Different domains for multilingual website

[BruLee]

Hey guys,

A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language.

So for example:

word1word2.com for the english version

word3word4.com for the french version

word5word6.com for spanish version ....

Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/...

Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs.

Thank You.

[Keszi]

Hi BruLee,

In your case I would advice you to check the article of Danny Dover. It might be a little-bit old - 2009 - but it covers the pros and cons of choosing how to host the different languages.

I have experience with the version where you have one big site and different languages are hosted on different subfolders, which was good, but we could have done better.

If you have enough resources to have better link building campaigns I would go with the different ccTLD for each language.

I hope this helped,

Istvan

[BruLee]

Hello Istvan,

Thank you for your response. However, don't you believe that the newly implemented HREF Lang tag was done for to resolve this specific kind of problem?

Having different ccTLD's for each language but keeping the same site would result in duplicate content am I right?

Thank You.

[Keszi]

Yes, that would be a signal. But the idea I have mentioned in my previous answer was to "host" different languages on different ccTLDs.

English version  - .com or .co.uk (if you are targeting the UK)

French version - .fr

Spanish version - .es

We had 9 languages back that at that company and for each language we had different subfolders: /en/; /fr/; /it/ and so on... which gave us the possibility to geo-target each subfolder from Google Webmaster Tools, but we have seen our competitors next to us(and even before us) in most of the cases with their ccTLD version.

"Having different ccTLD's for each language but keeping the same site would result in duplicate content am I right?"

If you plan to keep the current versions + have new ccTLD versions then yes, you have a duplicate there. What you could do, if you migrate to ccTLD version is the create 301 redirects from the old URL to the new.

Istvan

[BruLee]

The problem is that the domains have been online for years and they are all .com domains. So we will need to start fresh with new ccTLD domains.

Also, for the duplicate content problem, UK and US would be considered as duplicate content as both are in English, unless we create content for each website.

Thank you for your help Istvan.