Global/international SEO campaign strategy with a single TLD
-
Hi All,
Have 3 seperate questions all relating to global/international SEO from a domain strategy point of view so will try to make them all short and 'to the point'.
The current URL is www.example.com. The site's content strategy and all marketing activity has always been for the UK. We're now launching in US with also long term plans to launch in other countries. Each country will have their own webmaster/conternt strategy/marketing team.
1st question
Which is better and why?
The US team are leaning towards (and rightly so) the folder approach as it will help the US section of the site benefit from existing domain authority, link profile and off-page SEO work already carried out to a route domain level. This will also not be regarded as a new site as it's www.example.com/us
On the flip side however the sub domain option although has no short term SEO benefits; will have a more sustainable SEO campaign for each country as they can be treated as individual sites/SEO campaigns. This also reduces some risk elements involved as each geo-specific team will only be concerned about their own sub-domain and not have route domain level control. I'm also aware that sub-domains will be treated as individual sites and therefore certain updates (such as Panda) will treat each sub-domain individually. So a possible negative impact on uk.example.com would not necessarily have an impact on us.example.com unless content strategy was the same.
2nd question
Assuming we decide to go for www.example.com/us (folder option). The site's current geo target market is currently set to UK on Google Webmaster Tools to route domain level. If www.example.com was set to UK and www.example.com/us was set to US on GWT, would there be a conflict? We want to ensure that the route domain level settings does NOT override any settings on folder level within the same domain. Based on an answer from a top contributer of Google Webmaster Central, setting www.example.com/us to US would not be in conflict with settings within route domain level but I would love to hear/read from somebody that had actually gone through the process.
3rd question
We're considering implementing geo DNS so a US visitor accessing www.example.com will be redirected to www.example.com/us (or www.us.example.com) based on their location from their IP address. Reason being is we're trying to avoid a splash page with a choice of countries (UK or US) on route level (homepage) which is very commonly used by most sites with multiple geo specific target markets. We would be assuming that somebody from North America would be looking for the US site and therefore redirecting the visitor automatically to www.example.com/us. The SEO implications are however that a 302 redirect will be used and therefore redirects used based on the visitors location will not pass link value from the homepage towards landing pages. The homepage currently has very strong link juice and the site's general navigational structure is pretty good allowing the link juice to flow through from the homepage.
-
Well... what about the links in the footer of the home page? I don't like them, but that would help your "home page" issue.
Or, without giving up with the IP detection, still offer the opportunity to choose the territorial version using a selector?
-
Thanks Gianluca for your response.
Regarding question/answer 3, it still doesn't resolve the issue of being able to pass link value from the homepage as it will not serve any files from route level. A 302 redirect would point to the relevant geo specific section of the site so all of the external links pointing to the homepage will reach a dead end due to a 302 redirect. The 'About' page is a good call for usability reasons but is nowhere near as strong as the homepage in terms of its backlinks profile and therefore would not resolve the issue.
-
Pardon me if I answer first to question 2, then to 3 and last to 1.
Question 2.
I would not worry about conflicts. If you assign to a subfolder a territory as target, Google is quite good in following the indication you give. Therefore, if the main domain .com is generally focused to co.uk and the /us sub-folder to the USA, Google will not have problem in targeting correctly the two. Just a suggestion: eventually specify in the header that the language used in .com us en-uk and in the /us is en-us... not that Google is really paying a strong attention to that signals, but I would use any possible additional suggestion of the target.
Question 3
You are right... but, if there aren't other reasons you don't want to show to an USA users the Uk version of the site, why don't you think to put the links to the other language/territory versions of the site in a "About us" page? In that page, editorially you could list the markets the site is active, and those link would be direct.
I say this also for an usability reason. I don't know how the site is going to be developed, but maybe it should be interesting for an usa user to read the british blog of the website...
Question 1
I agree with the USA guys: subfolder is better, because that way it starts his online life with a strong authority domain, so that any links the sub-folder will obtain will have a bigger power than if obtained being an sub-domain.
