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I have the same problem, it is not updated!

My dear community and friends of MOZ, today I have a very interesting question to you all.

Although I´ve got my opinion, and Im sure many of you will think the same way, I want to share the following dilemma with you.

I have just joined a company as Online Marketing Manager and I have to quickly take a decision about site structure.

The site of the company has just applied a big structure change. They used to have their information divided by country (each country one subdirectory) www.site.com/ar/news  www.site.com/us/news . They have just changed this and erased the country subdirectory and started using geolocation. So if we go to  www.site.com/news  although the content is going to be the same for each country  ( it’s a Latinamerican site, all the countries speak the same language except Brazil) the navigation links are going to drive you to different  pages according to the country  where you are located.

They believe that having less subdirectories PA or PR is going to be higher for each page due to less linkjuice leaking.  My guess is that if you want to have an important organic traffic presence you should A) get a TLD for the country you want to targe… if not B)have a subdirectory or subdomain for each country in your site.

I don’t know what local sign could be a page giving to google if the URL and html doesn’t change between countries- We can not use schemas or rich formats neither…So, again, I would suggest to go back to the previous structure. On the other hand…I ve been taking a look to sensacine.com and although their site is pointing only  to Spain

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They have very good rankings for big volume keywords in all latinamerica, so I just want to quantify this change, since I will be sending to the designers and developers a lot of work

Hi Jeff,

Thanks a lot for your answers, I have read also the answers to the other threads you referred me.

I dont want to abuse from your time and kindnes, but I ve got one more question. The idea of creating a subdomain started circuling my mind, though Im not sure about this universe.

Like Vice and Mic I bring two cases to the table, but both are using subdomains in this case. www.mercadolibre.com  (latinamerican Amazon) and sony.com .

Sony uses store.com for all their products listing, support.sony for support and sony.com for main navigation pages.

Mercado Libre uses listado.mercadolibre.com for most of their products and autos(cars).mercadolibre.com or ropa.mercadolibre.com for really important categories like clothes and cars ( that would bring Mercado Libre more revenue than other categories, I think is where they are more focused in).

Now I always thought the same way Matt Cutts explains in his article about subdomain, it should be made for keywords that aren´t too related to domain´s keywords. I remember creating an  insurance subdomain for a brokerage firm.

The domain authority of the domain Im working in is already 92 I understand SEO efforts will only have repercussions in subdomain, but as I said domain authority is already 92 . On the other hand I should add another folder, and the site structure is already a little bit long, while using a subdomain will save me using at least one folder less.

Hope you can give me a hand with this.

Best Wishes.

Pablo

Thanks a lot Jeff, really helpful information.

This brand is also a manufacturer, as big as Sony. I understand your way you would proceed with this and I have the same approach, but if we follow an intuitive architecture of categories, the one they are using is not that wrong, altough not all the categories correspond to the same microsite .

Let me be a little bit more graphical :

/ Business /directory

/light-laptops/ displayed in microsite A

/light-tablets/ displayed in microsite A

/projectors/ displayed in microsite b

/4k-displays/displayed in microsite c

I dont really know how wrong its what they are doing. If tomorrow they come up with more "light tablets" info they will host it in /light-laptops/ I know this is not classic SEO, but do you think this structure would affect rankings?

Questions:

Yes, they don t have one directory including both products at the same time, but they have two different directories with Specific info about each product. (also including products,contact and home page since there is no general directory for both categories) You think this wouldn t be a right way to divide categories?

Do you think having a site like they have with two big and strong categories and no general categories would affect SEO?

Thanks a lot!

My Dear friends of MOZ, I´ve got you a case that has been driving me crazy for 2 weeks, Im doing an SEO audit for big brand that sells electronics.

Since they sell all kind of electronics, and are very popular the site is quite big and has several categories.

Now...Im working particularly in a kind of micro-site that sells two kind of products that are very similar but not the same. Lets say in this site they are selling super-light-weight-Laptops and tablets, so if you look the site its a Laptop/Tablet site. But the site is not under a laptop/tablet directory, some pages are under laptop and others in Tablet directory .

For example : Home page URL: /light-laptops/home.asp ; Products general page page URL is light-pads/products.asp ; and each single product page is under laptops or pads according the type of product.

From my point of view, they should create a new directory called /light-laptops-pads/ and single directories for products, and case studies, etc.. Since they want to show both products together when you click in products (off course they will be creating sub-directories for the two types of products).

At the begining I thought they were really mistaken, but now that I see that all light-pad content is in one folder  and light-laptops content is in another, and the site jumps from one category to the other I am a little bit confused. PLEASE HELP ME

PD: I want to make clear that general categories like products, case studies , contact us, solutions pages are in some cases under /light-pad/ directory and in other cases under /light-laptops / directory

PLEASE PARDON MY ENGLISH!

My dear community and friends of MOZ, today I have a very interesting question to you all.

Although I´ve got my opinion, and Im sure many of you will think the same way, I want to share the following dilemma with you.

I have just joined a company as Online Marketing Manager and I have to quickly take a decision about site structure.

The site of the company has just applied a big structure change. They used to have their information divided by country (each country one subdirectory) www.site.com/ar/news  www.site.com/us/news . They have just changed this and erased the country subdirectory and started using geolocation. So if we go to  www.site.com/news  although the content is going to be the same for each country  ( it’s a Latinamerican site, all the countries speak the same language except Brazil) the navigation links are going to drive you to different  pages according to the country  where you are located.

They believe that having less subdirectories PA or PR is going to be higher for each page due to less linkjuice leaking.  My guess is that if you want to have an important organic traffic presence you should A) get a TLD for the country you want to targe… if not B)have a subdirectory or subdomain for each country in your site.

I don’t know what local sign could be a page giving to google if the URL and html doesn’t change between countries- We can not use schemas or rich formats neither…So, again, I would suggest to go back to the previous structure. On the other hand…I ve been taking a look to sensacine.com and although their site is pointing only  to Spain

|   |
|   | |
|   | |
|   | |
|   | |
|   | |
|   | |
|   | |

They have very good rankings for big volume keywords in all latinamerica, so I just want to quantify this change, since I will be sending to the designers and developers a lot of work