Same language manage many country
-
Hello,
I would like to hear how you would handle the following situation. I make website for people with a .be domain that also want to score in .nl . Both countries speak dutch. There are however slight variations between the two countries. For some it does not matter for others it can be handy. Ex. A specific product might be called diffrent in one country then the other.
The main problem is for those that have a .be domain will not score on a .nl domain and visa versa. This due geo targeting. What would you do? Imagine we already have a .be domain (.be == belgium, .nl==Netherland both speak dutch)
A: Buy a .nl and copy and show the same content on .nl as .be
B: Buy a .nl and make new content (lots of work)
Buy a .EU, .com adres and Geotarget nl.somedomain.eu , be.somedomain.eu . But what about the content
The main problem is double content and targeting the two countries.
-
D surely is an option to take into account (see my answer just above).
Said that, I would monitor constantly the % of traffic from BE and NL and if one of them starts being relevant, I would use that data so to propose the migration to a .be and/or .nl domain name.
Remember that, in that case, you will also start thinking in implementing the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X", in order to solve the duplicate content issue between the two sites.
-
The .EU domains name are generic ones, hence you could create a unique site both the Belgium and Netherlands.
Said that, it would not be logical to geotarget th domain name to one or the other nation in Google Webmaster Tools, because that would screw up the nature itself of having just one site/content for both countries.
In that case, in order to have a good geolocalization you will need to rely - apart on site factors - on link building from BE and NL sites.
-
Actualy I think there is a D option
use .eu domain but don't determine the geografic region you should score.
Would that not result in higher score. Becouse .be and .nl are geografic determined.
Recreate 1000+ product and copywrite just to score better in .be and .nl would be way over budget. And very unpractical
-
Wouldn't you be producing separate content for both domains in the case of B and C?
-
Would .eu not be then the best option. What would be the difference for it if you would not found? geotarget this? versus geotarget...
-
That's actually a business decision your client's should make. The best option would be to do the two domains with different content but whether that would make business sense for them is their call. They may ask you how much more traffic they would get if they did B. and part of what they pay you for should be to provide them with that information but not necessarily to make that decision. I think that too often clients ask SEOs ask us to make executive decisions but only want to pay us SEO wages.
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
-
Correct Hreflang & Canonical Tags for Multi-Regional Website English Language Only having URL Parameters
Dear friends, We have a multi-regional website in English language only having the country selector on the top of each page and it adds countrycode parameters on each url. Website is built in Magento 1.8 and having 1 store with multiple store views. There is no default store set in Magento as I discussed with developer. Content is same for all the countries and only currency is changed. In navigation there are urls without url parameters but when we change store from any page it add parameters in the url for same page hence there are total 7 URLs. 6 URLs for each page (with country parameters) and 1 master url (without parameters) and making content duplicity. We have implemented hreflang tags on each page with url parameters but for canonical we have implemented master page url as per navigation without url parameters Example on this page. I think this is correct for master page but we should use URL parameters in canonical tags for each counry url too and there should be only 1 canonical tag on each country page url. Currently all the country urls are having master page canoncial tag as per the example. Please correct me if I am wrong and **in this case what has to be done for master page? **as google is indexing the pages without parameters too. We are also using GEOIP redirection for each store with country IP detection and for rest of the countries which are not listed on the website we are redirecting to USA store. Earlier it was 301 but we changed it to 302. Hreflang tags are showing errors in SEMRush due to redirection but in GWT it's OK for some pages it's showing no return tags only. Should I use **x-default tags for hreflang and country selector only on home page like this or should I remove the redirection? **However some of the website like this using redirection but header check tool doesn't show the redirection for this and for our website it shows 302 redirection. Sorry for the long post but looking for your support, please.
International SEO | | spjain810 -
Is it advisable to show additionally also English ciity names of American cities in website versions of non-western languages such as Chinese, Japanese etc?
To my understanding in many Asian languages city names are transcribed as they sound and this can cause confusion especially in the case of lesser known American city names. So I was planning to put in our international website versions (Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc. ) the English name in brackets after the translated city name in meta title and H1.
International SEO | | lcourse
However when I checked Tripadvisor and Booking.com I noticed that they do not show the English city name anywhere on their Asian language versions. Any thoughts?
