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Hi

If the UK website is already well-established on www.website.com then do not risk moving this to a .com/uk sub-folder. There will be no additional benefit from moving it onto the sub-folder, yet you could risk losing some organic search visibility through the redirection process.

There would be no issue for Google understanding your site structure if you go along with your plan:

www.example.com (UK)
www.example.com/fr (France)
www.example.com/de (Germany)
and so on...

We recently hosted a webinar detailing many of the considerations you should take into account when launching internationally - https://www.searchlaboratory.com/2016/10/technical-seo-for-international-markets-webinar-video/. I hope you find that information useful.

Good luck with the launch!

Hi there,

Matt's got some great insight below!  Agreed on the hreflang side of things as that's one of the most important steps.

I work for a search firm that specialises in helping brands expand internationally online.  We wrote a whitepaper on it recently that can be found at the link below which you may find helpful  Any questions just drop me an email:

ginny.deaconelliott@searchlaboratory.com

https://www.searchlaboratory.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Digital-Marketing-Brochure.pdf 

Hope the Whitepaper helps!

Ginny

Hi

From an SEO perspective there are no risks in taking this approach, but you will be limiting your overall visibility in local markets because Googlebot will only see the English version of your content. It will not see any of the translated versions at all and therefore you will struggle to rank in your local markets such as Spain, France, India etc.

In order to take full advantage of available local search volume you'll need to set up separate URLs with fully translated content (do not use Google Translate!) for your target markets.

But in the meantime, no it's not bad for SEO (in so far as there are no risks), but it is not beneficial.

Hope this helps and good luck!

Hi Holly,

I think you might struggle with the .co.uk to be honest - in theory, getting links from spanish websites will help, however you would have to ask yourself why someone would link to your UK site from a local one. To help you further I'd need to understand a little more. Can you give more context to the situation? Also, are you trying to rank for English or Spanish queries in Spain?

Jimmy

Hi Charles

Yes you'll need hreflang tags on those two sites wherever you have duplicated content. I'm not sure about that sentence in bold that you found in another Moz post however referencing the Google guidelines on hreflang, they have the following:

• You keep the main content in a single language and translate only the template, such as the navigation and footer. Pages that feature user-generated content, like forums, typically do this.
• Your content has small regional variations with** similar content in a single language**. For example, you might have English-language content targeted to the US, GB, and Ireland.
• Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English versions of each page.

The second point is most relevant to you in this situation I believe. Duplicate English content targeting different regions.

I would NOT recommend using the canonical tag because that will seriously limit the visibility of the piece of content that is your non-canonical version. If you want exposure in Google UK for your .co.uk site and other versions of Google for your .com then use hreflang and Google will be able to understand how your content should be targeted.

Furthermore, if you want to target one specific country with your .com (e.g. USA) then you can use the country geotargeting report in Google Search Console.

All the best