E-commerce worldwide sub domains or folders

[Trespass]

Hi Guys,

We currently only sell to the UK so its pretty easy to manage our seo etc.

However we are building a new site on Trespass.com and will be using magento enterprise. We will be serving the UK, US and the rest of the world.

Does anyone here have experience with this? Is it best to have sub domains ie. UK.trespass.com, US.trespass.com?

Or folders Trespass.com/uk  Trespass.com/de  Trespass.com/US

Thanks guys

[Letty]

Definetely go for subfolders, you can then target all you linkbuilding activities to different parts of the domains, and this will eventually help the complete domain. We work already with subfolders for the last 15 years and also with the hreflang, works fine.

[Trespass]

i think its folders. Need to make a decision today so folders it is. I know theres pros and cons to folders,sub domains and even seperate tlds.

Only in the UK I bet haha next year will be worldwide

Cheers

[Milian]

If that's the case, then yes I would also go with folders as they are my preferred way to do it.

I've had a couple of Trespass jackets in my time!

[Trespass]

I did mention that but essentially that would make link building to thousands of sites if we were targeting every country in europe etc.

Having subfolders would help to build authority on one domain as opposed to across mutliple domains.

Multiple tlds for each country isnt anoption as its expensive and time consuming. With folders I believe is the 2nd best option and using certain modules, rel="alternate" hreflang="x" would work well

Thanks for your reply

[Milian]

Hi Tresspass,

Before thinking about using subfolders and sub domains you should think about using the county top level domains (TLDs) you already have, as country specific TLDs are (generally) a much favored way to Geo target websites.

Trespass.com for US

Trespass.co.uk for UK

However this could become a stumbling block if you wanted one that isn't available. such http://www.trespass.de/

Here is a great post on International and Multilingual sites  and here is another one The Ultimate Guide to Multilingual and Multiregional SEO