My company wants to launch a new website for a new offer in 4 different countries : France, Germany, Netherlands, Poland.  I was asked for advice about what kind of URL organisation to choose for international targeting.   First, I thought this was the same website, same content, in 4 different languages, managed centrally.  So I advised subfolders, for better link equity sharing. So let's call the domain "mob.com": we would have mob.com/fr, mob.com/de, etc.  Then I learned that actually the websites will have different offers and content pages depending on the country, and that each would be updated by a local team. So I advised ccTLDs : mob.fr, mob.de... Since it's different languages, different content and different teams, let's go for different websites as well.  But for reasons that are beyond my control, they refuse ccTLD.  So i'm left with 2 options : back to the subfolders (mob.com/fr, mob.com/de...), or subdomains (fr.mob.com, de.mob.com...).  For SEO, I tend to prefer subfolders (for link equity and global SEO authority), but I wonder if it's right since these are in the end quite different websites. For different content, aren't subdomains more relevant ?   Moreover, subdomains allow to have one dedicated Search Console account for each. So I can set up the International Targeting in SC differently for each website.  With subfolders, I will have only one website, so one Seach Console account, so I can't use the International Targeting set up for each country can I ?   Thank you very much if you have insights about these questions
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When I set up a site in multiple languages, how should I set up my URLs for search engines and usability?  Let's say my site is www.example.com, and I'm translating into French and Spanish. What is best for usability and SEO?  Directory option:  http://www.example.com/sample.html http://www.example.com/fr/sample.html http://www.example.com/es/sample.html   Subdomain option:  http://www.example.com/sample.html http://fr.example.com/sample.html http://es.example.com/sample.html   Filename option:  http://www.example.com/sample.html http://www.example.com/sample.fr.html http://www.example.com/sample.es.html   Accept-Language header:  Or should I simply parse the  header and generate content server-side to suit that header?  Is there another way to do this? If the different language versions don't have different urls, what do I do about the search engines?    UPDATE 2011-12-06  Google has new recommendations for meta tags for explicitly pointing to other language content: .  UPDATE 2012-05-25  Related but not precisely:   UPDATE 2013-06-12  includes discussion of several URL schemes directly relevant to the question.
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I need to open a website only for Australian customers. The fact is that our provider's servers are all housed in the UK.  What do you suggest is better? Leaving our website in the UK? Or buy a service from an Australian provider?  How can I have (or where can I find) some statistics for traffic and connection quality and performance for a website from UK to Australia?  We don't use any country connection accelerator service.
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I'm really worried about professionalism.  My site would be something like http://mywebsite.uy instead of http://mywebsite.com.uy.  What do you think about this practice? What should I have in mind at the moment of choosing one?
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Google clearly states that duplicate content within a single, or multiple, domains is not advised. This is understood, but I am not sure of any exceptions for sites with region-specific content that is often replicated across locales.  For example, a site's /en-us/about page could be identical to /en-uk/about, whereas most likely /en-ja/about is unique.  Are GYM smart enough to understand that the initial URL depth is a locale specifier? Is there any robots.txt or header, etc, trickery that I should include to outline the site's international structure?
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I am creating a new website for a client, and I think a single page website / layout will be pretty neat. There is not that much detailed content, it is a company that imports a lot of products from different companies. So it will be a bit of a showcase of the different types of products / equipment you can order. Of the whole catalog only maybe 10 products are actually shown.  Now I have the basic structure with sections and links like:      #home / #products / #equipment / #services / #contact.    Now from what I understand is that Google does not index links containing #, so there will be no problem of duplicate content, everything will be indexed as the frontpage.  Now what I want to optimize is searching. This company is agent of some product in the country, meaning only they have the permission to import and sell that product. This means  that when somebody searches for product x, this website pops up as the first hit.  Now can I make it that they will be automatically brought to the #products part of the website directly from google.  I was thinking of something like having google index the different sections as different pages. Is something like that possible?