About your Panda fear.. .you are right to fear it, but the reaction - IMO - is not the correct one. If you fear Panda you don't have to react in a defensive way (going sub-domain), but in a pro-active and positive one: creating worthwhile and useful content, avoiding thin one, paying great attention to any duplicate issue and checking any other pandarank factor.
Ciao
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
-
Site migration/ CMS/domain site structure change-no access to search console
Hi everyone, We are migrating an old site under a bigger umbrella (our main domain). As mentioned in the title, We'll perform CMS migration, domain change, and site structure change. Now, the major problem is that we can't get into google search console for the old site. The site still has old GA code, so google search console verification using this method is not possible, also there is no way developers will be able to add GTM or edit DNS setting (not to bother you with the reason why). Now, my dilemma is : 1. Do we need access to old search console to notify Google about the domain name change or this could be done from our main site (old site will become a part of) search console 2. We are setting up 301 redirects from old to the new domain (not perfect 1:1 redirect ). Once migration is done does anything else needs to be done with the old domain (it will become obsolete)? 3.The main site, Site-map... Should I create a new sitemap with newly added pages or update the current one. 4. if you have anything else please add:) Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin0 -
Unique content for international SEO?
Hi Guys, We have a e-commerce store on generic top-level domain which has 1000s of products in US. We are looking to expand to aus, uk and canda using subfolders. We are going to implement hreflang tags. I was told by our SEO agency we need to make all the content between each page unique. This should be fine for cateogry/product listing pages. But they said we need to make content unique on product pages. If we have 1000 products, thats 4000 pages, which is a big job in terms of creating content. Is this necessary? What is the correct way to approach this, won't the hreflang tag be sufficent to prevent any duplicate content issues with product pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | geekyseotools0 -
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
Moving multiple Sites to One Site and SEO Impact/Ideas
Hi there, We are in the process of moving 2 sites with higher page authority to another site we own (that is our company brand), so essentially 3 sites into one. We're at risk of losing a lot of SEO from the original 2 sites that have all the product information. We are doing this since we merged companies a couple years back and need one web precense. Anyhow, the site launch date is in 3 months and the recommendation is to start moving content over prior to that for top pages, which is a big undertaking when we are launching all the pages again with new content, redeisgn and moving sites in 3 months. If it's the right move, we should do it, but I just wanted to get opinions on how others have handled something similiar when moving to a site with lower site authority and trying not to lose rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
How to rank for a location/country without having a physical address in that location/country
How do I go about it if my physical address (office) is in Country A but I want to rank my website in Country B, C and D (without having an office or physical address in the countries B, C and D)? I am aware of people setting up virtual offices in other countries/cities and adding them to Google Places/Maps with toll free phone numbers, but I don't wish to do any of that. I know Google will catch up with this one day or the other and punish me hard for trying to play games with it. Is there a way rank a website in another country without actually having a physical location there? If yes, please guide me how to go about it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
SEO Site Analysis
I am looking for a company doing a SEO analysis on our website www.interelectronix.com and write a optimization proposal incl. a budgetary quote for performing those optimizations.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | interelectronix0 -
Best Structure for Multi-Language/International Website
We are getting ready to do a total redsign of our website, which is a multi-language global website (www.hurco.com). Today we use an ip address lookup to determine country of origin and redirect to say hurco.de for Germany. The main reason for this was that our German division was afraid that their potential customers were going to the hurco.com site and seeing product that was not available to them. Is there a better way from an SEO standpoint to structure our website? Should we have all hurco.com traffic goto a country selection page and let them go there manually? Other good practices we should follow? Would you structure the entire site as //www.hurco.com/en-us or /en-canada (language and country) and then have all international domains 301 redirect to the proper one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fassnachtp0 -
Should we block urls like this - domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=ascℴ=price&price=1 within the robots.txt?
I've recently added a campaign within the SEOmoz interface and received an alarming number of errors ~9,000 on our eCommerce website. This site was built in Magento, and we are using search friendly url's however most of our errors were duplicate content / titles due to url's like: domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=asc&order=price&price=1 and domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=asc&order=price&price=4. Is this hurting us in the search engines? Is rogerbot too good? What can we do to cut off bots after the ".html?" ? Any help would be much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280