International Domain and URL Method of Preference
-
I'm seeing varied opinions and methods preferred for domain/URL structure on international websites. A specific example we have now is an international brand in Asia, USA, Brazil/South America, Australia, New Zealand and Africa. Their current domains are all fragmented across the brand and our goal is to have them unified, examples of their issue here;
country.brand.com
www.brand.com.au
www.brand.co.nzWhat I'm looking for is an approach that will have the best long term impact but no short term losses as well.
I'm leaning toward www.brand.com.eu or www.brand.com/eu/
Looking at SERP's for other countries, subdomain geographic segmenting doesn't seem to show on any first pages in the SERPs. There is one other option I'm still interested in finding out more about, geographically segmenting sites and pages through canonical or hreflang.
Interested in hearing some additional POV's.
Thanks!
Anthony
-
Thanks for the input Irving.
-
One main .com site with language folders is the best way to go. Easier to maintain, better for SEO to have one enterprise sites, shows the user you are global.
You need to deal with duplicate content by writing same language regions differently which is the pain about international sites.
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
-
URL structure for am International website with subdirectories
Hello, The company I am working for is launching a new ecommerce website (just a handful of products).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lvet
In the first phase, the website will be English only, but it will be possible to order internationally (20 countries).
In a second phase, new languages and countries will be added. I am wondering what is the best URL structure for launch: Start with a structure similar to website.com/language/content (later on we will add other languages than english) Start with a structure similar to website.com/country/content
3) Start with a structure similar to website.com/country-language/content (at the beginning it will be all website.com/country-en/content) What do you think? Cheers
Luca0 -
New domain or subdirectory?
I noticed my domain authority has dropped slightly in the recent update, and it has me re-thinking a strategy for a website I just recently launched. I purchased the domain name kansasisbeautiful.com about a year ago and have been working on building it for most of that time. Earlier in August, I went ahead and launched it. However, towards the end of the development of the website, I decided to just put it in a subdirectory of my parent company (my photography business) at mickeyshannon.com/kansas and redirected the kansasisbeautiful.com domain to the subdirectory. mickeyshannon.com is my photography business website. The Kansas website has it's own distinct design, but is powered completely by my photography. I created it for a few purposes, including promoting tourism to the state of Kansas and to publish a book on Kansas travel next year, but one of it's main goals is also to help sell my photography prints. I decided to put it in a subdirectory (mickeyshannon.com/kansas) as I had hoped it might drive more traffic into buying photo prints if it lived on my main website. However, I've been re-thinking my strategy and have been wondering if I'm competing against myself too much. Many of my photography prints have the name of a location in them and have their own URL per photo (for example: "Flint Hills Spring Sunrise" is at http://www.mickeyshannon.com/photo/flint-hills-spring-sunset/). It makes me wonder if the new Kansas travel website page for the Flint Hills (http://www.mickeyshannon.com/kansas/flint-hills/) is competing for that keyword. Would I be better moving mickeyshannon.com/kansas to kansasisbeautiful.com? I was worried having so many backlinks back to my photography site would send up red flags with Google as if the kansasisbeautiful.com website was just a spammy website created to push traffic to mickeyshannon.com when it really has it's own purpose. Any thoughts on whether using the domain name or keeping it at the subdomain level is better? Hopefully that made sense. Thanks, Mickey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VSphoto0 -
Linking to URLs With Hash (#) in Them
How does link juice flow when linking to URLs with the hash tag in them? If I link to this page, which generates a pop-over on my homepage that gives info about my special offer, where will the link juice go to? homepage.com/#specialoffer Will the link juice go to the homepage? Will it go nowhere? Will it go to the hash URL above? I'd like to publish an annual/evergreen sort of offer that will generate lots of links. And instead of driving those links to homepage.com/offer, I was hoping to get that link juice to flow to the homepage, or maybe even a product page, instead. And just updating the pop over information each year as the offer changes. I've seen competitors do it this way but wanted to see what the community here things in terms of linking to URLs with the hash tag in them. Can also be a use case for using hash tags in URLs for tracking purposes maybe?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
Website URL Structure - keyword targeting on homepage vs internal pages
I have developed a few websites before where the homepage contains the content for the keywords I was targeting. This has been reasonably successful as I have found it easy enough to get links to the homepage. I am considering a new site in a totally different industry that I am thinking about structuring like this: mybrand.com (not necessarily targeting any keywords) mybrand.com/important-keyword-1/ (definitely want to target) mybrand.com/important-keyword-2 (equally important as 1st keyword) There will be several (30-ish) other pages targeting keywords but they are not as significant as the two mentioned above, more so they are about publishing informative information. The two important keywords are quite different but industry related. My questions are: should I be careful targeting keywords away from the homepage when the homepage gets the most links? Would I be better off building 2 different websites where the keyword content is captured in the homepage? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BGu0 -
Can you canonical your homepage to a different URL on the same domain?
I would like to know if it is acceptable (or even possible from Google's standpoint) to canonical your homepage to a different URL on the same domain? For example, my homepage is www.grasscare.com (it's not) and I've built links to that page for years for terms like "grass seed" and "buy grass seed" because all I sold in the past was grass seed. If I then decide I want to sell both grass seed and sod, can I canonical my homepage (grasscare.com) to a new URL www.grasscare.com/grasss-seed.html to preserve the link value I've built up for "grass seed"?The new homepage would turn into a doorway page of sorts, forcing users to select either grass seed or sod before going further. Whatever content there is on the new homepage about grass seed would also be present on grasscare.com/grass-seed.html, though it would only be a small amount of content. Can a canonical be used to point the homepage to this new page and also, will this canonical pass all of the link value and ranking signals it help in the past to the new URL? Thank you in advance for any help or insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
Evaluate the value of domain
We have a chance to purchase a domain with our main KW dot net. We are already a competitor for this KW in its other variations. This domain is currently being used as a re-direct to another site. What are the risks associated with changing domain names and how to best evaluate if this domain will even help us win that KW in Google results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | devonkrusich0 -
Should 301 Redirects be used only in cross domains or also internally?
In the following video with Cutts: http://youtu.be/r1lVPrYoBkA he explains a bit more about 301 redirects but he only talks about cross sites. What about redirecting internally from a non-existing product in a store to a new similar existing product?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0
