Redirect the main site to keyword-rich subfolder / specific page for SEO
-
Hi,
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,
Sam
-
Hi SamuEU,
In general it is not good to have your home page be redirecting anywhere else on your website, often times spammy websites use re-directs to take users to a different page they may be hiding from search bots. I would suggest creating the new keyword-relevant URL, but also creating an entirely new keyword-relevant page to gain traffic directly from the search-engines, then link to it in a way that makes sense from your home page. This is a more natural way to use a keyword-relevant URL to gain search traffic.
Good Luck!
-
Hello SamuEU,
-
Just creating folders or pages for the sake of keywords is useless thing to do solely for ranking, unless it helps with categorization for example, shop.com/shoes/nike/
-
en.blog.com vs blog.com/en/ work the same way, If you are moving sites, its a bit easier to move a blog/en/ site you dont have to deal with subdomains.
Another thing to consider generally the closer the page is to the domain tends to rank more. All else equal:
shop.com/nike/ will tend to rank higher than shop/clothes/shoes/nike/ but its a small factor again if categories are needed and make sense go with categories.
Hope this helps
-
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
-
International SEO : Redirecting spanish visitors to spanish site
Hi There, I have a problem I need an advice for. I run an e-commerce site in French. Things are going well. I also run the Spanish version of this site. We are starting to sell. But nothing like French site. I have traffic coming to the French site from Spain from visitors with Spanish language and they don't buy anything. That is strange as the conversion rate is good. Si I want to redirect them to the Spanish site. We sell phone parts. Our SEO is mainly based on brands, make, and reference numbers. So keywords are almost the same in both languages. Of course, site.es is aiming at google.es, and site.fr at google.fr So I am wondering. If I redirect these visitors to the Spanish site, Will it affect french site's SEO? Thanks
International SEO | | Kepass0 -
International Sites and Duplicate Content
Hello, I am working on a project where have some doubts regarding the structure of international sites and multi languages.Website is in the fashion industry. I think is a common problem for this industry. Website is translated in 5 languages and sell in 21 countries. As you can imagine this create a huge number of urls, so much that with ScreamingFrog I cant even complete the crawling. Perhaps the UK site is visible in all those versions http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/GB/ Obviously for SEO only the first version is important One other example, the French site is available in 5 languages and again... http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/en/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/FR/ And so on...this is creating 3 issues mainly: Endless crawling - with crawlers not focusing on most important pages Duplication of content Wrong GEO urls ranking in Google I have already implemented href lang but didn't noticed any improvements. Therefore my question is Should I exclude with "robots.txt" and "no index" the non appropriate targeting? Perhaps for UK leave crawable just English version i.e. http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/, for France just the French version http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ and so on What I would like to get doing this is to have the crawlers more focused on the important SEO pages, avoid content duplication and wrong urls rankings on local Google Please comment
International SEO | | guidoampollini0 -
International Sites - Sitemaps, Robots & Geolocating in WMT
Hi Guys, I have a site that has now been launched in the US having originally just been UK. In order to accommodate this, the website has been set-up using directories for each country. Example: domain.com/en-gb domain.com/en-us As the site was originally set-up for UK, the sitemap, robots file & Webmaster Tools account were added to the main domain. Example: domain.com/sitemap.xml domain.com/robots.txt The question is does this now need changing to make it specific for each country. Example: The sitemap and robots.txt for the UK would move to: domain.com/en-gb/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-gb/robots.txt and the US would have its own separate sitemap and robots.txt. Example : domain.com/en-us/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-us/robots.txt Also in order to Geolocate this in WMT would this need to be done for each directory version instead of the main domain? Currently the WMT account for the UK site is verified at www.domain.com, would this need reverifying at domain.com/en-gb? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
International SEO | | CarlWint0 -
Language Usage for SEO in Hong Kong
Hi guys, I was wondering if you could help me with an SEO query for language usage in Hong Kong? Specifically, I'm aware that in mainland China it's preferred to use simplified Chinese. However, in Hong Kong, if you want to rank well in Google and Yahoo! HK, should you be use traditional or simplified Chinese in your web content? Any guidance would be much appreciated.
International SEO | | ecommercebc0 -
What is the proper way to setup hreflang tags on my English and Spanish site?
I have a full English website at http://www.example.com and I have a Spanish version of the website at http://spanish.example.com but only about half of the English pages were translated and exist on the Spanish site. Should I just add a sitemap to both sites with hreflang tags that point to the correct version of the page? Is this a proper way to set this up? I was going to repeat this same process for all of the applicable URLs that exist on both versions of the website (English and Spanish). Is it okay to have hreflang="es" or do I need to have a country code attached as well? There are many Spanish speaking countries and I don't know if I need to list them all out. For example hreflang="es-bo" (Bolivia), hreflang="es-cl" (Chile), hreflang="es-co" (Columbia), etc... Sitemap example for English website URL:
International SEO | | peteboyd
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/</loc></url> Sitemap example for Spanish website URL:
<url><loc>http://spanish.example.com/</loc></url> Thanks in advance for your feedback and help!0 -
Queston about subdomains for SEO Gurus
What is the best way to deal with a blog acting as subdomain (blog.domain.com) when you have 3 regional website versions (uk.domain.com, us.domain.com, and fr.domain.com)? I am facing a big problem for proper distribution of link juice to the three main websites. The point is that I have one blog, in which I have general content not targeting any specific market, but the link juice cannot be distributed properly across three websites, because I have a script to determine visitor’s region and serve him the right regional website. It uses a geoip script for Apache to redirect a visitor to their proper subdomain by determining which continent they are connecting from based off their IP address. Apache can use any type of redirect for this purpose, but we're using 302 to maintain user experience without using a 301 which might permanently redirect a crawler to only one version of the website. That cannot be done without 302 redirect, which means sending no link juice from the blog subdomain to the main websites. So, when you click on the logo from blog.domian.com, the script determines visitor region, and then 302 to the proper website. I don’t have main domain like www.domain.com. Instead the script is acting on this domain so that it 302 redirects to regional website according user location. The situation is complicated because you can’t send equal link juice to 3 regional website, having only one general blog. Even worse, none of the regional websites receives link juice from neither individual posts, nor blog.domain.com because of the 302 redirect. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
International SEO | | darmar0 -
Google adwords keyword tool - Can anyone recommend a free service that is similar?
Hi everyone, As many of you know the Google keyword tool is going away unless you have an active campaign. Can anyone recommend a tool that is similar and free? We do international SEO so it is really important for me to get keyword suggestions in several languages. Thanks Carla
International SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Country-specific SEO
Hi, my client offers courses that whilst based in Manchester, England are mainly attended by people in countries such as Georgia, Libya and Nigeria etc. The people that attend the courses are fluent in English. We're looking at performing country-specific SEO and I have a few queries. The plan so far: Obtain TLD's in each target country. These TLD's would be hosted on the same server as the core site based in England. Option 1: Each TLD would be a microsite with content specific to the country including geo-signals, in English. Option 2: Each TLD would 301 redirect to the core site, i.e. example.sa redirects to example.com/sa/ and this country-specific section would have relevant geo-signals. So I have 3 questions at this point: 1. Most-all of the tips I have seen about country-specific SEO assume that the content should be translated to the native tongue although in this case, the audience are fluent English speaks. Does this make a difference? Is it okay to use English and still be able to rank in country-specific search engines? 2. Between options 1 & option 2 - which would be the optimum setup? 3. Last question, if we obtain the TLD's I hear that it's not necessary to also host that TLD in the target country, is this right? Thanks.
International SEO | | lokito0