One company, 3 countries, 3 sites - best solution?
-
Hi all, I'm working with a company that has 3 x websites all on separate WordPress platforms.
One is at .com, the others .fr and .de - they are essentially very similar.
I have suggested that it is worth exploring setting all of these websites up on the .com domain with country-specific directories to combine their authority and help all 3 websites naturally rank due to combining incoming links, authority etc.
Quesitons:
To ensure each country has control of their site, would you maintain a separate install of WP at each directory, i.e: .com/fr/ and .com/de or would you put it all on the same WP?
Would you go down this route of combining all 3 sites onto one domain with country-specific directories? What are the pitfalls?
-
Gaston, your answer is correct (albeit not complete... see my answer below).
Plus: when linking to posts and guides, even if they are by Moz, always explain why they can be useful.
-
The answer offered by Gaston is correct, but it's not the only option available.
You can consolidate the three websites under the .com one and geo-target the /fr/ and /de/ subfolder via Google Search Console.
However, I wouldn't install 3 different WordPress, but only one and use the WPML plugin (https://wpml.org/documentation/getting-started-guide/), which works with no issues with all major WordPress plugins usually used for SEO (like Yoast SEO).
I don't pitfalls in a consolidation, but every international strategy really is unique and, not knowing the details of yours I cannot give you a firm positive (or negative) answer.
-
Hello Bee,
As for internationalization purposes, leave them in their own ccTLD. Just add hreflangs to the other country websites and you'll be just fine.
If you choose to go down the road of having all under a .com/country/ configuration, I'd suggest you installing separate wordpress on each country. Also, if you plan on expanding on more countries and having an overall control, take a look at Wordpress Multisite Network Administration.
Also, just for clarifying, take a look at these articles:
Multi-regional and multilingual sites - Google Search Console
International checklist - Moz Blog
Using the correct hreglang tag - Moz Blog
Guide to international website expansion - Moz Blog
Tool for checking hreflang anotations - Moz BlogHope it helps.
Best Luck.
GR.
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
-
These days on Google results, it also shows the site map. I submitted my company's sitemap and it still does not show?What am I doing wrong?
Look at the image in the link. I want my company to look like the "pluralsight" website in Google. I want it to show the sitemap. I have already submitted the sitemap to Google few days back, what am I doing wrong? search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&q=pluralsight&oq=pluralsight&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.11024j0j8
Technical SEO | | Deein0 -
Bigcommerce only allows us to have https for our store only, not the other pages on our site, so we have a mix of https and http, how is this hurting us and what's the best way to fix?
So we aren't interested in paying a thousand dollars a month just to have https when we feel it's the only selling point of that package, so we have https for our store and the rest of the site blogs and all are http. I'm wondering if this would count as duplicate content or give us some other unforeseen penalty due to the half way approach of https being implemented. If this is hurting us, what would you recommend as a solution?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
What should I do with 10 Similar Domains pointing to one site?
Hello,
Technical SEO | | thealika
I was recently put in charge of one website with about 15 extra Domains. I previously asked if Domain Parking hurts your SEO as duplicate content - and i learned that the answer seems to be yes. My next logical question is:
What should I do with all those EMD, keyword friendly domains? As I understand, 301 redirecting the domains to the root domain is a safe bet, but that means the extra domains will point to the original root domain no mater what comes after the forward slash. So www.ExtraDomain.com/AboutUS will point to www.OriginalDomain.com - is there a way to keep the forward slashes relavent to the content on the original root domain, if so How? Your Advice, Links, and Comments are greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Nikita0 -
Are multiple sites needed to rank one website?
My SEO guy for a mortgage website says that we should have 30 websites, with about 250 pages each on each site plus 50 blogs in order to even think of ranking for mortgage keywords. Is that correct?
Technical SEO | | simermeet0 -
Product landing page URL's for e-commerce sites - best practices?
Hi all I have built many e-commerce websites over the years and with each one, I learn something new and apply to the next site and so on. Lets call it continuous review and improvement! I have always structured my URL's to the product landing pages as such: mydomain.com/top-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category/product-name Now this has always worked fine for me but I see more an more of the following happening: mydomain.com/top-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category => mydomain.com/product-name Now I have read many believe that the longer the URL, the less SEO impact it may have and other comments saying it is better to have the just the product URL on the final page and leave out the categories for one reason or another. I could probably spend days looking around the internet for peoples opinions so I thought I would ask on SEOmoz and see what other people tend to use and maybe establish the reasons for your choices? One of the main reasons I include the categories within my final URL to the product is simply to detect if a product name exists in multiple categories on the site - I need to show the correct product to the user. I have built sites which actually have the same product name (created by the author) in multiple areas of the site but they are actually different products, not duplicate content. I therefore cannot see a way around not having the categories in the URL to help detect which product we want to show to the user. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | yousayjump0 -
Www. version of my site shows nothing in Open Site Explorer
When I first setup my site the domain was learnbonds.com. I moved hosts a couple of months ago and as part of the process I asked them to make the site show as www.learnbonds.com which they did. Now however when I goto www.learnbonds.com in open site explorer it says there is no data. When I enter learnbonds.com into open site explorer it gives me data but says that the site has been redirected to the www. version which shows no data. Also in google webmaster when I try to set the preferred domain as the www. version it gives me the following message: Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://www.learnbonds.com/. Please verify http://www.learnbonds.com/. I am concerned that this is hurting my SEO and would appreciate any advice you can give. Thanks Dave
Technical SEO | | fxtrader19790 -
How best to optimise a website for more than one location?
I have a client who is a acupuncturist and operates clinics both in Chester and Knutsford in Cheshire the site performs well for Chester based terms such as "Chester acupuncture" this is the primary location the client wishes to focus efforts on but would also like to improve rankings for the Knutsford clinic and area. I have setup local places pages for each clinic and registered each on different local directories. Both clinic addresses are placed on each page of the website and have a map to each on the contact page. Most of the on-page SEO elements such as page titles, descriptions and on-page keywords mainly focus on the term "Chester" over "Knutsford" is it advisable to target both locations in these page elements or will local search have an effect on this and will reduce/ dilute overall rankings for Chester clinic? I haven't setup and separate page for each clinic location as this might help in terms of SEO for improving ranking for both locations but from a user point of view it would just duplicate the same content but for a different location and also would create duplicate content issues. Any advice/ experience on this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Index forum sites
Hi Moz Team, somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer 🙂 Here is one more question: I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential. The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10. a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow? b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once. d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1. Looking forward to hear from you soon! Best Fabian
Technical SEO | | fabiank0