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SEO Best Practices - International or Region-Specific Sites and Domain Issues
May 08, 2007
Suggested Best Practices:
A good first question to ask is “Who exactly are we targeting?�? If you are targeting a specific country, targeting a specific language-speaking audience, or your web site copy is specifically for a country or language-specific audience, use a ccTLD (country code top level domain) that relates to your target country rather than a general .com domain. For example, a ccTLD would look like www.domain.fr, www.domain.ca, www.domain.jp, or www.domain.co.uk. Always use ccTLDs for each language of your site.
Avoid having multiple language sites on the same domain, e.g., www.domain.com for English language content and www.domain.com/fr/ for French language content.
Make sure that there is not any duplicate content on your .com and any other sites.
Make sure your pages identify what language they are in, e.g., meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="jp"
If you cannot use a ccTLD, use a subdomain, e.g., fr.domain.com. Google views a subdomain as a separate site.
Benefits Of Best Practices:
A ccTLD communicates to search engines the focus of your site.
A ccTLD is the quickest and most accurate way to communicate regionality to the search engines.
A ccTLD assigns more weight for local search. It allows your site to be more easily included in Google Canada, Google Mexico, etc.
Search engines tend to have higher confidence and often give a ranking boost to a ccTLD site for local searches. For example, Google France may give a more favorable ranking to a France-specific (.fr) site.
FAQ:
Q: What about using subdirectories such as www.domain.com/fr/? Can we do a 301 redirect from a subdirectory to a ccTLD, e.g., from www.domain.com/fr/ to www.domain.fr?
A: From a search engine perspective, it is always best to use a ccTLD. If a ccTLD is not possible, then consider using a subdomain. We do not recommend using subdirectories for international sites or language-specific sites.
Q: What does Google say about the use of TLDs, ccTLDs, subdomains, etc.?
A: “Use TLDs. To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We're more likely to know that www.domain.de indicates Germany-focused content, for instance, than www.domain.com/de/." (Source: Google Blog)
All posts by Doug Ausbury
posted by Doug Ausbury at May 8, 2007 11:26 AM
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Comments
Great info. Although, nowadays, I'm not so sure that Google sees subdomains as separate sites as it did before. I think the ccTLD's are the way to go even though I haven't tried it myself. Any tips on how to have the foreign sites built or the copy translated?
Posted by: Jeff Swanson at December 5, 2008 12:37 AM
You're missing something here that will mislead people.
Given two languages English and French, you need to make the distinction whether you are targetting those languages in one country (Canada) or two countries (U.S. and France).
If you are targetting the two languages in two different countries you want two different domain names on the appropriate country tld's. e.g. yoursite.com and yoursite.fr
If you're targeting two languages in one country, having your French site in a subdirectory (e.g. yourdomain.com/fr)IS appropriate, standard practice, and search friendly as long as you heavily link between the two language versions of the site.
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