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International Multilingual SEO and Duplicate Content Concerns around English Speaking Countries
Time for a great sphinnversation folks!
The issue around ranking foreign domains is especially pertinent for large sites that have an international presence. I'm working on one such project right now, and need the help of the seo-phere to discuss some best practices regarding this issue.
Option A: The ideal situation would be:
- Use Regional TLD such as domain.ca, domain.fr
- Geotarget the site in Google Webmaster Tools
- Build relevant IBL's from regional domains or domains with regional content
Cons to this include:
- New sites may take as long as 6 months to 1.5 years to rank against established regional competitors.
- Linkbuilding becomes more difficult as time and resources must be dedicated to each individual regional site
- Dup content filters may affect largely similar content on english speaking country pages - eg: privacy, legal, disclaimer etc.
Option B: The Middle Ground
Use the structure domain.com/country-language/content
- Register each individual country-language directory into GWT with geo targeting
- Build region specific IBL's
- Keep the top level domain with global content geo-neutral.
Pros:
- Link power rolls up to the main site making it stronger in the overall rankings
- Google will be able to distinguish regional content based on the TLD of the referring IBL's (apparently Matt Cutts hinted at this at an SES)
Option C: My least favorite
Use country based IP tracking to either prompt the user to visit the regional site, or automatically forward them.
Pros: Not a bad thing to do for usability
Cons: Usually the site will be very poorly indexed, and only the global content will rank. Poor google bot...
Please add to this conversation, thereby helping to make this a resource for a question that I'm pretty sure pops up for every business looking to expand on the internet, internationally.
Thank you kind folks! -- Dev Basu
5 Comments
Comments
Option B -- with country TLD's 301-ing to the correct Option B location
International (other-language) versions should be fully translated, not a hodgepodge of partially translated mess. This way Google can figure out the language and will show it in regional Google versions properly even if it's just a section of the main site (.com).
Get some links from sites within the particulary country TLD to make the regional connection even more obvious, and that's it. Nothing to really worry about.
"Register each individual country-language directory into GWT with geo targeting"
Can you do this?
Agreed - The best practice is to definitely translate fully. As for your second question, it is infact possible to register subdirectories into GWT. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-mondaysmx-west-interviews-will-critchlow-on-ranking-foreign-domains
Ok I wanted to formulate some more comprehensive notes so this is a "rough" how we do it thing.
Presuming you have a corporation with central offices in let's say UK to make things easier but you also deal with Australia, Canada and that colony in the americas.
The way we do it,
A central .com which contains all the common information, general documentation etc, non country specific products also containing some country specific information like headquaters in each country info basically a person should be able to arrive on this site and be able to understand about the company, who runs it, how to contact them, and if they are in your region and if appropriate find support for the product and service.
Each country then has it's own site, with country specific information, contact details, promotions and if appropriate country store if selling online. Because the main site is the one you will be using as your big heavy weight in search engines (and as all the countries we are targeting are English speaking) our mini sites really have to just rank well for the basics.
At this point you introduce IP based targeting to throw people to their correct regional areas, but always supply a method of getting them back to the main site and the ability to select another location. I would suggest a cookie as well to remember their last country should they be the jet setting type. The big issue is the eccomerce side which in this scenario is where you are likely to have duplicate content issues. Within regional SERPs this is unlikely to be a problem after all if your search .co.uk version of Google it won't(shouldn't) include the .au version of the site so as long as you are not selling from the main .com (which we do want to appear in the regionals but won't appear in the "search only in country option of such searches) we have only a very limited problem.
An alternative is simply to have a single store with currency price changes but this is not normally suitable for example here in the UK importers like to add the 150% "because we can" markup on goods compared to our US counterparts.
Add a multiple languages and you start to get in real fun.
This perhaps isn't very clear explanation so I think I will grab some diagrams and try and explain a bit more clearly.
@Tnash
Great minds and all that Tim - I'm actually writing a post on this topic too. Lets try and get a debate going next week and see what comes out. As DailyMoolah says, there are a lot of people looking for answers on these points.