Domain structure for US Local Sites
-
We are planning on opening localized versions of our website throughout the world and in the US.
For countries these websites will be:
etc....
For the US would it be better to add the states onto part of the domain name or use a sub-folder. What is the advantage/disadvantages of each?
Meaning, should it be:
or
-
Maybe you can use cookies to set the language, instead of hard coding it in the URL?
Subfolders are the optimal structure from an SEO perspective. With any other structure you will not benefit from the domain authority of having a single site, and will have to duplicate much of your SEO efforts.
-
Thanks for all the responses. I can't use subfolders because that is the structure of the languages on the site
www.site/fr
www.site/es
etc....
We are launching subsites for legal reasons so need to have them.
Any other suggestions?
-
When you do country level sites, you might only be doing a handful. But when you get to US States, you are probably eventually going to do all the 50 states. That said, that's too many websites. I totally do a sub-folder. No questions. On country level sites, I'd do CC TLDs if that makes sense for your business.
I hope this helps and clarifies.
-
It may make sense to have separate sites for the different countries since Google does favor country specific TLDs for searches within a country.
-
I would highly agree with Takeshi on this… you should try to focus on sub folders that should look something like this (http://ww.example.com/france) and for UK the URL should be something like this (http://www.examle.com/UK)
Using separate domains and sub domains are treated as separate domains to Google and your SEO efforts might not transfer from one to another… where as in sub folders your SEO effort will help one another and less work will give you more results in terms of more traffic, sales and SERP rankings…
-
The best practice would be to use subfolders.
Subdomains (nj.site.com) are treated by Google in many aspects as separate sites, so the domain authority from nj.site.com won't transfer to say ny.site.com. You would basically have to duplicate your SEO efforts across 50 subdomains and not benefit from having one strong domain authority site.
Different domains (site-nj.com) would be the same problem, except you would also have to pay for 50 different domain name registrations. Plus, Google has devalued exact match domains so that having keywords in the domain doesn't carry quite as much ranking benefit as it used to.
Bottom line, go with subfolders for the optimal SEO site structure.
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
-
Value of dormant domain
My client used to own a successful domain. They sold the business, the domain was not used by the purchaser. My client bought back the business and redirects the original STRONG domain to their new domain. How can I find out current page rank, traffic, etc of the original domain? Mik
Technical SEO | | mcorso0 -
Old Redirected Domain is replacing my current domain on SERPs
Hello everyone, All of a sudden a 2 year old redirected domain is replacing my current domain for 2 weeks now, my site is apitus.com and my old domain is aptitus.pe (the redirect is still working), however this only happens on my country google results (google.com.pe), if you check my site on google.com, everything looks ok even with a sitelink, which I no longer have on my country search results. Back to the issue, the first thing I thought was go to Search Console and take it out from the index, so I asked for access by uploading a file but since everything on that old site redirects to my current site I can't make such action. While still waiting for such access, is there anything else I could do?. Thanks in advance. PD: I'm adding the images of my SERPs CmzN8kY G3zZwwj
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ0 -
Site Link Issues
For several search terms I get site links for the page http://www.waikoloavacationrentals.com/kolea-rentals/kolea-condos/ It makes sense that that page be a site link as it is one of my most used pages, but the problem is google gave it the site link "Kolea 10A". I am having 0 luck making any sense of why that was chosen. It should be something like "Kolea Condos" or something of that nature. Does anyone have any thoughts on where google is coming up with this?
Technical SEO | | RobDalton0 -
Checkout on different domain
Is it a bad SEO move to have a your checkout process on a separate domain instead of the main domain for a ecommerce site. There is no real content on the checkout pages and they are completely new pages that are not indexed in the search engines. Do to the backend architecture it is impossibe for us to have them on the same domain. An example is this page: http://www.printingforless.com/2/Brochure-Printing.html One option we've discussed to not pass page rank on to the checkout domain by iFraming all of the links to the checkout domain. We could also move the checkout process to a subdomain instead of a new domain. Please ignore the concerns with visitors security and conversion rate. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | PrintingForLess.com0 -
Domain tld question
Hi all, I have a question regarding the ranking of exact match tld which is co.uk Currently I have a .com domain with PR of 3 and the problem is that it have one word in front of my desired keyword, so it's not exact match. I have managed to buy an exact match but it's co.uk The questions are: Will a co.uk rank better for UK than .com domain I am reading at SEOMOZ that exact match domain value is getting lower, so is it worth to redirect my current .com domain to co.uk just to get rid of that one word and start all over again with exact match. Thanks
Technical SEO | | VasilTasev0 -
Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
Hi, I'm new to seomoz (and seo in general) and loving it so far. My main domain name is more of a brandname than a search engine friendly list of keywords. I rank well for some keywords I optimized for, and less so for the more competitive keywords. I was wondering if making one page minisites hosted on keyword rich domain names could help in this respect? What I want to do is just have a single page with a few paragraphs of content and links to the main site. I am not looking for links to boost the main site, just for the minisites to do better for several keywords. Will this help? Is this ok, or against some Google policy? Can this hurt the main site rankings? Thank you! **Edit: **I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords have much less on-page elements than my page, have about the same domain trust and also very little inbound links. The only factor I can see is the exact match of keywords in the domain name.
Technical SEO | | Eladla1