Thoughts on different base URLs for different website language?
-
Hello mozzers,
Currently in the process of setting up a new website for a new entity. I was wondering what your thoughts were on using different base urls for different languages. Example:
ABCgroup.com -> English
groupeABC.com -> FrenchI've never done this before; I've been one to prefer using a subfolder structure. However, for this case, the expected visitors are truly split between 2 languages, and therefore having a base url in the visitor's language is appealing.
Would this approach be detrimental if all pages have a proper hreflang tag?
Thanks!
-
You are quite welcome.
-
Thanks to both of you. Will go forward and implement this.
-
I agree with Oleg. So long as you link them all together with hreflang tags, you will be fine.
-
nope, totally okay. its like having brand.com vs brand.co.uk vs brand.es etc
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
-
URL Parameters as pagination
Hi guys, due to some changes to our category pages our paginated urls will change so they will look like this: ...category/bagger/2?q=Bagger&startDate=26.06.2017&endDate=27.06.2017 You see they include a query parameter as well as a start and end date which will change daily. All URLs with pagination are on noindex/follow. I am worrying that the products which are linked from the category pages will not get crawled well when the URLs on which they are linked from change on a daily basis. Do you have some experience with this? Are there other things we need to worry about with these pagination URLs? cheers
Technical SEO | | JKMarketing0 -
Duplicate page issue in website
i found duplicate pages in my website. seomoz is showing duplicate web pages this is issue or not please tell me?
Technical SEO | | learningall0 -
Different URLS for our multi language pages caused penalty?
Hi all, We have a website www.phoneboxlanguage.com with 4 different language versions (Spanish, French, Italian, German). We have all the different versions on totally different URLS. E.G the French URL is www.cours-telephone-anglais.com. Recently this month we saw a huge drop in SERPS for all the 'foreign' language pages. This had happened before for the Spanish and French, which we put down to keyword density issues, so created new URLS for those pages. However now all 4 foreign pages have dropped. Could this be due instead to a penalty for duplicate sites? The content is obviously different due to different languages, but the coding and templates for the sites are the same. How can we find out this is the case and what should we do? I was thinking after some research on the forum to create subfolders in the original (phoneboxlanguage.com) and then create 301 redirects, from the old dropped sites, or would their penalties be bad for our original site, if this were the case? We are obviously very keen to not further damage the site and the original site which remains o.k. Many thanks for your kind help. Quime.
Technical SEO | | Quime0 -
Formatting dynamic urls?
We have a long-time previously well-established website that was hit by panda. On one section of the site, we have dynamic urls that include %20 in them (e.g. North%20America). It's recently come to our attention that google has both a version of the url with a plus sign (+) and the version with the %20 (space) (e.g. North+America). Upon researching this, it seems that a hyphen (-) is preferable to either of the above. We obviously need to remove the %20's from the urls as they can cause issues. So, should we stick with the + sign since it's already indexed and ranking or do a 301 rewrite and change them all to hyphens instead of the plus sign? This is the one section of the site that has maintained rankings through the panda debacle, so we need to take that into consideration as we don’t want to lose the rankings that we have. Along the same lines, we have two other sections of the site that provide search results as well, though these are all formatted to use a plus sign. Is it advisable to do a 301 rewrite to change the plus signs to hyphens on these as well or just leave them alone? This particular section has lost rankings over the last year with panda updates.
Technical SEO | | Odjobob0 -
Mobile website settings - I am doing right?
Hi, http://www.schicksal.com has a "normal" and a "mobile' version. We are using a browser detection routine to redirect the visitor to the "default site" or the "mobile site". The mobile site is here:
Technical SEO | | GeorgFranz
http://www.schicksal.com/m The robots.txt contains these lines: User-agent: *
Allow: / User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /m
Allow: / User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Disallow: /
Allow: /m Sitemap: http://www.schicksal.com/sitemaps/index So, the idea is: Only allow the Googlebot-Mobile Bot to access the mobile site. We have also separate sitemaps for default and mobile version. One of the mobile sitemap is here My problem: Webmaster tool is saying that Google received 898 urls from the mobile sitemap, but none has been indexed. (Google has indexed 550 from the "web sitemap".) I've checked the webmaster tools - no errors on the sitemap. So, if you are searching at google.com/m - you are getting results from the default web page, but not the mobile version. This is not that bad because you will be redirected to the mobile version. So, my question: Is this the "normal" behaviour? Or is there something wrong with my config? Would it be better to move the mobile site to a subdomain like m.schicksal.com? Best wishes, Georg.0 -
Www or not www base url
Here is the situation. Developer custom coded a magento commerce shop for a seo client and is having problems adding www to the URL without breaking the site. They wont be able to get this completed until a couple months down the road. We are starting monthly SEO this June. Most directories and websites link to the www version of a site not the non www. What should I expect since we are ranking for the non-www and linking to the www version. In web master tools i'm telling google to display the URL as www.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Should we block URL param in Webmaster tools after URL migration?
Hi, We have just released a new version of our website that now has a human readable nice URL's. Our old ugly URL's are still accessible and cannot be blocked/redirected. These old URL's use a URL param that has an xpath like expression language to define the location in our catalog. We have about 2 million pages indexed with this old URL param in it while we have approximately 70k nice URL's after the migration. This high number of old URL's is due to facetting that was done using this URL param. I wonder if we should now completely block this URL param from Google Webmaster tools so that these ugly URL's will be removed from the Google index. Or will this harm our position in Google? Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | eCommerceSEO0 -
Hyphen in URL
Hi, I would like to know if the following statement holds true today or it doesn't matter whether we use hyphens or underscore If you have a URL like keyword1_keyword2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for keyword1_keyword2 ( highly unlikely ) . But If you have a URL like keyword1-keyword2, that page can be returned for the searches - keyword1,keyword2 and even “keyword1keyword2” Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050