A global brand with localised microsites - distinct TLDs or directories by territory?
-
Hello,
Looking to create an export site for a gobal brand and considering the benefits of distinct domains/TLDs vs. directories by territory.
I.e.
brand.fr vs. brand.com/fr for our French content
brand.ca/fr vs brand.com/ca/fr for our French Canadian contentApple segregate their content by directory but we're not quite Apple to be fair...
Directory route would be technically cleaner but I don't wish to discount the SEO benefit of unique TLDs.
Any thoughts / considerations / similar experiences?
Thanks,
Jan
-
Hi Urban Fox
That's a good answer from Alan.
There is a blog post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/geolocation-international-seo-faq which is well worth a read. It's 2 1/2 years old however still very relevant.
Also, a Matt Cutts video worth a view can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo
Regards
Simon
-
Hi urban fox, i think we talked about a simular topic a while ago. I have got a bit more info lately from Matt Cutts.
If you have domains hosted in different countries, lets say .au and .uk with duplicate content, that is not a problem, but the sub directories with duplicate content is.
He did mentiion that you should have your dollar and pound sybols as well as date formats and teh like correct for each tld.
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
-
Favourite tool for unlinked brand mentions?
Hey Guys, There seems to be multiple tools on the market for unlinked brand mentions for link building e.g. Ahrefs, Moz, etc. Which one is your favourite? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl870 -
How to rank if you are an aggregator or a directory of resource?
Most of the SEO suggestions (great quality content, long form content, engagement rate/time on the page, authority inbound links ) apply to content oriented site. But what should you do if you are an aggregator or a resource directory? You aim is to send the user faster to other site they are looking for or provide ranking about the resources. In fact at a very basic level you are competing for search engine traffic because they are doing same things. You may have done a hand crafted, human created resource that is better than what algorithms are showing. And your site likely to have lot more outgoing links than content. You know you are better (or getting better) since repeat visitors keep coming back. So in these days of Search engines, what a resource directory or aggregator site do to rank? Because even directories need first time visitors till they start coming back again.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maayboli0 -
Branding and Page Titles - Please Help
Hello, I have a question about page titles. How important is branding here? I'm not referring to the company name, but rather the terminology that's used as "branding language" for a company. For example, let's say that the it would be a good idea to target the keyword "Restaurant Coupons" based on search volume and competition. However, our branding adheres to the language "Dining Offers". Is it considered a bad idea to use "Restaurant Coupons" in the page title? Or is that considered inconsistent branding? Basically, I'm just trying to figure out the correct balance between the SEO value of words and adhering to a company's branding. Any help is appreciated! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atmosol
Nick1 -
Best way to help a city-centric service provider market in new nearby territories?
Our client recently acquired new county territories outside the main area city. We could create separate location pages under the primary domain, but are wondering if micro sites with unique content (and location-including url) that links back to the location pages would also be a good idea. There is some traction for certain location-based keywords in those areas. Better to focus on the one domain, or augment with separate websites in different parts of the state? I can come up with plausible reasons for and against either, but would love your thoughts. Thank you for any insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PerfectPitchConcepts0 -
Foreign Language Directories
I have a client whose site has each page in multiple languages. each is in specific directories. Needless to say each page is showing up with the same site title, meta data, and content. When my campaigns are crawled they show up as thousands of page errors. Should i add each of these into robots.txt? would this fix the issue of duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gkellyiii0 -
Building a Large Local Services Directory - Subdomain Needed?
In 2012 we will be rolling out a directory of local services for our industry. This will ultimately be thousands of additional pages, with city/zip searching, individual provider pages etc. The main reason is for UX -- providing local resources for our industry to compliment the online experience (we're an online B2C retailer) My question is if there are pros/cons to putting this on a subdomain, or if having it on the root is ideal. I don't see a huge influx of backlinks (making a sub fine) but I suppose that could change down the road. I do see some indexing benefits for new terms like 'service x in los angeles' etc, but that would also be fine on a sub. It feels like it would be cleaner to keep separate and on a sub, but maybe we're missing something. We certainty don't want to hurt anything on our primary site which drives the business. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOPA0 -
Anybody know good SEO success stories in the field of small business directories?
We are helping a small business directory in their SEO. They address 20 service categories(300 subcategories) with 60000 profiles. We are focusing on following elements: 1. Cutting the flab (they have 3.4 million pages indexed), but they get only 30000 visitors on the website. This will be done by removing long list of cities & by using "Nofollow". 2. Improve internal navigation & use Anchor texts 3. Focus SEO (Backlinks) at business category pages 4. Clean URLs, Titles 5. Implementation of Rich Snippets (Schema.org) 6. Cleaning data If we can not take traffic volume to 300000 in a month, this project will be considered a failure. Does any directory has achieved this recently? We are in first 2 weeks of the project and It will help us our "To do" list 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UnyscapeInfocom0 -
Removing URLs in bulk when directory exclusion isn't an option?
I had a bunch of URLs on my site that followed the form: http://www.example.com/abcdefg?q=&site_id=0000000048zfkf&l= There were several million pages, each associated with a different site_id. They weren't very useful, so we've removed them entirely and now return a 404.The problem is, they're still stuck in Google's index. I'd like to remove them manually, but how? There's no proper directory (i.e. /abcdefg/) to remove, since there's no trailing /, and removing them one by one isn't an option. Is there any other way to approach the problem or specify URLs in bulk? Any insights are much appreciated. Kurus
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kurus1
