What does it involve when creating subfolders, I believe I may have been given false info
-
Hi, Please can you help, I believe I may have been given false information about the way sub folders are added to a site.
My company are a global company and we would like to start targeting individual country's more effectively with the use of sub folders using our existing domain.
However, I have been told by our external web development company that in order to do this we need to create separate websites (eg, www.mycompany.de, www.mycompany.en etc) and then re-direct them to folders within the .com site.
Is this the correct way to produce sub folders? If not how is it done?
I'm sure that this would be an incredibly expensive venture for us, but yet an incredible profitable one for them.
-
Thanks Lynn,
I appreciate this is a tough question to answer but I think you have a given me some great information.
Much appreciated,
Tom
-
Hi Tom,
I think this is getting into specifics of your particular cms/site setup that we are not going to be able to easily answer.
it seems that your web guys are saying that you can set up a url that will contain /en-us/ by adding that info to the folder field. If this is the case then it should work in terms of giving you the language sub folder in the sense that you do not actually have to have a real en-us folder on your server to have urls like www.example.com/en-us/page.html. It is creating a virtual sub folder so to speak that exists only in the url but not as a real folder. In technical terms, all other things being ok this setup should work as expected as long as you recreate all the relevant pages of the site in the language you want and add the same folder name in that field. I assume you will probably have to edit all the onpage links also to reflect the /en-us/ url.
In term of the TLD/redirect setup again this seems specific to your setup, To be honest it seem like they are suggesting exactly the same thing in this case, I still don't see a reference to a 'real' en-us subfolder. It looks like your site/cms is not ideally setup to handle languages and also that it is not easy to copy the entire site into a subfolder to have a second language version of the site available in this way. It is impossible to advise on the best way around this without having a much more thorough look at your setup, there are many variables involved.
-
Hi everyone,
Many thanks for replying to my concern.
However, not to be ungrateful, but rather than knowing which solution would be best, What I'm really looking for is how you set up the subfolders as I'm really unsure.
My third party web developers is telling me to just type in "en-us" (if I was to create an American page) into a field called folder everytime I build a "hidden page".
This doesn't seem right to me, I'm expecting that the developer needs to create these subfolders to which I can then work in. But to do it this way my web developer is telling me that I would need to create a ccTLD for each region and then 301 redirect them to a hidden page on the "main website".
This just doesn't seem logical, so if you could shed any light on this I would be really grateful.
Many thanks,
Tom
-
Hi Thomas,
The "ideal" scenario to target different countries is through ccTLDs: yourbrand.es, yourbrand.com.mx, yourbrand.co.uk. If this is feasible for you (from a technical and resources perspective), then you shouldn't use sub-directories, but show the content directly through your ccTLDs, targeting each relevant country with them.
On the other hand, if ccTLDs are too expensive for you at the moment, what you can do is to buy them so you can "protect" your brand for the future, and right now only use sub-directories for each country that you want to target inside your generic domain: yourbrand.com/es/ for spanish, yourbrand.com/uk/ for the UK, yourbrand.com/fr/ for France, and directly show your country targeted information through each one of them.
Since you will be using sub-directories to show the information to your international audience, then what you should link internally through your site and share with your users are the different sub-directories versions (not the ccTLDs), although since your ccTLDs will be "parked" you can 301-redirect them to their relevant countries sub-directories, just in case someone arrive to them.
Then what you can do is to geotarget each subdirectory through Google Webmaster Tools to the relevant country, where you can register each one of them independently.
Additionally, you can use the hreflang annotation in the different country versions, pointing out the language and country of each HTML.
For more information about international SEO please take a look at this checklist that I just published a few days ago at Moz, with the main aspects that you should take into consideration when going International.
I hope this helps and if you still have any question please let me know!
-
Sorry not TLC's I meant TLD's
-
Hi Lynn, thanks for your post.
I highly agree with you that TLC's are the best option when it comes to SEO. Unfortunately, our company don't have the resources to build up each individual site, and hence would look to benefit from consolidating all of our links using one website.
