.com. Our main concerned is what is the best way to do this without hurting our SEO rankings. Thanks for the help.0 -
Redirect to 'default' or English (/en) version of site?
Hi Moz Community! I'm trying to work through a thorny internationalization issue with the 'default' and English versions of our site. We have an international set-up of: www.domain.com (in english) www.domain.com/en www.domain.com/en-gb www.domain.com/fr-fr www.domain.com/de-de and so on... All the canonicals and HREFLANGs are set up, except the English language version is giving me pause. If you visit www.domain.com, all of the internal links on that page (due to the current way our cms works) point to www.domain.com/en/ versions of the pages. Content is identical between the two versions. The canonical on, say, www.domain.com/en/products points to www.domain.com/products. Feels like we're pulling in two different directions with our internationalization signals. Links go one way, canonical goes another. Three options I can see: Remove the /en/ version of the site. 301 all the /en versions of pages to /. Update the hreflangs to point the EN language users to the / version. **Redirect the / version of the site to /en. **The reverse of the above. **Keep both the /en and the / versions, update the links on / version. **Make it so that visitors to the / version of the site follow links that don't take them to the /en site. It feels like the /en version of the site is redundant and potentially sending confusing signals to search engines (it's currently a bit of a toss-up as to which version of a page ranks). I'm leaning toward removing the /en version and redirecting to the / version. It would be a big step as currently - due to the internal linking - about 40% of our traffic goes through the /en path. Anything to be aware of? Any recommendations or advice would be much appreciated.
International SEO | | MaxSydenham0 -
Optimizing for 3 international sites, how to avoid getting into trouble
Hi Guys As a newbie, I want to avoid any penalties or mistakes as possible that will be due to unknown and have taken some steps to educate myself around international sites and multiple domains. our aim was to target new zealand first and then branch out. Whilst we are pondering the NZ site and writing fresh unique articles for the site and the blog. And besides making the currency, language more relevant to these domains, is there anything else I could work on? I thought about making the meta tags different for the home page and adding Australia etc If we are going to spend time growing the site organically I thought I would make the most of spending the time growing all three together.... Any recommendations on how to get started and optimize the 3 alot better? Thanks
International SEO | | edward-may1 -
International SEO
Hi If you were developing a US version of an existing UK site then is this the correct format/instructions for on-page SEO. Ive taken quite a lot from Aleydas great post: http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist but just want to confirm below is a good overall checklist to provide to clients developers ? Create US & UK country & language subfolders such as: domain.com/en-us/ and domain.com/en-gb/ Add 'rel=alternatehreflang' attribute according to google guidelines Add individual site map to each subfolder or will the hreflang attribute do or vice versa or both best? Don't redirect users via IP sniffing their location and serving up country/language version. Instead obviously link between language/country versions with a crawlable and very visible menu. Use the meta content language/country by adding the 'country-language' meta-tag in your html head Create individual profiles in GWT & GA for each country/language version and geotarget accordingly Localise content: spelling, currency, contacts etc Anything else re on-page/technical im missing ? Many Thanks
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Dan [edited to fix formatting]0 -
Http://us.burberry.com/: Big traffic change for top URL (error 593f1ceb2d67)
Please forgive duplicating this question on the SEOMoz & Webmaster Tools forum but I'm hoping to hit both audiences with this question... A few days ago I noticed that our US homepage (us.burberry.com) had dropped from PR5 to PR0, and the page has been deindexed by Google. After checking Webmaster Tools I also received the following message: http://us.burberry.com/: Big traffic change for top URL April 2, 2012Search results clicks for http://us.burberry.com/ have decreased significantly.Message ID: 593f1ceb2d67.We're not doing any link building at all (we've enough on-site issues to deal with). The only changes I have made are adding Google Analytics to the website, uploading sitemaps via Webmaster Tools (it's not linked to from robots.txt yet), and setting the burberry.com and www.burberry.com geo-location settings to 'unlisted' (we want uk.burberry.com appearing in the UK results, us.burberry.com appearing in the US results etc rather than www.burberry.com).I've reversed the geo-location settings but I doubt this would have caused this. We've duplicate copies of our homepage (such as us.burberry.com/store//) from typos in inbound links (and bad programming that allows them to work rather than 404'ing) but I don't think any of this is new. What I don't understand is (a) why this is happening now and (b) why is this just affecting our US homepage? We've ~40 different duplicates of the homepage (us, uk, ca, pt, ro, sk etc etc) so why is the US site being affected and not the others? Does anyone know if this is due to an algorithm change by Google or something else all together? Background:Our website www.burberry.com has 46 subdomains such as uk.burberry.com, ca.burberry.com and us.burberry.com. There is a lot of duplicate content on each subdomain (including basic things like tracking parameters in URLs) and across subdomains (uk.burberry.com/store & us.burberry.com/store are exactly the same), there's very little text on the site (its nearly all images), as well as poor redirects, inaccessible content (AJAX/Flash) and a whole host of basic SEO things that aren't being done correctly. I've joined the company in the last few months and have started addressing these issues but I've got a LOT of work to do yet.One thing that we have in our favour is a link profile that is as clean and natural as they come - there was only ever one link building campaign performed (which was before my time) and I had all of those links removed as soon as I joined the company.Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for your timeDean RoweEdit: us.burberry.com 301 redirects to us.burberry.com/store/ as explained on the webmaster tools forum, but I don't believe this is the cause as its the same across all subdomains.
International SEO | | FashionLux0 -
International SEO with .com & ccTLD in the same language
I've watched http://www.seomoz.org/blog/intern... and read some other posts here. Most seem to focus on whether to use ccTLD, subdomains or subfolders. I'm already committed to expanding my US-based ecommerce to Canada with a .ca ccTLD. My question is around duplicate content as I take my .com USA ecommerce business to canada with a second site on a .ca URL. With the .com site's preference set to USA, and the .ca site's geo preference (automatically) set to Canada, is it a concern at all? About 80% of the content would be the same. FYI, .com ranks OK in Canada now and I want .ca to outrank it in Canada. I know 'localizing' content within the same language is important (independent of duplicate content), but this might not be viable in the short run given CMS limitations. Any direct experience to help quantify the impact here between US and Canadian ecommerce? Adding: I'm not totally confident here. From this google webmaster central post it seems that canonical tags aren't needed. I tend to think nothing is truly neutral and want to be confident regarding whether to use canonicals or not. Is it helpful, harmful or harmless? My site already has internal canonical tags and having internal and external would be a pain I think. @Eugene Byun used it successfully, but would the results have been the same without? Thanks!
International SEO | | gravityseo0