Subdomain or New Domain or Directory path?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I have a dilemma here. I have one of my clients that has its American website and would like to promote its business in canada(2 locations only vs more than 40 in the u.s).
What would be the best SEO decision here for the 2 Canadian locations:
- should i go for a new root domain? if yes why (www.example.ca)
- a new subdomain? if yes why (ca.example.com)
- or just following a directory path solution under the american site? (www.example.com/canadiancity)
Thanks
Ty
-
Agree with Justin, and would add a twist.
Consider buying the example.ca for the 2 Canadian cities and use them in your Canadian marketing. Just make sure they're 301-redirected to the appropriate directories on the main site. We Canadians do like to know that US-based companies actually have info that's specifically for us Also means that the call-to-action can be example.ca instead of example.com/city which might get a little cumbersome.
Google Webmaster Tools will let you geo-target a directory, so helpful to do that as well.. Getting links from other .ca sites is also a bit of a signal to SEs that the destination page is for the Canadian market.. Getting Canadian user reviews citing the Canadian directory would also likely help the localization process
Paul
-
Personally I would go for option 3, creating a /directory for the Canadian site, as the search weighting your root domain has will in part get passed onto the /directory as it is seen as another page on your root domain.
By going for a root domain or even a sub-domain you will effectively be starting your SEO efforts from scratch.
That said, there is some argument that a local domain would potentially rank better on local searches, however if you set up the directory route correctly by ensuring you have the localised address and phone number on the landing page, get inbound links to point to this page, social mentions etc that should to large degree counter that argument.
One other thing to consider is that all your SEO efforts on the /directory will help your domain authority and search weighting for the parent domain.
Rand did an great whiteboard friday a while back which explains the pro's and con's of the above options, so I would definitely check that out for a more in-depth explanation
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
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
-
New site migration (multiple sites into one + new domain)
Hi, I have read so many very helpful guides and experiences from you guys that will greatly help me but I have a few questions please. Our company has 3 sites, the main site and 2 sites for different product ranges: BrandProductName.com (main site - DA = 22 raking well for product name) Productname2.com (DA = 10 ranking very well for product name and little competition) BrandProductName3.com (DA = 10 poor ranking) We wish to bring all the sites into one with categories for the 3 different product. The main site is an e-commerece site whereas the other 2 are not (currently). On top of this as the main domain has one of the product names in it they wish to change the domain to be just Brandname.com. So the plan is to combine site 2 and 3 into site 1 and change that domain name. As you can imagine this is going to be quite a job. I am fairly happy with the steps required (having read all the guides and migrated many sites in the past) but with the added domain name change this is a little daunting. So my questions are: Should I merge the 3 sites into 1 and then changed the domain at a later point? Should I change the domain of the main site first and then merge site 2 and 3 in later? Should I just do it all together? Or based on the data i have provided do you disagree with the plan, what would you recommend? We are not in a massive rush to complete all of this so we have the time to plan and execute this when we are fully ready. Any help / advise would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csimmo0 -
How to Evaluate Original Domain Authority vs. Recent 'HTTPS' Duplicate for Potential Domain Migration?
Hello Everyone, So our site has used ‘http’ for the domain since the start. Everything has been set up for this structure and Google is only indexing these pages. Just recently a second version was created on ‘httpS’. We know having both up is the worst case scenario but now that both are up is it worth just switching over or would the original domain authority warrant just keeping it on ‘http’ and redirecting the ‘httpS’ version? Assuming speed and other elements wouldn’t be an issue and it's done correctly. Our thought was if we could do this quickly it would be easier to just redirect the ‘httpS’ version but was not sure if the Pros of ‘httpS’ would be worth the resources. Any help or insight would be appreciated. Please let us know if there are any further details we could provide that might help. Looking forward to hearing from all of you! Thank you in advance for the help. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R1 -
Moving to new platform
I am moving a site with great SEO and tons of pages to a new platform. Page names will all be different because they will not have the .html ending and names will change. It is on a system that does not support .htaccess. So, I don't have a way to do 301 redirects. How can I keep my competitive status? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bhsiao0 -
Merging Domains
Up until last week, we had separate domains for each of our 3 products. We've now merged two products to sit under one URL. The merge coincided with a CMS upgrade which effectively killed all of our old URLs save for the homepage. Is it best for me to 301 the old homepage to it's new place, as well as the rest of the old site's top pages to according pages on the new site? Or is there a better solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
Redirect gateway domain to main domain?
We have following scenario: Our main website - www.esedirect.co.uk which gets a 1800 visits a day with around half of those from organic search. It's been around since 2004. Our original website - www.ese.co.uk which gets around 30 visits a day and really is nothing more than a doorway page with links to the above site and couple of other sites that belong to the same company. This is an old domain that's had content since 1997 and has good domain authority with some good links. We are considering doing a 301 redirect from www.ese.co.co.uk to www.esedirect.co.uk to redirect the link juice. I welcome opinions to any possible negative effects this could give and how beneficial doing this will be. Thanks, Lee
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ese0 -
Does 301 redirect to a new domain removes penguin penality
Hi, One of my client has shady link profile and has hit by penguin update. I have confirmed the penalty using Google hack. Now, seeing his link profile, most of his links comes from blog comments which are from unmoderated blogs, and there is no way, we cant remove those comments. But without removing them, we cant get rid of the Google's penguin penality. So, i am planning on 301 redirecting to a new domain. But my question is, will the penality transfers, if i 301 to a new domain? What iff, if someone buys an old domain hit by a penguin update? Please clarify me, or if there are any alternatives to get rid of penguin update, please help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Indexxess0 -
New folder structure
We are in the process of relaunching one of our website's that will use a totally need folder structure. Previously we used mydomain.com/content/country/region/city/district/hotel_name/ Now we are changing to make the URL shorter, more precise - since we are using a new CMS, to be mydomain.com/gb_Hotel-Name/ My question is currently we've in the region of 10,000 pages indexed in Google. So we are going to have to create 301 permanent redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs. From your previous experience, is this the correct way of approaching the task.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeilTompkins0 -
How risky is temporarily moving high value SEO pages to a brand new domain?
Hi, I won't bore you with all the details but we may have to temporarily move part of an existing domain onto a separate domain for a couple of months. The content being moved includes most of our key branded and organic SERP pages. We've owned the new domain for years but it's never been live or indexed. After a couple of months, all the content will move back to the original domain but will move to a slightly different structure and different page names. Most of the page content will remain largely the same. I"m concerned, but don't really have any experience with this kind of thing. Can anyone shed some light. Perhaps on a scale of 1 to 5 you could give me your thoughts: 1. Should be fine, as long as you set up all the redirects properly 5. Do everything in your power not to do it! Using the new domain and other factors will be problematic. Thanks for any help you may be able to provide!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rfjc0