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Hi Rob, Virginia & others, I know this question and answer is way over a year old, however it's in my opinion still highly relevant. I just read this article, suggesting that a gTLD is better than having ccTLD's when wanting to become multinational. https://www.branded3.com/blog/choose-subdomain-subfolder-cctld-international/ I have a small startup project with a patio heater company, where I have a gTLD (.com) and right now also a ccTLD (.dk). These two domains of course link to each other but infact they are two separate Shopify stores. DA is around 20 on the ccTLD and 10 on gTLD. Now I want to expand to Poland, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands (I have purchased these ccTLD's), so my question is now, which is to prefer SEO-wise for the optimal setup in each country? Go with the gTLD and having the other languages served as de.domain.com, pl.domain.com etc.? Having a CNAME setup on each ccTLD, so the shop will be on domain.pl, domain.de etc. and still "in the background" being served from the gTLD? I hope somebody can point me in the right direction. Best regards, Jens

So glad to help, and wishing you good luck!

It's my pleasure! It sounds like you are asking some really good questions of yourself, and being observant! That's definitely a great start. I'd say a podiatrist has some pretty excellent leeway in presentation, particularly if you are serving a great many athletes who want to meet health goals. I'd suggest coming up with some personae for your main customer "types" to get a sense of where that might take your content. And good for you for blogging! If it turns out that most of your colleagues are being somewhat stuffy in their presentation of foot health management, you, with your pleasant personality, might have a chance to set your brand apart by presenting your practice as one where you are personally ready to help patients meet their physical fitness goals, with happy feet instead of tired dogs.

Yeah they really suck though. They are mean to patients and do a bad job and overcharge them.  So it's a good thing really.  I sound evil but my team do really beautiful work for fair fees and make hundreds of people a week smile and feel better about themselves.  So every patient I acquire I see as being saved from potential dental disaster at the hands of some incompetent or greedy practitioner.  It's a cool culture. I feel sorry for our competition because I don't ever want to see businesses fail.  But some of them don't deserve to be in business.  Not in 2018.

Absolutely agree on the branding push. There needs to be a long term strategy. In terms of working out the business case for the blog and working out ROI: If you have a link to your product on your blog and you track it. When it converts, there is a ROI! To work out the ROI, look at the number of visitors to the blog, then number of people who clicked the link, then number of people converted and what that is worth to you. Let's say from 100 visitors, 2 clicked the link and 1 person converted to buy our product worth £10. From 100 visits you would get £10 which means each visitor to your website is worth 10p. If you can generate visitors for less than 10p each, then I would say there is a return on investment with your blog!

Exactly that's my point

Good luck on that, Patrick. The business may want to consider consolidating their websites so that all branding and marketing efforts are feeding a single super site instead of being bucketed into two sites.

Absolutely agree! Thank you!

Check for yourself. Pick a sentence, then copy/paste it into a google search box between quotation marks and search. You will probably find that same sentence on other websites.

Oh yes it does! Thanks for the ideas!!

I like your thinking, Nicholas! Some good tips here and intriguing predictions. Thank you so much for contributing to this thread.

I'm so glad if that helped, Ed!

Thanks, Miriam Ellis

Always is pleasure to help : )

Hello I was able to find your site and took a look at it. Indeed some pages are not indexed. It seems like it's because they are very similar in content. Your Location pages don't offer much unique value besides just changing the city name and some of the content a little bit. I'm sure Google is looking at it as low quality content, that duplicates the same purpose. If you want to index and rank separate city pages they need to be super unique and specifically add value for the user in each location. The content feels spun (created programmatically) even though it might be manually created, there is still a lot of just copy/pasting etc. Think about what it would take to have a 100% unique page, with unique content for each location (testimonials, photos, information, maps, service info etc). If they are not the city pages that you're referring to, please link to an example so I (and others) can take a closer look! Hope this helps!

There's more on my blog guerrillahub.com

Hey Gabe, Great topic, and those competitors with EMDs outranking one are seriously aggravating. You've done a really good job of brainstorming the pros and cons. Pretty much 100% of the time, I advocate for a single site approach. The potential for brand building, authority building, ease of management and protection from the ever-changing whims of Google's filters make this the smart choice. Some things to ask the client, which I'm going to pretend is called R&B Realty: Won't it be easier for you to build awareness of R&B serving all realty needs, than to expect consumers to somehow remember that they should go to rbfarmrealestate.com or rbhomesforsale.com? Don't you just want them to think of RBrealty.com for all of their needs? Is there anything about the present domain that is ruling out building awesome farm-related content? For example is the domain something like homesforsalechicago.com right now? If so, could it be that you do need to purchase a new domain, but that it needs to be a branded domain that can encompass all present and future services? Imagine if in future R&B wants to expand to commercial real estate or luxury real estate. Would they then need 4 domains? That's a rabbit hole you don't want to go down. Are you ready to invest? Provided that the current domain isn't making it somehow impossible to believe one could buy farm real estate from the company, I would present the company with a plan for creating the best possible section on the website for farm real estate. I would consistently publish best-in-class articles on this topic until I'd convinced Google that farm real estate is part-and-parcel of my brand, just as much as residential real estate is. I would be sure this content was highlighted from the homepage onward, and was built with good UX and good CTAs in mind. I'd invest a great deal in this, and make my pages rank highly for core terms. I'd also consider offsite marketing initiatives (both online and off) that would begin to build awareness of my brand's association with farm properties. I see far more opportunities than limits with this approach, and with the right plan, you should have no problem creating a sterling strategy for the client. Hope these thoughts are helpful!

Hi imjonny123, Yes thanks, hope your doing well too.  if you have the same content you have already on the main domain, no issues in using noindex and you will avoid duplicate content issues at the same time.

Ups! My mistake, was not aware of that article from google. Im deepl sorry if i´ve confused you. Yeah! Following the recommended precautions and steps in the cited articles you will be perfect! There is no need to do any further than that. Best luck! GR.