Foreign versions of sites

The construction of URLs is part of one big problem called " internationalization ". With the evolution of the Internet (it was definitely not invented for people suffering from Darwin syndrome ))) by TLDs (Top Level Domains from English - Top Level Domains, such as .com, .info, or .org) it became impossible to determine the purpose of the site (except perhaps special TLDs, such as .gov, .edu, .mil and some national TLDs).

In theory, the .com domain is intended for use only by companies and .org non-profit organizations. But in practice, everything is different. To this should be added the current tendency to use foreign national domains (ccTLDs) to shorten the name of addresses (for example: Bit.ly has no relation to Libya) as a result of all this it turned out that it is impossible to classify sites by TLD.

How in such a situation to act SEO specialist, who is faced with the task to optimize the "foreign" part of the site? Get ready to be a SEO researcher. In this situation, you are faced with a choice of three different options, which one to choose depends on the specific situation.

Task: Weigh out the options below and select the most suitable for your organization.

Subdomain - uk.site.com /

A good choice for sites where the influx of foreign visitors is expected from the main site.

Pros :

• Some weight (trust, popularity) of the root domain is preserved.
• Visitors will immediately understand that this is a foreign part of the site, for a particular country.
• Each such subdomain can be located on a server with the IP address of the target country.

Cons :

• While some important parameters are preserved in the weight of the domain, a significant number of them are still lost.
• When linking is more likely to make a mistake in the address. Many of the old habit will be typing "www".

National Domain (ccTLD) - www.site.co.uk

An excellent solution for sites with a strong link to the "native" country and a big difference from its foreign version.

Pros:

• Everything is very clear, intuitively easy to guess for which country this site is.
• High chances to get good links.
• Provides the ability for each domain to get the IP address of the country to which it is oriented. This may be important when ranking the search engines of this country.

Minuses:

• A completely different domain than its foreign friends, such as amigos and amis. This means that they do not share the benefits of incoming links.

Subcategory - www.site.com / uk / or www.site.com / en-gb /
(Why en-gb, see below in the paragraph about the content attribute in the meta tags)

A suitable way for already developed sites that are looking for an opportunity to enter international markets.

Pros:

• All links to any of the versions of the site (native or foreign) equally help in promoting the domain. It is like a growing wave that simultaneously raises all the boats.
• There is less chance of making a linking error, as this format supports standard convection www.example.com.

Minuses:

• From personal experience I can say that national search engines do not like such addresses very much.
• Potentially inconvenient for users who will search for your site in the national ccTLD domain zone (for example .co.uk).
• There is no possibility to place foreign versions of the site on the servers of the target country, with the ability to get the IP address of the desired country.

Other solutions:

Google Webmaster Tools:

Google provides services that help solve the problem of internationalization of sites. When you use the capabilities of the Google Webmaster tools, you have the option to select geotargeting your site. See below:

This does not work for all national domain zones (ccTLDs), but if your country is on the list, then changing this parameter will help a lot.

It should not be forgotten, as in most other things that are done for SEO, this is just a small half-measure that will not replace the main work on the internationalization of the site.

Tongue:

Language is one of the most important determining factors for search engines, it indicates the content belongs to a particular country. Many countries have a common language (for example, the United States and the United Kingdom) in which case there is a danger of facing the problem of non-unique content.

To avoid this, make sure that the search engine can easily determine which language group the site belongs to. To do this, optimize the URL using the methods described above, and other methods described below.

IP Addresses:

IP addresses are important when moving to national search engines. If you have a small or medium size website, first of all, take care to place it on the server of the country from which the main target audience is.

Meta tags:

By specifying the content attribute in the meta tag, you greatly simplify the language targeting of your website by search engines. It also serves as a clue for the search engine which version of the language was used. For example, for the English language in its British version you should specify the following:

<meta http-equiv = "content-language" content = "en-gb">

For a complete list of language indexes, see here: Microsoft's Developer Center.

Links from the websites of the country to which the foreign version of your site is targeted.

Among SEO experts, the debate about the effectiveness of this method is still ongoing. In my practice, I saw the obvious effect of this at the local search level (at the city level more than at the country level), but at the same time I did not notice any particular effect from such links at the international search level.

I recommend this method to be considered as secondary; one should not expect high efficiency from it. In any case, additional good links will never be redundant.

What should I do if I am lazy and do not want to bother with all of the above?

First, you need to change your profession (think about a career as a politician) or you can follow a few simple tips:

• Select an option with subcategories (example: www.site.com / en-us / page /).
• Define the country for the site in Google Webmaster Tools.
• For each version of the site, assign your item "to the home page".
• Automatic redirection of users to the correct version of the site depending on the country of the IP address from which the entry was made (in most cases this will be the English version, but not always).
• At the top of each page, make links to switch to a different language version of the site (many designers use country flags for this purpose).
• Register content attribute in meta tags for all necessary pages.

These are not universal methods, but in most cases they will have a positive effect.