Campaign landing pages

[JetBookMike]

Hi

At our company we decided we wanted to reach out to a more global audience. So we bought a bank of domains for different countries, e.g. ".asia". Some are our company name, others are things like "barcelonaprivatejets.com."

We then put up single page websites for each of these domains, which link to our main .com site.

However, I don't know if this is good for our SEO or bad. I've seen so many different things written but I cannot find a definitive answer.

The text will be different on all the pages, but being only one page, and the "design" being the same, will we get penalized in some way or another?

I've also added links to 2/3 of them in the footer of our main site but now I'm reading that this is bad too - so should I remove these?

If anyone also has any ideas of how better we could use these Country-specific domains I would be welcome to suggestions to that too! I am not an SEO person really, I'm a web developer, so this is all completely different to me.

P.S My name is Michael not Andy.

[RyanKent]

if we just duplicated our homepage, would we not get penalized?

You would not receive a penalty as long as the SEO was handled properly.

If you have a page mysite.com design for the US and another page mysite.com/uk designed for England then search engines should understand clearly that each site is designed for a particular country, even though they are all in English. A few added points:

• a ".com" site is not thought of as a US site automatically. Google makes that determination based largely in part of where your site is hosted. You can also set your site's target country in Google WMT to avoid any confusion.

• there is a langauge meta tag which is something like "EN-US" for the United States and "EN-GB" for England. By setting that tag you will help search engines understand your target audience.

• be certain to localize your page. For example the US says "center" while English people say "centre". There are different monetary units, systems of measurements and phrases associated with each culture as well.

if our host was able to simply put the pages on different servers, would that be sufficient?

No. A different server with the same host would not be sufficient. You need to change your C-block and usually a host will retain the same C-block for all of their servers.

having a page targeted at say, Mexico, loading from a UK server may not be great for page load times.

True, which is where cloud hosting is very helpful. The prices are fairly reasonable and it is an option you may want to explore.

[CPU]

Hi Michael, Ryan has covered many of the relevant points but there are a couple of things I wanted to pick up.

You mention having pages of different text for each site or region but the same design and wonder if you will get penalised. I can confirm that you won't get penalised for duplicate design but if you had duplicate content you may find that the duplicate pages do not rank as you would expect or may not be indexed.

Many companies will use the same design on different regional sites to maintain consistent branding. If the sites are selling different products or services e.g one is cars and the other is cheese then it may be appropriate to vary the design to make it fit the product better.

Hope this helps.

[JetBookMike]

Hi Ryan

That's some really great stuff, thank you. However, surely if we just duplicated our homepage, would we not get penalized? As some of the countries we'll be targeting will also be English speaking. Additionally, all the site content (news items etc) are written in English, so I'm not sure how we would handle that?

Or - could we just have a few headers/description on the target language, but then the rest in English. We're also only an English speaking company so we want to make that clear too so we don't have any awkward emails/calls.

Additionally, thanks for pointing out regarding the host. However, if our host was able to simply put the pages on different servers, would that be sufficient? Or should we absolutely have each page on a different host? I am also thinking that having a page targeted at say, Mexico, loading from a UK server may not be great for page load times.

Thanks again for a fantastic response.

[RyanKent]

Hi Michael.

The practice of purchasing a number of URLs then pointing them back to your main site is much more difficult to pull off then most people realize. In most cases, companies spend their time and resources but receive minimal or no benefit.

The best practice would be to develop your main website with landing pages for each country. If your main site is privatejets.com you can have a privatejets.com/es/ page for Spain, privatejets.com/uk/ for England and so forth. Each landing page should be targeted by country, not language. For example both Spain and Mexico speak spanish, but the dialects are different along with their monetary units and cultures.

In short, if you want to use your existing URLs you need to develop each of them into a solid landing page and then provide one link back to your main site. You need to also work on these pages to get them boosted in search engines so they rank well, and finally they need to be hosted with a different hosting company then your main site. Links between sites with the same C block are not valued.