Restructure of multi-region and multi-lingual site?
-
I've read through a lot of material to this point on the subject which has been helpful. In making a major decision like this I'd love another set(s) of eyes on this. A lot of the material I read is pretty dated. Thanks for your help!
Background: Company is currently maintaining the following sites, some in multiple languages: company.com, company.us, company.de, company.fr, etc. (12 ccTLDs, some multi-lingual). Each site represents a physical office/distributorship in each location. Each ccTLD site (and pages) include both duplicate, and unique, localized content (intermixed). Each country office will be producing content for their ccTLD, though some content will be duplicated from the .com. In essence, there is a .com corporate site template and the ccTLDs will be customized but include a lot of the content on the .com corporate multi-lingual site.
Some of the ccTLDs rank ok, some don't, all SEO strategy to date has been implemented by independent marketing companies in each country. I am working on a centralized SEO strategic approach.
Approach: My initial thought was to leverage the .com domain internationally by consolidating all ccTLDs within the .com site using sub-directories. Since some regional sites are also multi-lingual, the consolidated site structure might look like this...
company.com/en-us/, company.com/en-de/, company.com/de-de/, company.com/en-fr/, company.com/fr-fr/. This would allow for location-specific content to be presented in multiple languages.
When I learned how much customization/localization will need to be done (each country maintaining its own blog,etc), and started evaluating things like the length of the urls for marketing purposes, the necessity to have multiple users accessing certain sections of the site, and some insight that the ccTLDs will likely rank better than the consolidated .com, research of other sites (amazon.com has ccTLDs for each country). I began to reconsider my initial strategy, and re-evaluate a .com corporate site in mult-languages with regional ccTLDs with a blend of duplicate and unique content instead.
Beyond business needs, my primary concern is preventing duplicate content. I can already see issues arising between the .com corporate multi-lingual site in French, for instance, and the company.fr regional site that would contain some of the same corporate content, and a lot of its own unique localized content. I am imaging the corporate .com actually having to defer to the ccTLDs via rel=canonical to avoid duplicate content issues which doesn't seem to natural (maybe just in the case where the .com corporate site would use rel=canonical to the .us office site)
I've had a lot of success consolidating sites and working to build a single, strong, trusted, authoritative domain vs. having to build that same authority, in this case, a dozen times with all the ccTLDs. I am not sure if the ability to leverage a single .com multi-regional/lingual site outweighs the benefit of a ccTLD for a site that operates in a single country. What do you think?
What solution would you recommend, all things considered? Please let me know if I am missing something. I enjoyed the challenge of weighing all the factors and am at a point where I could really use some feedback from colleagues.
The developers are building the site(s) in Drupal.
Thanks!
-
In the past when I've worked on something similar, having the ccTLD was such a strong factor for the types of business each company was doing locally, that it also was key in assisting conversions, and supporting the local marketing teams. That's one consideration.
Another way I'd look at it is via translation. Pretty much every site can avoid duplicate content if they are always using their localized translated versions of any material originally written by the .com, save for the overlapping English ones. In that regard it's a consideration of either writing different versions or using rel=canonical to point to the site that you want to rank the most for that particular document, again probably a consideration of the region of the article by customer, client, etc, i.e. if it was an article about a UK client or offering than the rel=canonical should point to the UK hosted site. But I'd still consider taking on hires to help with translation and copy writing as there sounds like there could be quite a bit of it.
Going in reverse, you could probably have any English versions hosted on the ccTLDs point back to the .com as canonical. Cheers!
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
-
Shopify Site with Multiple Domains?
Hey there! My client has a website on Shopify. I don't even know how to open this can of worms, but let me try. The site URL is: https://mobilityequipmentforless.com/ However, there is another (older?) URL that gets updated as the main site gets updated and shows the exact same content. It's a straight duplicate, but is it's own URL and doesn't redirect to the main site. https://www.powerchairrecyclers.com/ And this isn't the SITE.Shopify back-end site name that was used for set up initially. I just have no idea what's going on here. Not sure if it's a serious error that needs to be fixed, or if it's something weird with how Shopify work. Any insight would be immensely helpful. Thanks! Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
My site is not ranking at all.
