New folder structure
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I would 301 all of the pages - to relevant new pages otherwise you will end up with a heap of 404s too if the old content just disappears. Blogs etc will have linked to them etc, you want to make the US as good as possible.
Mapping out the 301s will take time but be worth it in the long run.
I have done a website with 500,000 pages and mapped it and it worked well.
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For the new site we will be having international TLD like mydomain.de. Re the GB this is so we initially know what country the hotel is located in, and in some instances hotels have the same name, but in different countries.
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Okay. That makes sense but I would stick to one TLD if you could as you can run with folders and all of the country country sites (in the folder) will inherit all of the your one TLD strenght, makes things like link building easier too.
I would strongly recommend this. We have 6 international sites now and three are TLD (before I got here) and three folders and all of the folder sites are doing so much better than the TLD - the difference is amazing.
Even if you go with the new TLD I would miss out the GD_ bit - you don't need that at all if you have a TLD and makes no sense to me. I would rather have domain.com/city-hotels/hotel-name and optimise around this. You can then have landing pages around city hotels ie berlin hotels and pull in traffic this way.
Just a thought!
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Currently our domain is domain.com.
But we were thinking about having domain.de, domain.com.cn, domain.es etc. Are you saying this isn't the way to go ? We were looking to host these sites in the TLD country e.g domain.de hosted in Germany.
Examples where this has worked very well is TripAdvisor.
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Yes that is what I am saying. Definitely head down the domain.com/country-folder ie domain.com/uk
This has a lot of advantages around marketing, all of the links to this one domain help strengthen the entire site instead of having to having to link building to a number of new sites (which are starting from scratch in Google's eyes).
And you can still target them in GWMT by country too - which will definitely work. I am presuming they will be in local language as well?
Hope this helps.
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Yes, the other .de site for example will be 100% in the local language. What pitfalls do you feel we will have if we went the route of many TLD sites ?
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You are having to link build to multiple sites, they are start from zero in a search engines eyes (no matter how strong your current site is), your marketing materials cannont just mention domain.com etc.
Our use of folders with our strong domain strength has seen them launch and a month later be at the top of local search engines for hard to rank for search terms.
I cannot recommend strongly enough that going down the folder route is much better for SEO.
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I have to disagree, using the TLD's you dont need to worry about duplicate content.
See Matt Cutts
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Disagree with you on that one Alan. We have no issue with duplicate content and it is also what everyone (including those at MOZcon this year) recommend.
In fact I have an email from SEOMoz themselves recommending it.
TLD will get better over time but from experience running 7 sites (6 country sites) I would only ever use folders now.
I also disagree with your comments below about not 301ing all old content. You must do this when re-launching.
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Why must you 301 it, if they have no in comming links. There is no link juice to keep.
As for theTLD's, if they are duplicate content websites, which I assume they are, then you will have duplicate content problems. How will you get around that?
If yopu listen to the Matt Cutts video again, he says at the beginging, if the are all on the same TLD you will be pinged for DC
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I agree it would of worked, but if they had no incomming links, then it was un-necessary.
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The pages will still have some authority even without links, so I would definitely pass any little bit there. Social signals too if there are any that might not have been picked up. And I would also worry that while some tools say there are no links, I don't know one 100% reliable tool to tell you page X has no links.
If the local sites are in DE, FR, ES, or whatever, then they are not duplicate, they are local language. IBM, Apple to name a couple certainly do this route also.
Matt Cutts may say that, but we certainly do not suffer from this problem in the least. Another Cutts "we do this but really don't" comment maybe?!
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"The pages will still have some authority even without links"
they would if they were still there, but they no longer are, its just a ref to them in the index,
sure if they have some like or links, I agree
If they are in another lingo, they maybe, I dont know, but if they are in the same lingo, I still say they will be duplicate content
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I would 301 all the pages; it's "best practice," IMO.. The old pages had juice just from the fact that they existed; ie. inbound links aren't the only value you want to preserve. And, as ASR points out, best to avoid the 404s. The redirects are not just for the PageRank, but to allow search engines to easily reindex the content.
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They will reindex them, you dont need to 301 then to get them reindexed.
But they dont have any page rank if the no longer exist. you can only pass link juice though a link, if the page no longer exists then you can not link from it, and there is no link juce juice to pass.
If that were true, you could keep moving a page and its link juice would keep rising.
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A 301 will pass 80% of the page authority over. You also don't leave any 404s.
I'm not sure why you are so against 301s? It's tidier, "best practice" and not hard to do. Why risk missing something out that might prove the difference?
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"A 301 will pass 80% of the page authority over."
No a 301 will pass 85% of its incomming link juice, you are redireceting the inomming links not the page
A 301, passes 85% of its PR from the page to another page though a link from the page.
But if the page no longer exists it can not. Once you delete that page, it no longer has any page rank, but the pages that may link to the old page are still passing PR, so in that case you can redirect those links to the new page. But you cannot redirect the non existing page or any authority it had to the new page.
Read Google’s algorithm, I assure that is not how it works.
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
By the way, all links pass 85% of link juice it has though its links, if the link hits a 301 redirect, it loses 15% again. This is so you don’t get infinite loops.
Imagine if you could move a page and somehow gets its PR by doing a 301 redirect. You could keep moving it and it would keep getting more PR.
If I could use an analogy
If you have a store and Bob has a store, and Bob closes down, but puts a sign on his door telling his customers to go to your store, you will get his customers, but you don’t get his stock. And if he had no customers you get nothing.
Anyhow if you read the link you will see that I am correct -
Ooops, should have said link juice.
As you can all see Alan and I have different views on this but at least you have a range of views Tommo!
Good luck - hope it all goes well.
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either way, it would not hurt to 301 all.
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Hi ASR, can you advise more on how you moved to the new folder structure ? Did you leave old pages in place, launch new site, then go through all old URLs and 301 them to the new URL ?
The problem I have is the new folder structure is not a standard pattern, so any 301 will need to be done manually.
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