Shall I automatically redirect international visitors from www.domain.com to e.g. www.domain.com/es? What is best SEO practice?
-
We have chosen the one domain approach with our international site having different language versions in subdirectory of main domain:
www.domain.com/es
www.domain.com/it
etc.What is SEO-wise best practice for implementing international index pages. I see following options:
- entering www.domain.com will display without redirection the index page in language of user (e.g based on IP or browser) in www.domain.com
Example: www.booking.com - entering www.domain.com will always show English index page.
Additionally one may display a message in the header if IP from other country with link to other language version.
Example: www.apple.com - entering www.domain.com will always redirect automatically to country specific subdirectory based on IP
Example: www.samsung.com
Any thoughts/suggestions on what may be best solution from a SEO perspective? For a user I believe options 1) & 3) are preferable.
- entering www.domain.com will display without redirection the index page in language of user (e.g based on IP or browser) in www.domain.com
-
The solution you describe it's correct, so you can go with it.
-
good point. thanks Gianluca.
But in this particular case crawling would not be an issue since non-English language versions are in subdirectories which are accessable via country dropdown. US google spider seeing the EN version in the main domain is exactly as desired. So if crawling is not an issue, do you still see a problem with option 3). To address your point, I would also enforce that if someone clicks via country dropdown to English version, that this person would not be redirected again.
What do you think?
In case of websites following an international one domain strategy such as booking.com, redirecting to subdirectory may be most convenient for vast majority of users, since the name of the main domain is promoted to users in different languages.
-
Option 1 must be discarded.
Option 2, which is also what Amazon does, is the best one IMHO, even though should be also present a country selector html page, so that Googlebot can discover it and crawl it.
Option 3 is a no no, because you are pretending that someone is visiting your site just in his language, which may be not true. More over, this is also discouraged by Google for that same reason, and because googlebot IP is american... it would end always seeing the version assigned to US IPs.
-
Subdirectories can work very well. Those subdirectories can benefit from link juice above them. I would also consider different sitemaps for the different languages. Again, I like your third option from a user experience standpoint. Given the search engine's emphasis on that coupled with improved click through rates, you should do well as long as the content end of things is good.
-
Thanks.We believe in our case language versions in subdirectry over country specific TLDs is the better choice. My doubt is really just about how to best deal with international visits to www.domain.com.
-
There's a lot of good info out there on this subject. The ideal for ranking in a specific country would be to have domain.es with a hosting provider in Spain that has a local Spain billing address. Aside from that, I personally like option 3 in your list but provide links to other languages in case the user is on a VPN that confounds geolocation.
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
-
Switch to Separate URL Configurations for International SEO?
We run an ecommerce website and sell to customers in the US and Canada. We recently realized that the way we serve content to our users isn't Google's recommended way. We use locale-adaptive pages in that some content changes slightly depending on where we think the user is located based on their IP address. But the URL doesn't change. Google's stance on locale-adaptive - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en&ref_topic=2370587 That being said, the changes are quite minor. It is usually only pricing and currency that changes depending on if we determine the user to be based in Canada or the US. However, I understand that there can be problems related to this configuration because of GoogleBot primarily using a US-based IP. We decided that the best course of action for us is to serve US content as our default content on all of our existing URLs. And Canadian content would be served using new url paths such as: example.com**/en-ca/**product1. All of this would also be configured to use hreflang tags. The problem we have run into is that it is a pretty huge development challenge to reconfigure how the site serves content when we have been using locale-adaptive for over a year. So developer resources would be taken away from other tasks and put toward this one for a relatively long time. Based on this information and the fact that we would like to both rank better in Canada and to follow Google's recommendations, how important would you say this change would be? I realize this isn't a black and white question and it depends a lot on business goals and preferences. However, I need to be able to gauge as best as I can how necessary it is to do this in order to make the decision of whether to do it or not. Any input is greatly appreciated!
International SEO | | westcoastcraig1 -
Auto-Redirecting Homepage on Multilingual Site
The website has an auto-redirecting homepage on a multilingual site. Here is some background: User visits the site for first time > sent to javascript age verification page with country of origin selector. If selects "France" then served French page (.com/fr-fr/). If selects any other country, then served English page (.com/en-int/). A cookie is set, and next time the user visits the site, they are automatically served the appropriate language URL. 1st Question: .com/ essentially does not exist. It is being redirected to .com/en-int/ as this is the default page. Should this be a 301 redirect since I want this to serve as the new homepage? 2nd Question:. In the multilingual sitemap, should I still set .com/ as the hreflang="x-default" even though the user is automatically redirected to a language directory? According to Google, as just released here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/creating-right-homepage-for-your.html "automatically serve the appropriate HTML content to your users depending on their location and language settings. You will either do that by using server-side 302 redirects or by dynamically serving the right HTML content. Remember to use x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation on the homepage / generic page even if the latter is a redirect page that is not accessible directly for users." So, this is where I am not clear. If use a 302 redirect of .com/ to either .com/en-int/ or .com/fr-fr/, won't I then lose the inbound link value and DA/PA of .com/ if I just use a 302? Note: there is no .com/ at this moment. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks,Alex
International SEO | | Alex.Weintraub0 -
SEO in foreign languages
Hi everyone, I currently run a website called Barquitos www.barquitos.com The site is an extension of a shop that is based here in Spain. Though because the town is particularly touristy we built the website to offer English and Spanish as language options on the site. English on Barquitos.com and Spanish through a sub domain es.barquitos.com. In an ideal world I want to rank the English version for English phrases on Google.co.uk, and the Spanish sub domain on es.barquitos.com. However, my Spanish is only at a reasonable standard, probably not good enough to look at writing quality content in Spanish. Is building up the Page Authority and Domain authority for the English main domain enough to rank the Spanish sub domain or do we need a focussed approach for both languages? Any tips or advice for helping to rank sub domains in foreign languages would be greatly appreciated. Thanks everyone Stu
International SEO | | Barquitos0 -
What are the best practices for translation of city/state names for international SEO? (ie. New York in English vs. Nueva York in Spanish)
I'm working on international SEO / translation of a global travel site. While we have a global keyword research and translation strategy in process for each market they serve, I've run into a unique question. Overall, we are translating (and localizing) content for each market but aren't sure what to do with location names. Each country/state has cities and locations that have their own dedicated pages. I see three options for these location names (when titling a page and writing content): keep them in English, translate the names in the market languages, or use a combination of the two. The challenge with altering the location names to the market languages is that they are truly not known by those names. Though there are some instances where it may make sense…for instance **New York **in Spanish would be "Nueva York" with **‘**Nueva' being the Spanish translation of ‘new’. There are other instances, where no translation exists. If you’ve had a similar experience I'd love to hear your approach/recommendation.
