Multiregional / Multilingual SEO - Subfolders Question
-
Hello all,
I wonder if you can help me...
I have a question about subfolders in multi-regional / multi-lingual SEO - more specifically in reference to targeting the UK and the US.
Having looked at some global websites these are the types of implementations I've most commonly seen:
UK subfolders
- .com/uk
- .com/gb
- .com/gb/en-gb | .com/en-GB
- .com/gb-en
- .com/en-gb
- .com/uk/en
US subfolders
- .com/us
- .com/us/en-us | .com/en-US
- .com/us-en
- .com/en-us
- .com/us/en
Are any of these approaches better than others or is it all a matter of personal preference? What's the reason for using .com/gb over .com/uk (or vice versa) for example?
Secondly, my assumption is that the examples above which include language subfolders do so because these companies are targeting different speaking users within these countries. Would I be right to think that since the organisation I work for is only targeting the American speakers in the US, we wouldn't need to go so far as to have language subfolders in addition to location subfolders?
Would be great to get some feedback / suggestions!
Thanks!
-
Ok great thanks for clarifying Kate!
-
1. Nope. What you put in the URL is not relevant to SEs, just users. Whatever you think is best there will work.
2. There is a difference between recognized countries and languages.
For the English language, there are different dialects. US, GB, AU, etc. The HREFLANG tag uses the code for the region of the dialect. So it is en-gb for that region.
For the geo-targeting portion, the UK is a recognized country. Great Britan is not. The United Kingdom is made up of Great Britain ( which is made up of the "countries" of England, Scotland, Wales) and Northern Ireland.
-
Hi Kate, thanks for your response. Apologies for the late reply - my subscription ran out!
I have a couple of questions:
1)"You always should start with the country and then language if you go down that route so that the first subfolder is the geotargeted folder."
Is there any difference to using .com/uk as the country or .com/gb?
2. "UK vs GB is because GB is a part of the UK. The recognized country is the UK so that is used for geo-location. GB is the region in the UK that speaks a recognized version of English. Make sense?"
Sorry I'm still a bit confused by this. Can you clarify?
Thanks!
-
1. Yes, usually the "best" is a matter of preference. You always should start with the country and then language if you go down that route so that the first subfolder is the geotargeted folder. But other than that, there is no real "right" answer.
2. UK vs GB is because GB is a part of the UK. The recognized country is the UK so that is used for geo-location. GB is the region in the UK that speaks a recognized version of English. Make sense?
3. Yes, companies use languages when they are going to geo-target their company or material for specific countries and then offer translations within those countries. If you are only operating in the US in English, then you don't really need all of this.
However, it won't hurt to set it up for future structuring.
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
-
How To Proceed With Int'l Language Targeting if Subfolders Not An Option?
I’m currently working with my team to sort out the best way to build out the international versions of our website. Any advice on how to move forward is greatly appreciated! Current Setup: Subdirectories to target languages - i.e. domain.com/es/. We chose this because… We are targeting languages not countries Our product offering does not change from country to country Translated site content is almost identical to the english version Current Problem: Our site is built on WordPress and our database can’t handle the build out of 4 more international versions of the site. The database is slowing down and our site speed is being affected for multiple reasons (WordPress multilingual plugin being one of them). **What to do next? **My developers have said that we cannot continue with our current subdirectory structure due to the technical infrastructure issues I’ve mentioned above (as well as others I’m yet to get full details on). Now I’m left with a decision: Change to a subdomain structure Change to a ccTLD structure Is there an option 3? From what I’ve read it does not make sense to build out language targeted sites on a ccTLD structure because that limits the ability for people outside of the targeted country to find the content organically. I.e. a website at www.domain.es is targeted to searchers in Spain so someone in Columbia is less likely to find that content through the engines. Is this correct? If so, how much can it hurt organic discovery? What’s the optimal setup to move forward with in this case? Thanks!
International SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
SEO When Teaching English To Russians
My girlfriend is from Saint Petersburg, Russia and now lives in Toronto, Canada. She's been teaching English to Russians for 3 years in person and on Skype, and now wants to start a website to get more 1-on-1 clients and sell online courses, which I have a lot of experience in. If you don't feel like reading my notes below, I'll summarize my main questions here: Would you lean to creating the site more in English or Russian language or both equally... with a .com or .ru or both (2 sites)... hosted in the U.S. or Russia? I've been reading a number of excellent threads about strategies and tactics for online marketing in multiple language (including some here on Moz), but am still confused about how best to approach this. Here are some notes: -Some prospects will search for her services in English and some in Russian (probably more in Russian). -If I build her a site primarily in English, she can take advantage of my experience in English keyword research, SEO, competitor research, and so on. If I build her a site primarily in Russian, I can still do those things, but not as efficiently or effectively. -If I were thinking first and foremost of our users, which is obviously a good place to start, the site would be in both English and Russian, but I've read that if a site has both English and Russian text, and is a .com instead of a .ru, that can really hurt its chances of ranking in Russia's Yandex search engine, which is used more in Russia than Google. Along the same lines, although most SEO sites are saying that it doesn't matter where you host a website these days, an exception seems to be that Yandex does reward sites that are hosted locally. Are these assertions true? -At first I assumed that organic search competition is lower in the Russian language, but I don't really know. I've also read that Yandex really rewards older domains and that it can be hard to beat them, which means competition may be quite high. So my questions again are: Would you lean to creating the site more in English or Russian or both... with a .com or .ru or both (2 sites)... hosted in the U.S. or Russia? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | smilinggardener
Phil1 -
International Confusion between .com and .com/us
A question regarding International SEO: We are seeing cases for many sites that meet these criteria: -International sites that have www.example.com/ ip redirecting to country site based on ip redirect (ex. www.example.com/ 301 to www.example.com/us -There is a desktop + mobile site (www.example.com + m.example.com) The issue we see is Google shows www.example.com/ in US search results instead of www.example.com/us in search results. Since the .com/ redirects, there is no mobile version, and www.example.com/ also shows up in mobile SERPs instead of m.example.com/us. My questions are: 1. If www.example.com/ is redirecting users and Googlebot, why is Googlebot caching it with the content of www.example.com/us? 2. Why is www.example.com/ showing up in SERPs instead of www.example.com/us? 3. How can we help Google display www.example.com/us and m.example.com/us in SERPs instead of www.example.com/? Thanks!!