Can anybody check it what is the main culprit behind my website's growth?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anshu14320 -
If I put a piece of content on an external site can I syndicate to my site later using a rel=canonical link?
Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please? What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website. Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO1 -
Should I just redirect all my sites to my main site.
Hi, Over the last few years I have built many sites and own a lot of domain names. Some have high page rank some have high domain authority and some have many back links. I'm finding it very difficult to keep up with all the links and being able to provide quality content for everything. Should I just redirect everything to my one site that make the most money as all sites are for the same industry, but in different categories of that industry. So I could 301 redirect all the sites to the relevant page on my money site. Would it be a problem is 1000's if not 10,000's of links all of a sudden pointed in to one site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cibble030 -
Moving career site to new URL from main site. Will it hurt SEO for main page?
For one of our clients we are building a career site and putting it under a different URL and hosting service (mainly due to security concerns of hosting it under the same host and domain). almost 100% of the incoming traffic to their current career section (which it is in a sub-folder) receives traffic for branded keywords (brand + job/career/employment), that is, there are no job position specific keywords. The client is now worried that after moving the site, the inbound traffic to the main site will be severely affected as well as the SERP results. My questions are, will the non-career related SERPs be affected? I don't see how will they be but I could be wrong If no, how could we reassure her that the SEO to the main site wont be affected? are there any case studies of a similar case (splitting part of the website under a new URL and hosting service?) Thank you for your help. PS: this is my first post so please forgive me if this has been asked before. I could not find a good response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rflores0 -
How is my 301 redirected site stealing rankings from the main site?
Hello, I have a site, drhobelt.com, that 301 redirects to the main site, drhonow.com. Not only is drhobelt.com still indexed, but it recently stole rankings from drhonow.com for "decompression belt" related terms. What could be causing this? How do I reclaim the rankings for drhonow.com? Thanks for reading!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Noindex a meta refresh site
I have a client's site that is a vanity URL, i.e. www.example.com, that is setup as a meta refresh to the client's flagship site: www22.example.com, however we have been seeing Google include the Vanity URL in the index, in some cases ahead of the flagship site. What we'd like to do is to de-index that vanity URL. We have included a no-index meta tag to the vanity URL, however we noticed within 24 hours, actually less, the flagship site also went away as well. When we removed the noindex, both vanity and flagship sites came back. We noticed in Google Webmaster that the flagship site's robots.txt file was corrupt and was also in need of fixing, and we are in process of fixing that - Question: Is there a way to noindex vanity URL and NOT flagship site? Was it due to meta refresh redirect that the noindex moved out the flagship as well? Was it maybe due to my conducting a google fetch and then submitting the flagship home page that the site reappeared? The robots.txt is still not corrected, so we don't believe that's tied in here. To add to the additional complexity, the client is UNABLE to employ a 301 redirect, which was what I recommended initially. Anyone have any thoughts at all, MUCH appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ACNINTERACTIVE0 -
Indexing an e-commerce site
Hi all, My client babyblingstreet.com. She sells baby and toddler clothing. Now a lot of the links on her site contain the same products. For instance: if you go to "What's new" you can find those same products in let's say her "Sale Items" link category. The real problem with this is let's say my client sells a green dress and someone accesses it through the "baby and toddler dresses" category. And let's say this URL has 10 links pointing to it. Now, let's say someone else accesses this same green dress through the "What's new" category. And let's say this particular URL has 10 links pointing to it. Instead of having 20 links pointing to one URL about the green dress, I now have 10 links pointing to one URL and 10 pointing to another URL even though both URLs feature the exact same green dress. In this particular example I would want to make the URL of the green dress in the "baby and toddler clothing" section be the canonical URL. So that means I would have to use this canonical tag on the green dress URL that's in the "what's new" category and let's say also the "sale items" category. This could get very tedious if my client has 200+ products. So I am wondering if I have to place a canonical tag on every URL that displays the green dress? More importantly, I would like to know other people's strategies for indexing e-commerce sites that have the same product featured in multiple categories throughout the site. I hope this makes sense. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jenga110