Different domains for multilingual website
-
Hey guys,
A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language.
So for example:
word1word2.com for the english version
word3word4.com for the french version
word5word6.com for spanish version ....
Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/...
Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs.
Thank You.
-
The problem is that the domains have been online for years and they are all .com domains. So we will need to start fresh with new ccTLD domains.
Also, for the duplicate content problem, UK and US would be considered as duplicate content as both are in English, unless we create content for each website.
Thank you for your help Istvan.
-
Yes, that would be a signal. But the idea I have mentioned in my previous answer was to "host" different languages on different ccTLDs.
English version - .com or .co.uk (if you are targeting the UK)
French version - .fr
Spanish version - .es
We had 9 languages back that at that company and for each language we had different subfolders: /en/; /fr/; /it/ and so on... which gave us the possibility to geo-target each subfolder from Google Webmaster Tools, but we have seen our competitors next to us(and even before us) in most of the cases with their ccTLD version.
"Having different ccTLD's for each language but keeping the same site would result in duplicate content am I right?"
If you plan to keep the current versions + have new ccTLD versions then yes, you have a duplicate there. What you could do, if you migrate to ccTLD version is the create 301 redirects from the old URL to the new.
Istvan
-
Hello Istvan,
Thank you for your response. However, don't you believe that the newly implemented HREF Lang tag was done for to resolve this specific kind of problem?
Having different ccTLD's for each language but keeping the same site would result in duplicate content am I right?
Thank You.
-
Hi BruLee,
In your case I would advice you to check the article of Danny Dover. It might be a little-bit old - 2009 - but it covers the pros and cons of choosing how to host the different languages.
I have experience with the version where you have one big site and different languages are hosted on different subfolders, which was good, but we could have done better.
If you have enough resources to have better link building campaigns I would go with the different ccTLD for each language.
I hope this helped,
Istvan
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
-
About DA of the Website
Hi There, I would like to know why one of my website - https://patnalocalguide.com Domain Authority is not improving. It is not going up and down but it is maintaining its score between 10 since last 5 months. Not going above 10 or below. Why is it so? I'm conitnuously working on creating backlinks for the website and the DR score on Ahref improving but the DA is not. What steps to follow to increase DA? How to find out whats going wrong with our present strategy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozByAnuj0 -
Does having a different sub domain for your Landing Page and Blog affect your overall SEO benefits and Ranking?
We have a domain www.spintadigital.com that is hosted with dreamhost and we also have a seperate subdomain blog.spintadigital.com which is hosted in the Ghost platform and we are also using Unbounce landing pages with the sub domain get.spintadigital.com. I wanted to know whether having subdomain like this would affect the traffic metric and ineffect affect the SEO and Rankings of our site. I think it does not affect the increase in domain authority, but in places like similar web i get different traffic metrics for the different domains. As far as i can see in many of the metrics these are considered as seperate websites. We are currently concentrating more on our blogs and wanted to make sure that it does help in the overall domain. We do not have the bandwidth to promote three different websites, and hence need the community's help to understand what is the best option to take this forward.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinodh-spintadigital0 -
Google News - How to be featured in different countries with same domain
Hello, I am sure I am not the first to go through this but I did not find the answers in the previous Q&As. So, sorry if this question is bit redundant for some folks. We have a site in English with readers in multiple english speaking countries. How to make www.mysite.com accepted in Google news for US, UK, India, Australia and Canada at the same time? It is currently accepted in the US but, as I stated above, we do have a strong audience in other countries. I have read about sub-domains, but wouldn't it be considered duplicated content if I had the exact same article in different sub-domains? We are talking about creating 4 copies on mysite.com just to be added to Google News in those specific countries www.mysite.com/same-article/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Koki.Mourao
uk.mysite.com/same-article/
au.mysite.com/same-article/
in.mysite.com/same-article/
ca.mysite.com/same-article/ Isn't there a better way of having mysite.com included in Google News for all English speaking countries?0 -
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 -
Convertinh Website for Mobile ?
Dear All, My website (a rental website where you can hire anything online) currently has approx 1/3 of it's traffic from mobile devices , ipads, iphones, blackberry , HTC etc etc. The bounce rate is slightly higher for these at 47% but we have not optimised our site to be mobile friendly as yet. This is something I want to do. Do we just make it fit well into a 320 pixel screen or should we do new wire frames etc and essentially make a cut down website just for mobile. One of the things I know we will do is to make it pick up someones location and retrieve results nearest to them but is there any other do's and don'ts when going down the mobile route ?. I seem to find conflicting infomation when researching this , one example is about using a different url for mobile , one site says it gets you more traffic whilst another says don't use a different url. Also does anyone know of any good tips or sites where I can get some useful info about making the site Mobile Friendly >? thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Large Scale Domain Forwarding
I recently purchased a domain from a domainer who owns and parks many, many exact match domains in my niche. He gets a lot of type in traffic via these domains and is willing to forward them to my domain to help get my site started with traffic. We were planning on forwarding a few dozen domains at the most. I'd like to make sure I'm not raising any red flags with google for forwarding so many domains to a new site. I found this article, which says Panda made some changes with regards to what I'm trying to do here. Not sure if they guy is right though. http://domainate.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/how-google-panda-affected-domain-forwarding-and-what-to-do-about-it/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | terran0 -
Multiple Domain names pointing at one website
Hello, A collegue has asked if we can buy multiple domain names which contain keywords and point them at our website. Is this good practise or will it be seen as spam? Will these domains actually get ranked? I'm sure I'm not the first person to raise this but can't seem to find any questions and answers about this. Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markc-1971830 -
If we add noindex to a subdomain, will the traffic to that subdomain still generate domain authority for the primary domain?
We are trying to decide whether a password protected site, that we will noindex, should be set up as a subdomain or if it should be its own domain. The determining factor here is whether or not having that noindexed subdomain will increase domain authority since its noindexed. Any ideas???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0