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
-
I want to use a photo from an official website for my own website.IF YES HOW?
Lets suppose i downloaded a photo from a XYZ website and want to use it on my own website, and also i want to rank for same keyword, and would like to rank just below XYZ site, i know there could be copyright issue. what can be done to avoid this issue. Can i manipulate the picture in a such way that it is usable. if yes how? How can i use that official websites picture for my website, i mean, can i cite that website as a source? what is the best practice in this case? i dont want to use stock photo,i really like xyz sites pics.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam09schulz0 -
Hreflang : mixing with/without country code for same language
Hello, I would like to display 3 different english versions of my website : 1 for UK, 1 for CA and 1 for other english users. It would look like this for a page: . (english content with £ prices) <link rel="alternate" href="https: xxx.com="" en-ca" hreflang="en-CA">(english content with $CA prices)</link rel="alternate" href="https:> <link rel="alternate" href="https: xxx.com="" en="" " hreflang="en">(english content without currency)</link rel="alternate" href="https:> I wonder if I can mix this hreflang without country code with hreflangs with country code for the 2 other specific versions... or if the hreflang without country code version will appear whatever the country, even if i specified it . In other terms, is hreflang="en" > hreflang="en-CA" + hreflang="en-GB" if tagged together on a same page? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexisH0 -
Best tools for submitting contact forms of 1000 websites?
For a new B2B service we have identified websites that we would like to make aware of our service.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
There are about 1000 websites for which it was not possible to retrieve emails, and where we need to do the outreach using the websites contact pages. Do you know of any tools that save time or outsource companies specialized in such a service? We do not want to fully automize the process but a human should do a visual check that form is properly filled. What I imagine could save time would be tools that already load from a list of URLs the next pages already in the background of the browser and good autoform fillers. Any recommendations?0 -
Setting up the right Geo targeting/language targeting settings and not to brake the SEO
Hello the great Moz Community! Gev here from BetConstruct, a leading gaming and betting software provider in the world. Our company website is performing great on SERP. We have 20+ different dedicated pages for our 20+ softwares, event section, different landing pages for different purposes. We also run a blog section, Press section, and more... Our website's default language is EN. 4 months ago we opened the /ru and /es versions of the website! I have set the correct hreflang tags, redirects, etc.. generated correct sitemaps, so the translated versions started to rank normally! Now our marketing team is requesting different stuff to be done on the website and I would love to discuss this with you before implementing! There are different cases! For example: They have created a landing page under a url betconstruct.com/usa-home and want me to set that page as the default website page(ie homepage), if the user visits our website from a US based IP. This can be done in 2 different ways: I can set the /usa-home page as default in my CMS, in case the visitor is from US and the address will be just betconstruct.com(without /use-home). In this case the same URL (betconstruct.com) will serve different content for only homepage. I can check the visitor IP, if he is from US, I can redirect him to betconstruct.com/usa-home. In this case user can click on the logo and go to the homepage betconstruct.com and see the original homepage. Both of the cases seems to be dangerous, because in the 1st case I am not sure what google will think when he sees different homepage from different IPs. And in the 2nd case I am not sure what should be that redirection. Is it 301 or 303, 302, etc... Because Google will think I don't have a homepage and my homepage redirects to a secondary page like /usa-home After digging a lot I realised that my team is requesting from me a strange case. Because the want both language targeting(/es, /ru) and country targeting (should ideally be like /us), but instead of creating /us, they want it to be instead of /en(only for USA) Please let me know what will be the best way to implement this? Should we create a separate version of our website for USA under a /us/* URLs? In this case, is it ok to have /en as a language version and /us as a country targeting? What hreflangs to use? I know this is a rare case and it will be difficult for you to understand this case, but any help will be much appreciated! Thank you! Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | betconstruct
Gev0 -
Does anyone know how dynamic/personalized website content affects SEO?
A client using Marketo has inquired about personalizing their website content to be personalized based on a persona. To be clear, I'm talking about key website pages, maybe even the Home page, not PPC/campaign specific landing pages. For example, areas of on the site would change to display content differently to a CEO vs a sales person. I'm new to marketing automation and don't exactly know how this piece works. Hoping someone here has experience or can provide pros/cons guidance. How would search engines work with this type of page? Here's Marketo's site explaining what it does: https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Web+Personalization+-+RTP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flock.Media0 -
Linking to External Websites?
Is it good to link external websites from every page. Since, the on-page grader shows there should be one link pointing to an external source. I have a website that can point to an external website from every page using the brand name of the specific site like deal sites do have. Is it worth having external link on every page, of-course with a no-follow tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
If other websites implement our RSS feed sidewide on there website, can that hurt our own website?
Think about the switching anchors from the backlinks and the 100s of sidewide inlinks... I gues Google will understand that it's just a RSS feed right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Best website structure for product benefits and features.
I'm in disagreement with my partner over how best to represent our products' benefits and features on the homepage of our website. I'm interested in this from primarily a SEO perspective but it obviously has an impact on conversions as well. I believe that a homepage shouldn't contain too much information so as not to overwhelm the user, a brief sentence or two about each benefit with a link to another page with in depth info about the related feature. Each of these inner pages would be optimized and contain much more content that you could put on the homepage example below. Each Please see wireframe A He believes in more information on the homepage. There is more content to index which he believes is important for the homepage. Also, by using tabs most of the content is hidden from initial view so its doesn't clutter the page and the user doesn't have to leave the page to decide whether he is interested in the software. Please see wireframe B below. I'd really love to hear from other Moz'ers which they would choose and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Riona0