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.
International Seo - Canada
-
Our organization is currently only operating in the USA but will soon be entering the Canadian market.
We did a lot of research and decided that for our needs it would be best to use a subfolder for Canada.
Initially we will be targeting the english speaking community but eventually we will want to expand to the french speaking Canadians as well.
The question is - is there a preferred version in setting up the subfolders:
www.website.org/ca/ -- default will be english
www.website.org/ca/fr/ - french
www.website.org/en-ca/ - english
www.website.org/fr-ca/ - french
www.website.org/ca/en/ -english
www.website.org/ca/fr/ - french
Thanks
-
Hi there!
Ideally if you're going to be targeting another country the best way to go is with a ccTLD, in this case, .ca. In case you're not able then you can go with a directory and at some point switch to the ccTLD (when you're ready) with a migration, when it makes sense for your business.
You can take a look at the different criteria you can take into consideration in this post I wrote some weeks ago, where I also gave my recommendations from a web structure perspective when you target many countries with different languages for each with a generic domain. In this case it would be the following one to maintain a consistency from a country/language perspective and keep the URL structure as simple as possible for a user and crawling perspective:
USA: yourbrand.com
Canada in English: yourbrand.com/en-ca/
Canada in French: yourbrand.com/fr-ca/
In the post I mention you will find also some examples with this different structures and other best practices to follow.
Good luck with the site
Aleyda
-
Thanks Tammy for your response! We do plan on adding the hreflang tag to the different versions.
That being said - I've seen many seos advise to use set up # 2
but I’ve seen many brands do it differently
for example:
apple does it like # 1
ikea like # 3
so I wasn't sure whether there is any real difference.
Regarding tld .ca -- we do own it and plan to redirect it to our subfolder. At the moment we prefer to use that route so we don't split up our link juice among two different sites. Evnetually we can always separate them if we feel it will be better for use
-
Number one, if you also tie in the language tag within the head code. It would also, be preferential if you make sure your content is unique to each sub directory page ( even if the content is similar it should be 100% unique from the main domain and within the anchor text links coming to the /ca/ version.
Interestingly, if you obtain incoming links from .ca domains, to the /ca/ sub directory it will increase the relevance of the intent of Canada traffic.
Why would you not attempt to obtain the tld from .ca? Instead of sub-directories? Each is fine, but when you have a tld with a country specific extension, it increases your indexation rate within the Canada specific directories, citations as well as attracting incoming links.
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
-
Are Expires Headers Detrimental to SEO Health?
My dev was looking into Expires Headers to increase speed, but she don't know the ramifications behind them for SEO. What I found online is really old: https://moz.com/blog/expires-headers-for-seo-why-you-should-think-twice-before-using-them What do SEOs think? Thanks in advance! ~Dana
Technical SEO | | dklarse0 -
Craft CMS SEO Resources
I'm just starting out in freelance SEO & I've taken on a client who is using Craft CMS (version 2.0ish) for their site. I am not even close to being competent enough to manually code via Twig, but I had the main developer install the SEOmatic plugin for me. My question from here is - are there any resources or tips I should be aware of starting out? I just started by updating meta title/descriptions via "New Template Meta(s)" but I'm a bit concerned i'm doing the "template path" thing right - I haven't seen any visible changes in browser, and the SERP preview I'm getting is giving me a broken link. But i'm doing a fresh Moz crawl right now to see if the changes took place or not. so 1. Am I on the right track? 2. How long does it typically take for changes to start to show? 3. Is there anything I should be aware of? any follow up questions just let me know, I'll be following this thread!
Technical SEO | | dig_ad_austin0 -
Express js and SEO?
Hi fellow Mozzers, I have been tasked with providing some SEO recommendations for a website that is to be built using express.js and Angular. I wondered whether anyone has had any experience in such a framework? On checking a website built in this and viewing as a GoogleBot etc using the following tools it appears as though most of the content is invisible: http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php http://www.browseo.net/ Obviously this is a huge issue and wonder if there are any workarounds, or reccomendations to assist (even if means moving away from this - would love to hear about it)
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing2 -
JavaScript page loader - SEO impact
Hello all,
Technical SEO | | Lvet
I am working on a site that has a bizarre page load system. All pages get loaded trough the same Javascript snippet, for example: Changing the values in the form changes the page that is loaded. The most incredible thing is that, against my expectations, pages do get indexed by Google.
My question is: "Does loading pages dynamically using JavaScript affect the overall SEO performance?" Why are pages getting indexed? Thank you for shedding light on this.
Cheers
Luca0 -
Does Google index internal anchors as separate pages?
Hi, Back in September, I added a function that sets an anchor on each subheading (h[2-6]) and creates a Table of content that links to each of those anchors. These anchors did show up in the SERPs as JumpTo Links. Fine. Back then I also changed the canonicals to a slightly different structur and meanwhile there was some massive increase in the number of indexed pages - WAY over the top - which has since been fixed by removing (410) a complete section of the site. However ... there are still ~34.000 pages indexed to what really are more like 4.000 plus (all properly canonicalised). Naturally I am wondering, what google thinks it is indexing. The number is just way of and quite inexplainable. So I was wondering: Does Google save JumpTo links as unique pages? Also, does anybody know any method of actually getting all the pages in the google index? (Not actually existing sites via Screaming Frog etc, but actual pages in the index - all methods I found sadly do not work.) Finally: Does somebody have any other explanation for the incongruency in indexed vs. actual pages? Thanks for your replies! Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Why are these internal pages not showing any internal links?
If you look at Author profile pages like this one, http://experts.allbusiness.com/author/denise-oberry (THE top contributor on the site with over 82 posts under her belt), or any Author profile page, they show zero internal links or Page Authority. The same goes for most posts for each author on the site. Author pages should show internal links from every post the author has on the site. And specific posts should also have internal links from categories, etc. Yet they show zero. The only posts that show internal links and PA are ones that were either syndicated to the root domain's homepage, or syndicated to Fox Small Business. ZERO internal links. Does anyone know why this is? The root domain does not act this way with Author pages and posts. And I see nothing blocking links or indexing via the robots.txt file or page level nofollow tags. A real head scratcher for this SEO nerd, that I'm sure someone here will have a really simple answer to.
Technical SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
How to handle (internal) search result pages?
Hi Mozers, I'm not quite sure what the best way is to handle internal search pages. In this case it's for an ecommerce website with about 8.000+ products and search pages currently look like: example.com/search.php?search=QUERY+HERE. I'm leaning towards making them follow, noindex. Since pages like this can be easily abused for duplicate content and because I'd rather have the category pages ranked. How would you handle this?
Technical SEO | | Qon0 -
Changing CMS, are there SEO effects?
We want to change our cms from typo3 to CMS made Simple. We have done this already for another site and it effected the rankings. Have you got experience with this? What factors are important for SEO to consider? Is it normal when you change from cms the rankings will drop?
Technical SEO | | PlusPort0