Many thanks,
Tom
-
Hey Thomas,
It is considered acceptable to create a country specific domain for each nationality your company is active in, in fact, this is what many large international businesses do; for instance Adidas has adidas.co.uk, adidas.de, etc.
However, it is not necessary to do so, and you would need to begin building links back up from "ground zero". It seems it would be both more SEO-friendly and cost effective to go ahead and use a new folder, or subdirectory, for each country.
Check out this previous Moz thread for more info.
This article may help explain directory structure to you a little bit.
At any rate...I'd recommend subdirectories as your best bet, so you're on the right track. Hope this helps!
-
Hi Andie, I hope your right about their miscommunication.
I just wanted to pick up on when you said "While there is likely to be development work for these country specific sites", what kind of developments would need to be made?
Many thanks
-
Agree with Andie, probably a slight miscommunication.
They also might saying that you will get more 'seo value' out of local domains which might be true to a point but depends on a number of factors both technical and procedural. There is evidence that stand alone country specific domains give more local 'value' in terms of rankings, but you need to weigh this against the need to build links and gain domain authority for all these separate domains individually rather than leveraging the existing domain authority of the main site which you would be doing if you used sub folders. Gianluca has written a good roundup of the considerations to take into account when looking at this kind of scenario and also includes details on geo-targetting in webmaster tools setup and using the hreflang attribute well worth a look: http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust
-
It may be a bit of miscommunication on their part Thomas.
While there is likely to be development work for these country specific sites, you shouldn't have to get a new site built for each country, that's most likely insane!
What they're probably suggesting is to launch country sites at yourcompany.com/de/ but then registering domain names such as yourdomain.de which would just redirect to that - not for SEO use but just to protect your brand and for those who try to access it from those domains.
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
-
Multiregional / Multilingual SEO - Subfolders Question
Hello all, I wonder if you can help me... I have a question about subfolders in multi-regional / multi-lingual SEO - more specifically in reference to targeting the UK and the US. Having looked at some global websites these are the types of implementations I've most commonly seen: UK subfolders .com/uk .com/gb .com/gb/en-gb | .com/en-GB .com/gb-en .com/en-gb .com/uk/en US subfolders .com/us .com/us/en-us | .com/en-US .com/us-en .com/en-us .com/us/en Are any of these approaches better than others or is it all a matter of personal preference? What's the reason for using .com/gb over .com/uk (or vice versa) for example? Secondly, my assumption is that the examples above which include language subfolders do so because these companies are targeting different speaking users within these countries. Would I be right to think that since the organisation I work for is only targeting the American speakers in the US, we wouldn't need to go so far as to have language subfolders in addition to location subfolders? Would be great to get some feedback / suggestions! Thanks!
International SEO | | SEOCT0 -
Internationalization guides for subfolder structure
I'm wondering if there are any guides out there that list how subfolders should be structured for Internationalization? The first language/location that I'm targeting is Portuguese in Brazil so should my folder structure be: www.example.com/br/pt/ or www.example.com/pt-br/ I did find the guide below but was wondering if there was perhaps anything from Google? http://www.lingoes.net/en/translator/langcode.htm
International SEO | | Brando160 -
Using a top level domain name and directing it to a subfolder
Hi, we have a large international network. Our main website sits on .com domain and is used by the UK market. We have an international site in a subdirectory .com/dk/ for Denmark for example. We have also purchased the domain name www.ourcompany.dk/. Should we be forwarding the domain name (www.ourcompany.dk/) to point to the subdirectory www.ourcomany.com.dk/ so in the browser it shows up as www.ourcompany.dk or should we be displaying it as www.ourcompany.com/dk/? Are there any pros and cons to this method? Which one is best and are there any benefits in SEO. Ideally we want the .com domain name to have the best domain authority so would this impact it in any way? Any tips would be great.