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I am planning to have my own website and would like to ask some questions regarding about the organization (I don't know if this is the right term for it) of domain names.  Let me give an example:  If I have a domain named “www.joe.com” but is planning to have different websites or categories for my varied interests but would still retain the  “joe” name on my domain, would it be better to have a sub-domain instead?  Is that it?  Is this what would turn out:  www.joe.com             = my main site bookworm.joe.com        = a blog for my love of books travel.joe.com          = a blog for my travel experience food.joe.com            = a blog for my love of food and cuisine  I also notice that there are other websites that are like this: (this is just an example, but you get the idea)  www.personname.com          = main site www.personname.com/blog     = a blog for his site ( is this a subdomain now)  Everytime you go to the www.personname.com, you are then redirected to the www.personname.com/blog address.  Is it safe to say that the blog address is a sub-domain and for blogging only and then the www.personname.com is the main site?  What is the difference of this approach compared to the first example I've given above?  Cheers!
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I'm managing a website that has a US section and a UK &amp; International section. Let's say these are divided as:   website.com/ website.com/us   The website has hreflang implemented correctly as follows:  &lt;link rel="alternate" href="https://www.website.com/us/" hreflang="en-US" /&gt; &lt;link rel="alternate" href="https://www.website.com/" hreflang="en-GB" /&gt; &lt;link rel="alternate" href="https://www.website.com/" hreflang="x-default" /&gt;   My questions are as follows:   Is it absolutely OK to have 2 annotations (en-GB and x-default) for the same page? Does Google have an official recommendation on this? And is there a chance / situation where this could become problematic? If the webmaster were to remove the en-GB annotation and just use x-default for all English versions other than en-US, would that adversely affect visibility and rankings in the UK?
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We are currently planning on registering multiple domains for different parts of the website we own. For example consider that we have example.com as the main domain and have assigned all the sub-departments their own subdomain.    There will be tutorials.example.com, videos.example.com, articles.example.com, etc.  Now for marketing reasons we plan to register examplevids.com, exampletuts.com, etc.    The catch here is all these domains should somehow point to their respective subdomains. We can either use a permanent redirect or have and iframe to display the content directly from the subdomains.   Which approach is better considering SEO?  Will using iframes be considered replicating content by search engines? Or is it at all wise to have different domains?
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Is it better to have separate country specific domains (which costs more money) or sub domains which define the country, for better SEO?  e.g.   example.com example.com.au example.co.uk   vs   example.com au.example.com uk.example.com   Assumption: The search engine web master tools, each sub domain are associated to a country. Example au.example.com is associated to the country Australia.  Update #1  I understand that both methods do work, especially when i utilize the assumption, listed above. The question is about: Which method is better? Is there such a small SEO difference between them? Is the first method way way way better than the second with getting better SEO results?  Update #2  A number of folks have suggested that the following is a good/better approach:   example.com/ example.com/au example.com/uk      By adding a country specific ISO   code to the end of the url/the first   folder of the domain can be recognised   as the country.   But a number of SEO mates have suggested that this is a valuable waste of folder level space. Er.. how can I explain. OK, it's been suggested by some SEO experts that if the number of levels or folders in the domain exceeds 5 then the page drops dramatically in importance. Basically, you don't want to make it deep. As such, adding the country as the first level can be considered a waste, especially when it can be handled by the domain OR sub domain - hence the question :)
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I'm doing SEO for a new real estate company, yet the developer had surprised me with this:  The developer had created two websites with two domains for one brand:  The first domain/website:  samplehouse.com - that's where the rental and real estate listings go  The second domain/website:  samplehouseinc.com - that website has pages like "about us" "pricing" "contact us" "how it works" and basically only pages representing the brand.  When I asked the developer the reason behind two websites!! this was her response:     The website was too big to be put on one Domain. Hence the reason that   we got two domains!!!!   If you can please answer some of my concerns:    How does this affect SEO? How to notify Google about this? This will likely create confusion to some users, what do you think? Should the site be redone again using just one domain only? given the fact that the company is just starting out in a competitive niche.   Your answers are appreciated and thanks a lot in advance.
