Best practice for multiple domain links
-
A site i'm working on has about 12 language domains - .es, it, .de etc.
On each page of every domain the header has links to every homepage. At the moment these are all set to no-follow as an initial step to stop potential link profile issues spreading around.
Moving forward i'm not totally sure how to handle these links. On one side I see and agree that no-follow is not necessary, but do-follow is just filtering out and weakening link juice. What is the best way to handle this scenario?
-
Hi Michael,
First, I need to clarify something. If you have .es, .it. de, those are not language domains, they are ccTLDs, targeted at different countries. .es is for Spain based sites, not Spanish language sites. If your translations are on ccTLDs, you are sending the wrong signals to Google and Bing. A ccTLD is always geo-targeted to that country and for some of these domains, the language you mean to target is actually much larger than that country. For instance, only half of the world's French speakers live in France.
If you are just meaning to translate your content, I'd suggest moving that to your main domain and putting them in subfolders, so www.domain.com/es www.domain.com/it (for italian, not Italy).
Once that is all settled, linking to the others in the footer is not hurting your link equity, but it isn't necessary either. For translated content, you should be utilizing HREFLANG and the Meta Content Language tag (for Bing) to note to the search engines what pages are translations. Then you simply need to give users a way to change the language either at the top of the page (preferred) or the footer.
If you mean to geo-target (developing different sites to target different countries), then my answers change completely, let me know if that's what you are trying to do here rather than just translate. If you're not sure what to do, check out this tool I made to help you pick the best international strategy. http://www.katemorris.com/issg
-
"Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both
example.de/
andexample.com/de/
show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use therel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines onrel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers."My scenario has completely independent domains served from a central CMS/database, so all that differs is the language content:
- example.co.uk
- example.de
- example.it
- etc...
I'm just not so sure I should be interlinking with every homepage on ever page of each domain with a do follow link, so hesitating on reverting.
-
Hi Michael, this article from Google might be useful https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
-
thanks David. No there is no group homepage as such - each domain is only different in language so each homepage is the same and important to rank in the relevant Google engine.
The only 'central point' as such is a .com which is a page linking out to each domain.
-
If you have a main homepage which acts as the group homepage you could rel canonical the other domains to the one main homepage so google knows which is the main page and which are not.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
If some rooted domains providing back links to a website are from the same server, would it cause an issue?
My client with alliedautotransport.com has a brother that owns hundreds of relevant websites that has great content on there, however, if we have him do some back linkings from those pages from the same server, would it hurt the rankings or make a difference?
Technical SEO | | SeobyKP1 -
Best practices for lazy loading (content)
Hi all, We are working on a new website and we want to know the best practices for lazy loading of google for content.
Technical SEO | | JohnPalmer
My best sample is: bloomberg.com , look at their homepage. Thank y'all!0 -
Where and how much; Schema best practices.
Couple of schema questions: Should I 'only' mark up the contact page, as this has the most information? What about the header and footer, should I tag everything there also? If I do mark up the header, footer, and contact page, I end up with 3 "LocalBusiness" entries in Google testing tool, is that bad?
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
I have a blog on a sub domain, would you move it to the rood domain in a directory?
I have a blog that preforms fairly well on a sub domain, but after reading a post that Rand made to the Q & A I am thinking about moving it to the main domain in a sub directory. What are your thoughts on this? Here are some stats on it. The blog currently gets about 5 x the traffic of the main domain. The domain is older, 2008 creation date. They pretty much register for the same keywords.
Technical SEO | | LesleyPaone0 -
Should I consolidate multiple domains to a single site with 301 redirects?
Our client wants all his sites to be re-designed and perhaps consolidated into one domain. What are the dangers of using 301s on all his already ranking and established domains to their new forward-slash location? If there are some good articles that describe this exact issue please post a link.
Technical SEO | | dsmdesign0 -
Preferred domain
In GWT it gives an option to do the following but which is best? and why? If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to http://example.com, we'll consider both links the same. | <label for="no_assoc">Don't set a preferred domain</label> |
Technical SEO | | jwdl
| <label for="use_www">Display URLs as ** www.example.com**</label> |
| <label for="use_nowww">Display URLs as example**.com **</label> |0 -
Linking Domains in Open Site Explorer Report No Longer Exist. Help.
Hello to all, I have a number of Linking Domains on our Open Site Explorer Report that no longer exist. I've run URL checks on just a sample of the list, and found that approx. 35% of that sample are from now dead Linking Domains. Can someone help? If these Linking Domains are defunct, how can I remove these? Does Google reflect negatively on these dead Linking Domains in our SERPs? Has anyone experienced this before? What action did you take?
Technical SEO | | -Al-0 -
What to do with domain?
I bought a domain a couple months ago while having delusions of granger. The domain is PR2, has around 30 decent backlinks, and a small amount of traffic. It also has one of our keywords in the domain name. I'm thinking of 301 redirect to our homepage. Is there a downside to doing this? We really could use the additional traffic on our site.
Technical SEO | | dmac0