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?
-
Hi Phil
From an SEO standpoint and in an ideal world, dealing with localisation issues, it would be preferred to have each country specific site hosted within that particular country. But this throws up additional hosting cost as well as individual link building efforts to each of those domains.
The best way would be to redirect any country specific versions of the domain to the relevant root folder.
For example, if we were to launch hurco in Italy, the preference would be to place the Italian content within a subfolder (i.e. http://www.hurco.com/it/) but also purchase http://www.hurco.it and use a 301 redirect the site to the Italian subfolder. This is done both to preserve your brand assets in other countries and markets, but also to avoid any confusion should a user mistakenly remember your brand but not your site.
The subfolders or portions of the website can be targeted to the local market by way of designation within Google Webmaster Tools.
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
-
Creating Individual Posts w/ Excerpts from Expert Columns On Your Website
Hey Moz Fam! I have a question regarding adding excerpts from guest posts/expert columns to your website. The reason this came up to begin with is we want to find a way to track ALL our social media posts engagement. When we share guest posts links, we obviously cannot track when someone clicks it since its not going to our own website. The idea was if we create an individual page with an excerpt from the guest post, then add a "read full post" button that links back to it, we could then instead share that excerpt post from our website to social media so we can track it. Then the user could go to view the full post on the actual guest article from there if they wish. We wanted to create a page titled "Media" and have all those posts categorized to fall on that page. Then canonicalize all of the individual posts to the top level media page. My question is... we've spent a lot of time and money on creating pages with unique quality content and updating any thin content to make it not thin. These new excerpt pages will be thin content, is that going to negatively impact our SEO? We're not trying to rank these excerpt pages or anything. I just want to make sure that adding these excerpt posts with only 100-200 words each is not going to hurt our overall SEO strategy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE0 -
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
How to avoid getting penalized for having same website in 2 languages
Hi, I have a price comparison website in English with .com domain. Now as we are expanding, we want to localize our website and target different markets in their local languages. The first market we are targetting is France. For that purpose we have a different domain name in French .fr domain The website however, will have the exact same content & mostly translated in French. My question is what is the best way to avoid getting penalized by Google for having duplicate content? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kh-priyam0 -
International SEO and Website Redirection
Hey there Mozzers, If you have a website for example www.example.com and you wanted to target Australia and UK and you owned the .com.au and .co.uk. Would that be ok if everything redirected to the .com ? I know that having the .com.au is a signal for Google but the redirection is causing me troubles. Would that be huge of a difference if everything redirected to the .com version of the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AngelosS0 -
Best practices for structuring an ecommerce site
I'm revamping my wife's ecommerce site. It is currently a very low traffic website that is not indexed very well in Google. So, my plan is to restructure it based upon the best practices that helps me avoid duplicate content penalties, and easier to index strategies. The store has about 7 types of products. Each product has approximately 30 different size variations that are sometimes specifically searched for. For example: 20x10x1 air filters, 20x10x2 air filters, 20x10x1 allergy reducing air filters, etc So, is it best for me to create 7 different products with 30 different size variations (size selector at the product level that changes the price) or is it better to create 210 different product pages, one for each style/size?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pherbio0 -
Https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/wolf/ setting tag pages as blog corner stone article?
We do not have enough content rich page to target all of our keywords. Because of that My SEO guy wants to set some corner stone blog articles in order to rank them for certain key words on Google. He is asking me to use the following rule in our article writing(We have blog on our website):
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian
For example in our articles when we use keyword "wolf", link them to the blog page:
https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/wolf/
It seems like a good idea because in the tag page there are lots of material with the Keyword "wolf" . But the problem is when I search for keyword "wolf" for example on the Google, some other blog pages are ranked higher than this tag page. But he tells me in long run it is a better strategy. Any idea on this?0 -
Should I change .html to / ?
On my ecommerce site, we have .html extensions on all files and categories. I was wondering if it is worth the development cost to make all of them / ? Is there any SEO benefit in doing so? Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Best SEO format for a blog page on an ecommerce website.. inc Source Ordered Content
Does anyone know of a page template or code I might want to base a blog on as part of an eccomerce website? I am interested in keeping the look (includes) of the website and paying attention to Source Ordered Content helping crawlers index the new great blogs we have to share. I could just knock up a page with a template from the site but I would like to investigate SOC at this stage as it may benefit us in the long run. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0