Domain structure for US Local Sites

[theLotter]

We are planning on opening localized versions of our website throughout the world and in the US.

For countries these websites will be:

www.site.co.uk

www.site.fr

etc....

For the US would it be better to add the states onto part of the domain name or use a sub-folder.  What is the advantage/disadvantages of each?

Meaning, should it be:

nj.site.com

or

site-nj.com

[TakeshiYoung]

The best practice would be to use subfolders.

Subdomains (nj.site.com) are treated by Google in many aspects as separate sites, so the domain authority from nj.site.com won't transfer to say ny.site.com. You would basically have to duplicate your SEO efforts across 50 subdomains and not benefit from having one strong domain authority site.

Different domains (site-nj.com) would be the same problem, except you would also have to pay for 50 different domain name registrations. Plus, Google has devalued exact match domains so that having keywords in the domain doesn't carry quite as much ranking benefit as it used to.

Bottom line, go with subfolders for the optimal SEO site structure.

[MoosaHemani]

I would highly agree with Takeshi on this… you should try to focus on sub folders that should look something like this (http://ww.example.com/france) and for UK the URL should be something like this (http://www.examle.com/UK)

Using separate domains and sub domains are treated as separate domains to Google and your SEO efforts might not transfer from one to another… where as in sub folders your SEO effort will help one another and less work will give you more results in terms of more traffic, sales and SERP rankings…

[TakeshiYoung]

It may make sense to have separate sites for the different countries since Google does favor country specific TLDs for searches within a country.

[NakulGoyal]

When you do country level sites, you might only be doing a handful. But when you get to US States, you are probably eventually going to do all the 50 states. That said, that's too many websites. I totally do a sub-folder. No questions. On country level sites, I'd do CC TLDs if that makes sense for your business.

I hope this helps and clarifies.

[theLotter]

Thanks for all the responses.  I can't use subfolders because that is the structure of the languages on the site

www.site/fr

www.site/es

etc....

We are launching subsites for legal reasons so need to have them.

Any other suggestions?

[TakeshiYoung]

Maybe you can use cookies to set the language, instead of hard coding it in the URL?

Subfolders are the optimal structure from an SEO perspective. With any other structure you will not benefit from the domain authority of having a single site, and will have to duplicate much of your SEO efforts.