International SEO | | Easigrass0 -
Country subfolders showing as sitelinks in Google, country targeting for home page no longer working
Hi There, Just wondering if you can help. Our site has 3 region versions (General .com, /ie/ for Ireland and /gb/ for UK), each submitted to Google Webmaster Tools as seperate sites with hreflang tags in the head section of all pages. Google was showing the correct results for a few weeks, but I resubmitted the home pages with slight text changes last week and something strange happened, though it may have been coincidental timing. When we search for the brand name in google.ie or google.co.uk, the .com now shows as the main site, where the sitelinks still show the correct country versions. However, the country subdirectories are now appearing as sitelinks, which is likely causing the problem. I have demoted these on GWT, but unsure as to whether that will work and it seems to take a while for sitelink demotion to work. Has anyone had anything similar happen? I thought perhaps it was a markup issue breaking the head section so that Google can no longer see the hreflangs pointing to each other as alternates. I checked the source code in w3 validator and it doesn't show any errors. Anyway, any help would be much appreciated - and thanks to anyone who gets back, it's a tricky type of issue to troubleshoot. Thanks, Ro
International SEO | | romh0 -
International SEO Subfolders / user journey etc
Hi According to all the resources i can find on Moz and elsewhere re int seo, say in the context of having duplicate versions of US & UK site, its best to have subfolders i.e. domain.com/en-gb/ & domain.com/en-us/ however when it comes to the user journey and promoting web address seems a bit weird to say visit us at: domain.com/en-us/ !? And what happens if someone just enters in domain.com from the US or UK ? My client wants to use an IP sniffer but i've read thats bad practice and should employ above style country/language code instead, but i'm confused about both the user journey and experience in the case of multiple sub folders. Any advice much appreciated ? Cheers Dan
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Redirect the main site to keyword-rich subfolder / specific page for SEO
Hi,
International SEO | | Awaraman
I have two questions. Question 1: is it worthwhile to redirect the main site to keyword-rich subfolder / specific page for SEO? For example, my company's webpage is www.example.com. Would it make sense to redirect the main site to address www.example.com/service-one-in-certain-city ? I am asking this as I have learned that it is important for SEO to have keywords in the URL, and I was thinking that we could do this and include the most important keywords to the subfolder / specific URL. What are the pros and cons and how important is it to include keywords to folders and page URLs. Should I create folders or pages just the sake of keywords? Question 2: Most companies have their main URL shown as www.example.com when you access their domain. However, some multi-language sites show e.g. www.example.com/en or www.example.com/en/main when you type the domain to your web browser to access the site. I undertstand that this is a common practice to use subdomains or folders to separate the language versions. My question is regarding the subfolder. Is it better to have only the subfolder shown (www.example.com/en) or should you also include the specific page's URL after the subfolder with keywords (www.example.com/en/main or www.example.com/en/service-one-in-certain-city)? I don't really understand why some companies show only the subfolder of a specific language page and some the page's URL after the subfolder. Thanks in advance, Sam0 -
Subdomains or subfolders for language specific sites?
We're launching an .org.hk site with English and Traditional Chinese variants. As the local population speaks both languages we would prefer not to have separate domains and are deciding between subdomains and subfolders. We're aware of the reasons behind generally preferring folders, but many people, including moz.com, suggest preferring subfolders to subdomains with the notable exception of language-specific sites. Does this mean subdomains should be preferred for language specific sites, or just that they are okay? I can't find any rationale to this other than administrative simplification (e.g. easier to set up different analytics / hosting), which in our case is not an issue. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
International SEO | | SOS_Children0 -
CcTLDs 301 redirected to subfolders
My client has an international website and currently has a mixture of ccTLDs, subdomains, and subfolders for the country specific pages. We are trying to change this however they want to have ccTLDS because of the SEO benefit but 301 redirect them to subfolders because of the simplicity of management that subfolders provide. I believe that if they are really just working with subfolders, why don't they just use subfolders and use Google Webmaster Tools and XML Sitemaps to help Google understand each targeted country. My questions are: 1. Does having aht ccTLD example.ca 301 redirected to example.com/ca really benefit anything? 2. This client tends to spell out the name of the country even with country specific TLDs, and they can't change it, will this affect SEO? Ex: example.ca/canada. 3. What the best practice? example.ca/canada/en-ca/city or example.ca/canada/city/en-ca? Thanks!
International SEO | | nrv0