International SEO | | JonClark150 -
Targeting an Specific Country Audience - Domain Q
Hiya everyone! I know this might entail a novice SEO question, but i am having some doubts. Hope you can give your opinions. Its kind of technical question regarding domain and country targeting. I have a Steel Construction company targeting only the audience of the particular country. Last year, i bought the targeted domains for my brand (company name), as in domain.country specific TLD, Should i use these domains, redirect them, or something? Would that help?. I currently use domain.com, but i am constantly being beaten down by websites with domain specific with overly thin content, no PA or DA, and 0 links to their site. Should i use my country specific domains, would that make a difference? Note: I also run some marketing campaigns for charitable foundation i started, and i used country specific domain and server, and with little effort i ranked top 3 in most of the desired terms. Any help or comment is appreciated, Thanks!
International SEO | | JesusD0 -
Duplicate content international homepage
Hi, We have a website which is in english and dutch language. Our website has the following structure www.eurocottage.com:
International SEO | | Bram76
Dutch or English language ones the user has set his language in a cookie. www.eurocottage.com/nl/ :
Dutch language www.eurocottage.com/en/:
English language The .com and the eurocottage.com/nl/ and eurocottage.com have according to Google duplicate content because they are initial both in Dutch. What would be the best strategy to fix this problem? Thanks, Bram0 -
Russian SEO Specialist Needed
Hi All, Looking for a bit of help here. We are quoting for a big SEO project on a Russian website and need high quality Russian link builders to work on building the links to the website. As well as this, we need to have a little look at the on-page content (but that will be more of just straight translation stuff, nothing big). If you're a Russian link builder and could help me here then get in touch. I only want ethical, white-hat and relevant links being built to the website so if that's not what you do, please don't waste my time 🙂 Also, this should really go without saying but I'll mention it anyway... you MUST speak Russian! Look forward to hearing from you. Matt matt@wowinternet.net
International SEO | | MatthewBarby0 -
International SEO - auto geo-targetting
I read with interest the recent post on international SEO and the top level domain architecture approaches to local content: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview#jtc135670 The issue I have is a little more complex: The business sells a wide variety of products (37) but one is by far and away the biggest and most popular. This means that due to the link profile of the various country sites and HQ site, search engines categorise the site according to this product (this is easily seen with the Google Adplanner) and the other product lines suffer as a result. The current architecture is to have a .com site and then individual ccTLD country sites, again with all products on each site. This creates an issue as in most countries the brand is not strong (compared to the keyword names and search volumes of the products) and so it is not that effective in generating organic traffic. The .com hogs much of the inbound links and the country sites themselves are not that well optimised for a number of reasons. A proposed solution has been to leverage the strength of the .com and the search volume for the product names, and to produce thematic sites based on each product: productA.brand.com
International SEO | | StevieCC
productB.brand.com
productC.brand.com In this way, the sites, content and link profiles are aligned around the more desirable products and we can expect improved organic search performance as a result (or at least ensure relevant traffic finds the relevant content fast). In terms of providing localised content, the plan was to use content mirroring and to then assign each content mirror to a specific geo-location using the webmaster tools console (and other SE equivilents). This is shown I think in one of Rand's videos. ProductA.brand.com/de/de Germany site for product A with unique German content
ProductA.brand.com/fr/fr French site for product A with unique French content This makes economic sense to me as to utilise the ccTLDs would result in hundreds of separate sites with all the licence and server considerations that entails. For example, for product A alone we would have to produce: productA.brand.de
productA.brand.fr
productA.brand.cn
productA.brand.jp
ect ect ect This just would not be sustainable in license/server costs alone across 37 products and 24 countries. However, I saw in a recent presentation at SES London that (auto) geo-targeting is risky, often doesn't work well for SEO and can even be seen as cloaking. I think the above strategy could still work, but perhaps we should avoid the use of auto-geotargetting altogether and hope the search engines alone do their job in getting users to the right content as we optimise the unique content for each country (and if they don't, ensure our desgn, UX and country selectors do the job instead). SEO guru consensus is to use the ccTLD if you own it, but as described above, in the real world that just isn't possible or practical given the company's strategic position. Which leads to the final question- we do own the brand ccTLDs- if they are directed back to the content mirror for the country on the .com, is there any SEO benefit in doing so aside from directing back any link juice associated with the domain)?0