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I have more than 5 subdomains on a project, say developer, www, staff and some more, what is the best practice in creating sitemaps?   All subdomains that share a same sitemap at base domain (example.com/sitemap.xml) ? or different sitemaps for different subdomains?(developer.example.com/sitemap.xml and www.example.com/sitemap.xml)   Since the subdomains are several parts of the main application, what are the pros and cons of each, and what should I consider while choosing the one over the other? (one sitemap per subdomain or one for the whole site)
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We are currently maintaining country folders like  www.example.net/de/ www.example.net/fr/   Now we are thinking about Swiss with 3 languages (it, de, fr). I think it's bad to change all the current directories. Is it okay to only add the region if necessary? For example:  www.example.net/de/ = German speaking, not Swiss www.example.net/fr/ www.example.net/it/ www.example.net/de-CH/ = German speaking, Swiss only www.example.net/it-CH/ www.example.net/fr-CH/   So: Is it for SEO okay to mix the subfolder structure between /lang/ &amp; /lang-country/?
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I recently posted a question about using a site structure similar to what's shown below.   example.com/bikes/foo-bike/wheels    //content about foo-bike's wheels example.com/bikes/bar-bike/wheels    //content about bar-bike's wheels   If two bikes are at comparable price points, it's likely that they will have similar components. Should I be concerned if multiple bikes have similar content and the only major difference between them is their component name?  The website I'm creating is a user guide for bikes. With the URL structure above I'm a little worried that I run the risk for creating duplicate content.
116042
I'm trying to set up tracking on a project that I'm working on.   The main site is at http://www.example.com/  The order page is at https://www.example.com/index.php   Currently they have two different profiles under separate domains:     Main Site:   UA-aaaaaaaa-1   Order Site  UA-aaaaaaaa-2   This isn't giving me the results I want. When on the order page, I would like to see where on the main page users came from. Also, when on the main page I'd like to see when they navigate away to the order page, right now I can't tell the difference between an exit and order page click.  I'm not even getting the main site as a referrer to the order page.  What am I doing wrong? Should they be under one profile? Or two like I have them. Should I be setting the domain name (_setDomainName)? Should I be using _link() when linking to the order page. I can't find the right resource for what I need.
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This is in connection to drupal.org issue .  That's when I happen to request for page "node/1/aaa/bbbb", I'm served the response for "node/1" (it's parent page).  I can understand, this is the way Drupal menu system has been designed and works for some obvious reasons.   But I'm in a need to change this. Reason we have some aliased urls across the site, links from third party sites are taking (visitors and crawlers) to not existing page for which ideally http 404 response code and page not found to be returned. Instead Drupal showing it's parent page (with http res. code 200). This is leading to duplicate page in Google webmasters and misleading our genuine users.  I have found a  to this issue. However it is working fine only for 80% of cases, some valid urls (admin/*, sites/default/files/ * , system/ajax/*, etc.,) leads to 404 page.  Would like to hear how others are dealing with this duplicate content issue concerning SEO and possible fix!
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NA is North America, EU is Europe/Middle East, ..etc.  I am curious as to where the NAXX numbers are specifically located. For instance (no pun intended), NA23 would be located on the east or west coast? Salesforce has to have this documented somewhere. I have the same questions for the sandbox instances (CSXX).
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I need a counsel about my websites' domain.  Let's say I have just bought two domains: xyz.com and xyzphotography.com.  As we can see, the first one is shorter but way less meaningful than the second one. The second one contains a photography keyword but it's longer.  I have only one website which is my photography portfolio. Can you advise me how to set those domains to make it all as SEO-friendly as possible? Which one should be the main one, does the rest should work on their own or have some kind of SEO-friendly redirect to the main domain?