Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Seo For .com And Country Specific Domain Name

Posted by Anonymous on 5/19/2009 at 2:54 AM ET 250 Points
In the past, when carrying out SEO activities for a www.xyz.com and for a country specific website (e.g. xyz..au, xyz.com.uk etc), I have preferred to have content structured/developed specific to the domain name.

So a .com would have content that is US specific to the "organization" where is a .au would have content specific to Australia "organisation". Note the "s" and "z" on the respective words.

However, the following have been major pain points:
1. Content overlaps and is repeated/duplicated
2. Management is difficult as files have to be uploaded/deleted etc in more than one places
3. for some instances, e.g. .au and .uk content is very similar. Google could treat this as spam

So far the sites have been small with manageable pages.

Going forward, when content increases, would this be the best way to continue?

Would a permanent 301 redirect be a more practical solution? any downfalls of this? e.g. redirecting a .au to .com would not rank either sites in local google.com.au results??

What are best practices optimising a site with similar content for a .com and a .au as an example?

Am I asking too many insider questions in an open forum ;-)

Thank you all, for your time and help.

Regards,
Isaac


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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 5/19/2009 at 6:57 AM Accepted
    Dear Isaac,

    It would, I think, be worthwhile making as much of your content as country specific as possible. But I'll be honest and say I don't know enough about the mechanics of your problem as other people might.

    This sounds like a series of questions for Brad Fallon over at www.StomperNet.com

    You could also try:

    www.forums.seochat.com

    www.forums.digitalpoint.com

    www.highrankings.com/forum/

    I hope this helps. Good luck.

    Gary Bloomer
    Wilmington, DE USA
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 5/19/2009 at 8:51 AM Accepted
    Two thoughts:

    1) Use meta tags to specify the language dialect of the web pages:
    < meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" />
    (For more details, see: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4646.txt). This may help search engines understand that your 2 websites are different language dialects and not penalize you.

    2) By not doing a redirect, search engines may give an extra boost to your local website content.

    Also - not all your differences will strictly be spelling. Dialects have idioms. Different dialects may also imply different localized images/colors.
  • Posted by excellira on 5/20/2009 at 5:46 PM Member
    This solves the language problem but not the localization issue.
  • Posted by excellira on 5/20/2009 at 8:30 PM Accepted
    My apologies, Annelies asked a very similar question and in my previous post I mistakenly assumed it was the same one.

    https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstID=28954


    If you're viewing this from a usability perspective, Jay Hamilton-Roths' solution is valid. This would also consume less resources.

    Your question however does not address rankings. Google looks at IP addresses as well as TLDs (and who knows what other factors ;-) so if your site is a .co.uk or a .com.au, etc, then you would be better served by hosting the site in the respective state. .com in US. .co.uk in UK, etc.

    There's a tradeoff to be made.
  • Posted by excellira on 5/20/2009 at 10:42 PM Member
    A strong brand is likely to pull visitors globally. How large is the organization and the site? This could impact the decision.
  • Posted by excellira on 5/20/2009 at 11:29 PM Member
    IBM can achieve results that a SMB can't.

    The redirect approach does not provide a local ranking benefit. If rankings are a priority you would be better served by generating unique content for each country written in the local language or dialect and host in the state where the TLD designation indicates.

    The other option would be to host microsites in each region and direct visitors to the main site for additional information. Then you could implement Jay's recommendation.
  • Posted by matthewmnex on 5/21/2009 at 9:20 PM Accepted
    May I suggest that you look at your overall strategy.

    You mentioned that you are a 'small' company.

    Therefore, splitting off the site into different versions hosted in different places is a very BAD idea.

    You will have to do all the work several times to bring just a very small amiunt of traffic for each site and each site will end up with a very low ranking.

    Much better to think about your overall brand and drive all the traffic to a single domain.

    Instead of using xxx.com.au
    and xxx.co.nz etc.

    use au.xxx.com
    nz.xxx.com

    Then you have just 1 top level domain with all search traffic and inbound links leading to the same place. This will help your ranking enormously.

    In our company we also manage a great deal of localised & localized content :))

    The truth is, it is a lot of hard work and planning to manage well. What you need is a good CMS system.

    I think Jay's solution is very good to mention the language encoding so just be sure to add this in the headers appropriate to each sub domain.

    If you are buying traffic on Google and others, then you can point your ads to the appropriate sub domains to get the correct localised versions and easily monitor your ROI per territory with country specific ads.

    Good luck

    Matthew
  • Posted by excellira on 5/21/2009 at 9:47 PM Member
    I don't disagree though again, if organic search plays in important role in your marketing mix, this isn't the optimal solution. If organic search is not a consideration or your budget will not accommodate multiple web sites, then yes, this would be the best approach. And I also agree with Matthew that a good CMS would simplify I18n quite readily.
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 5/22/2009 at 9:11 AM Member
    Dear Isaac,

    CMS. Customer Management Systems, right? There's so much jargon out there, it's sometimes difficult to keep up.

    If this is the CMS you're talking about, it will only come into play when you have customers to manage. With CMS. many people think it will solve all their problems simply by virtue of them having it.

    Until you've formed a relationship with your customers, you've got nothing to manage. Just thought I'd mention this.

    Gary Bloomer
    Wilmington, DE, USA
  • Posted by excellira on 5/22/2009 at 1:32 PM Member
    CMS = Content Management System
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 5/23/2009 at 8:19 PM Member
    Dear Excellira,

    Yes, minutes after I'd posted my entry above I realized my mistake.
    Apologies. Although I do think it's wise to have someone in mind to direct one's content at before one sets about managing it.

    But thank you again for setting me straight.

    Gary Bloomer
    Wilmington, DE, USA


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