Would you recommend to put the English city name in brackets after the translated city name or may it rather hurt our ranking and traffic?0 -
Ranking in Different Countries - Ecommerce site
My client has a .com ecommere site with UK-based serves and he wants to target two other countries (both English speaking). By the looks of it, he wouldn't want to create separate local TLDs targeting each country, I therefore wanted to suggest adding subdomains / subfolders geo-targeted to each country that they want to target, however, I'm worried that this will cause duplicate content issues... What do you think would be the best solution? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
International SEO | | ramarketing0 -
Is it possible to geotag language folders on a .co.uk domain
Hi all, I'm going around in circles a little on this one, so I thought that I'd as as I haven't found anyone asking quite the same thing (sorry if someone has). I have a .co.uk site and would like to set up some different language variations. I've been looking at the subfolder route for now (budget is limited). Can I set a geotag in webmaster tools on a .co.uk site or does it need to be a domain that Google considers country neutral? Many thanks for any suggestions!
International SEO | | ceecee0 -
Best practice for multi-language site?
Recently our company is going to expand our site from just english to multi-language, including english, french, german, japanese, and chinese. I deeply understand a solid and feasible plan is pretty important, so I want to ask you mozzers for help before we taking action! Our site is a business site which sells eBook software, for the product pages, the ranks are taken by famous software download sites like cnet, softonic, etc. So the main source of our organic traffic is the guide post, long-tail keywords. We are going to manually translate the product pages and guide post pages which targeting on important keywords into other languages. Not the entire english site. So my primary question is: should I use the sub-domain or sub-category to build the non-english pages? "www.example.com/fr/" or "fr.example.com"? The second question: As we are going to manually translate the entire pages into other languages, should I use the "rel=alternate hreflang=x" tags? Because Google's official guideline says if we only translate the navigations or just part of the content, we should use this tag. And what's your tips for building a multi-language site? Please let me know them as much as possible Thanks!
International SEO | | JonnyGreenwood0 -
Rel alternate use for multi regional website with english language and same content
I have a website targeting multi language and multi regional users. For example, my main site is www.abcd.com which is in English and targeting US. I have the same content in English which is targeting UK and India with www.uk.abcd.com and www.india.abcd.com. I want to avoid content duplication and help search engines to show the right pages on the country level searches. I have researched a bit and have come to conclusion of using re alternate tag. Can someone help me with how to place the codes for the same. Many thanks Mozers!
International SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
What is the best SEO site structure for multi country targeting?
Hi There, We are an online retailer with four (and soon to be five) distinct geographic target markets (we have physical operations in both the UK and New Zealand). We currently target these markets like this: United Kingdom (www.natureshop.co.uk) New Zealand (www.natureshop.co.nz) Australia (www.natureshop.com/au) - using a google web master tools geo targeted folder United States (www.natureshop.com) - using google web master tools geo targeted domain Germany (www.natureshop.de) - in german and yet to be launched as full site We have various issues we want to address. The key one is this: our www.natureshop.co.uk website was adversely affected by the panda update on April 12. We had some external seo firms work on this site for us and unfortunately the links they gained for us were very low quality, from sometimes spammy sites and also "keyword" packed with very littlle anchor text variation. Our other websites (the .co.nz and .com) moved up after the updates so I can only assume our external seo consultants were responsible for this. I have since managed to get them to remove around 70% of these links and we have bought all seo efforts back in house again. I have also worked to improve the quality of our content on this site and I have 404'ed the six worst affected pages (the ones that had far too many single phrase anchor text links coming into them). We have however not budged much in our rankings (we have made some small gains but not a lot). Our other weakness's are not the fastest page load times and some "thin" content. We are on the cusp (around 4 weeks away) of deploying a brand new platform using asp.net MVP with N2 and this looks like it will address our page load speed issues. We also have been working hard on our content building and I believe we will address that as well with this release. Sorry for the long build up, however I felt some background was needed to get to my questions. My questions are: Do you think we are best to proceed with trying to get our www.natureshop.co.uk website out of the panda trap or should we consider deploying a new version of the site on www.natureshop.com/uk/ (geo targeted to the UK)? If we are to do this should we do the same for New Zealand and Germany and redirect the existing domains to the new geo targeted folders? If we do this should we redirect the natureshop.co.uk pages to the new www.natureshop.com/uk/ pages or will this simply pass on the panda "penalty". Will this model build stronger authority on the .com domain that benefit all of the geo targeted sub folders or does it not work this way? Finally can we deploy the same pages and content on the different geo targeted sub folders (with some subtle regional variations of spelling and language) or will this result in a duplicate content penalty? Thank you very much in advance to all of you and I apologise for the length and complexity of the question. Kind Regards
International SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield
Founder: Nature Shop Ltd0 -
Different country, same language
I have read the blog posts by Rand and other community members at YouMoz but i still have a question on trageting and domains / sub-directories usage. Suppose, my business is located in France but my prospects are in US and UK as well. The issue is, they are not English speakers but French. If i use ccTLD, i don't think it will rank well in US and UK. gTLD will not be a good option for prospects in France. What should i do? Regards, Shailendra
International SEO | | IM_Learner1