I am launching an international site. what is the best domain strategy

[Johnny_AppleSeed]

Hi Guys,

I am launching a site across the US, UK and UAE. Do I go **test.com/uk   test.com/us   test.com/UAE -- **or do I go us.Test.com UAe.test.com us.test.com? Which is best for SEO?

[gfiorelli1]

Suggesting subfolders without considering the peculiarities of the site jusrt because it's a "best practice" is not the ideal thing to do. Even if subfolders have sure advantages, their use can be not technically affordable or even good for effectiveness.

[gfiorelli1]

As always, it depends.

Is your site an ecommerce site with thousand hundreds if not more products. Or a news site? Then, maybe, the best thing to do should be using country code level domains, because - apart better for geotargeting - the technical maintaining of three complete ecommerce/news sites under in a subfolder system is not the most agile (especially if the site is custom made).

If the case if the one described above, but the ccTLDs are not available, then subdomains can be an alternative.

If your site is not an very technically complex ecommerce or news site, then use subfolders, but consider, if you see that one of the subfolders has very good metrics (sessions, conversions) to move it to a ccTLDs in the middle/long term.

[SamuelScott]

There are positives and negatives to using different strategies. Moz's education section has three articles on international SEO: International SEO, Hreflang, and CcTLDs. I'd suggest going through them and also reading any further resources that they cite.

Good luck!

[LaythDajani]

Also, if we want to target GCC countries with arabic content, what domain strategy should we apply..

We already have www.tcf-me.com (for english) and www.tcf-me.ae for arabic (But now we not only want to target UAE  (Ae) but the entire GCC..

[LaythDajani]

Figen we are in the same situation asking the same questions..

How do you tackle duplicate content?

[ekile]

Use sub domain (Etc. us.domain.com -  fr.domain.com - de.domain.com) if your site will be different languages .

if your site will be only english  use this :  domain/us  - domain/uk  .

Be careful about duplicate content