International SEO | | FranFerrara0 -
Setting up I.P Filter Google Analytics - I.p ending with 0/24
Hi everyone, Your help would be much appreciated for the following: I am trying to setup I.P filters for our Google Analytic account to exclude internal traffic. We are located in multiple locations and each location have multiple I.p addresses. The I.P addresses we have end either by 0/24 which apparently means they provide a range from 0 to 255 and or 128/25. I have tried to setup the I.P addresses in different formats on the GA filter but they are apparently are not valid: example of one setup I tried: 1**.\2**.\8*.([0-256]) I have gone through the Filter setup guide from Google but I must be doing something wrong- probably to do on how I setup the I.P's ending with 0/24 and 128/25 If anyone could help me on how I can set up the I.P filters Google analytic would be great. The I.P addresses look like the following (changed digits): Location 1: 174.177.179.0/25 174.177.179.128/25 Location 2: 196.222.87.0/24
International SEO | | AlphaDigital2
194.59.197.0/24 Thanks you so much for your help, L.0 -
Non-Unicode Fonts and SEO
For some reason we've translated part of our website into Burmese. The most common font in use in Myanmar (Burma) is called Zawgyi and is non-unicode. Which means that if you look at it in Chrome you get a bunch of squares. That's not a problem because firefox provides support and 9x% of Burmese use firefox. So two questions Will we get penalised for using non-unicode font? Can google understand the pages and will we rank? It's worth mentioning that this is 0.001% or less of our traffic and an experiment (and market research) to find out a bit about that market than having much real BL impact
International SEO | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Is this hurting our SEO: company1.uk.com, company1.ru.com, company1.de.com, etc...?
Hello I work for a company which is using this kind of subdomains, that look like domains such as company1.uk.com, company1.ru.com, company1.de.com, but they are obviously not. We also own company1.com where the main site in English lies. We are one of the leader portals in one financial sector, and I am wondering if our SEO can be hurted by these fake "domains". I understand that we get some effect from the other domains hosted under this domain, and they are probably not as high quality as ours and they are probably unrelated. **- Would you recommend us to stop using these and use subdomains? So change: "company1.de.com" and use "de.company1.com" instead? Should we expect an increase in traffic after this change?** Any help will be appreciated.
International SEO | | forex-websites0 -
Backlinks to URLs with Language Parameters (for Chinese version of website) and SEO?
Hey all, We run a large eCommerce site in Australia and are preparing to launch to the Chinese market. Our site has been fully converted to Chinese and displays the version of the site detected as default in the user's browser unless they manually select otherwise. This is done by appending the parameter "?la=zh" onto the end of the URL, so for example the Chinese version would be: **www.example.com/australia?la=zh ** This then forces the product catalogue to display the relevant language version. My question is, for SEO purposes and back links in particular, since they aren't really a "true URL" (i.e: strictly speaking they aren't different "pages", just the same page being populated with different characters), would getting links from Chinese websites to the URL "www.example.com/australia?la=zh" really be viewed as any different from just "www.example.com/australia"? Do they pass the same amount of juice and is the difference detected by the engines (thinking mainly about Baidu in particular but of course Google as well)? Feedback from anyone with experience in SEO for multi-lingual sites would be much appreciated, thanks.
International SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
Multilingual Ecommerce Product Pages Best Practices
Hi Mozzers, We have a marketplace with 20k+ products, most of which are written in English. At the same time we support several different languages. This changes the chrome of the site (nav, footer, help text, buttons, everything we control) but leaves all the products in their original language. This resulted in all kinds of duplicate content (pages, titles, descriptions) being detected by SEOMoz and GWT. After doing some research we implemented the on page rel="alternate" hreflang="x", seeing as our situation almost perfectly matched the first use case listed by Google on this page http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077. This ended up not helping at all. Google still reports duplicate titles and descriptions for thousands of products, months after setting this up. We are thinking about changing to the sitemap implementation rel="alternate" hreflang="X", but are not sure if this will work either. Other options we have considered include noindex or blocks with robots.txt when the product language is not the same as the site language. That way the feature is still open to users while removing the duplicate pages for Google. So I'm asking for input on best practice for getting Google to correctly recognize one product, with 6 different language views of that same product. Can anyone help? Examples: (Site in English, Product in English) http://website.com/products/product-72 (Site in Spanish, Product in English) http://website.com/es/products/product-72 (Site in German, Product in English) http://website.com/de/products/product-72 etc...
International SEO | | sedwards0