Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Craig,

I have had a look at the .com site and some of the national sites and I am a little unsure why you are progressing down this route. It is always easier to administer one site but this reduces the effectiveness of the site in different countries.

The Optimisation of the national sites in each country with their own national domain and hosting in that country is the better option for good search rank.

I am sure that you have solid reasons for proceeding in the direction you are.

Using the URL path /file name should be a descriptor in the national language of the country you are operating in.

There is so much more to optimising the site that I have witnessed in the few that I have looked at it would take a long time to go through it here. Get in touch with an international SEO specialist to go through the sites and you plans. you may be presented with an option that will serve your business goals more readily.

Kind regards

Nigel T Packer

You can have it both ways, if you want. You could do www.mathworks.ch and also ch.mathworks.com, with either the domain or subdomain pointing to the other. That'll keep things consistent (and also won't mess up your existing backlinks).

Some articles:
https://www.visualswirl.com/2010/03/crosscultural-web-design-practices-buil...
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-guide-international-versions-of-websites

You might also connect with W3C (www.w3.org) to learn what other developers are doing (and why).

Dear Craig

For several years we’ve been advised that using multi top level domains was important for search recognition in the respective countries – advice which we blindly passed on to clients. When a client asked why? I thought it good to get the up-to-date story. About a week later (I’ll not even summarise here!!) I was au-fait with the latest ins and outs of a dozen search engine methodologies and their respective information retrieval and indexing strategies. My head hurt!

So the latest client has now gone from one .com/fr/de/it/ domain to seven domains - the opposite of you! As a reference to Jay’s “have it both ways” suggestion, we are maintaining the .com language pages for the sake of the reasons he mentioned and to preserve current indexing. We will suggest that they are maintained as live pages.

Rather than seeing the admin as an issue, the top-end URL registration has forced the client to think like a German or an Italian and realise that when his customer wakes up after lunch and wants to find a hang-over cure, he does not suddenly start searching in English or even for English Brands. Same goes for AdWords!

By the way – in your field, AdWords are unusually little appreciated, especially by academics and other researchers. They will wade through 5 pages of organic results before trying one click on an advert!


Best wishes

Steve Alker
Xspirt