Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
English and French under the same domain
-
A friend of mine runs a B&B and asked me to check his freshly built website to see if it was <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> compliant.
The B&B is based in France and he's targeting a UK and French audience.To do so, he built content in english and french under the same domain:
https://www.la-besace.fr/When I run a crawl through screamingfrog only the French content based URLs seem to come up and I am not sure why. Can anyone enlighten me please?
To maximise his business local visibility my recommendation would be to build two different websites (1 FR and 1 .co.uk) , build content in the respective language version sites and do all the link building work in respective country sites.
Do you think this is the best approach or should he stick with his current solution?
Many thanks
-
First the domain reside on a Country code top-level domains (.fr) ... which means it very hard for google or even impossible for google to target ur english content for UK (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399)
when you fix the first note, then you need to implement hreflangs (https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag) this will help google index and find the alternate version of your webpage in the language you announce in the markup.
going with 2 domain name like you mentioned is definitely a solution but i recommend going with one domain with a generic tld like a .com or .net and having the root that targets the french/france market and a subfolder that target the english people in UK.
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
-
How can you promote a sub-domain ahead of a domain on the SERPs?
I have a new client that wants to promote their subdomain uk.imagemcs.com and have their main domain imagemcs.com fall off the SERPs. Objective? Get uk.imagemcs.com to rank first for UK 'brand' searches. Do a search for 'imagem creative services' and you should see the issue (it looks like rules have been applied to the robots.txt on the main domain to exclude any bots from crawling - but since they've been indexed previously I need to take action as it doesn't look great!). I think I can do this by applying a permanent redirect from the main domain to the subdomain at domain level and then no-indexing the site - and then resubmit the sitemap. My slight concern is that this no-indexing of the main domain may impact on the visibility of the subdomains (I'm dealing with uk.imagemcs.com, but there is us.imagemcs.com and de.imagemcs.com) and was looking for some assurance that this would not be the case. My understanding is that subdomains are completely distinct from domains and as such this action should have no impact on the subdomains. I asked the question on the Webmasters Forum but haven't really got anywhere
Technical SEO | | nathangdavidson2
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/1Avupy3Uw_o/hu6oLQntCAAJ Can anyone suggest a course of action? many thanks, Nathan0 -
Help: buy domain from Tradenames.com?
Hello to all, I'm Silvia. I am writing to ask if any of you know this site: tradenames.com. It is a domains broker. They contacted my client and would like to sell the .com business domain (my client currently has the .it). Does anyone know them? Thanks you for your help.
Technical SEO | | advmedialab0 -
Tool to Generate All the URLs on a Domain
Hi all, I've been using xml-sitemaps.com for a while to generate a list of all the URLs that exist on a domain. However, this tool only works for websites with under 500 URLs on a domain. The paid tool doesn't offer what we are looking for either. I'm hoping someone can help with a recommendation. We're looking for a tool that can: Crawl, and list, all the indexed URLs on a domain, including .pdf and .doc files (ideally in a .xls or .txt file) Crawl multiple domains with unlimited URLs (we have 5 websites with 500+ URLs on them) Seems pretty simple, but we haven't been able to find something that isn't tailored toward management of a single domain or that can crawl a huge volume of content.
Technical SEO | | timfrick0 -
Moving my domain to weebly
I am thinking of moving my html website to weebly. They offer a 301 redirect for my domain name. Is that ok for SEO?
Technical SEO | | bhsiao0 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0 -
Shopping Carts & Sub Domains
I was hoping someone could guide me in making the correct decision regarding integrating my existing domain with a hosted shopping cart. I have an existing website to promote my bricks and mortar retail operation and am expanding into web retailing. I will be using one of the major hosted shopping carts. What is the best way to join the two components from an SEO perspective? Have the cart as a sub domain of my main site, or move my existing domain name to be hosted by the cart provider and have both components operate under the same general domain? I have read arguments that putting your cart within a sub domain is not a good idea because any clout of the pre-existing domain will not be shared with the sub domain; that they will be treated as two separate sites. I have also read that using a sub domain is a good idea being that the content focus of the main domain (marketing and blogs) is different form the focus of the sub domain (product sales), and that the two components would benefit form earning their own rankings undiluted by the other. And, I have also read that search engines are getting good at being able to deduce that an eCommerce sub domain is legitimate extension of a content intensive main domain, and that they treat the two components as a combined whole. What is the truth? Which is the better way to go? Any guidance would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MEI1520 -
Subdomain vs Main Domain Penalties
We have a client who's main root.com domain is currently penalized by Google, but the subdomain.root.com is appearing very well. We're stumped - any ideas why?
Technical SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like: staging.domain.com
Technical SEO | | fthead9
User-agent: *
Disallow: / in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.0