What does it involve when creating subfolders, I believe I may have been given false info

[CoGri]

Hi, Please can you help, I believe I may have been given false information about the way sub folders are added to a site.

My company are a global company and we would like to start targeting individual country's more effectively with the use of sub folders using our existing domain.

However, I have been told by our external web development company that in order to do this we need to create separate websites (eg, www.mycompany.de, www.mycompany.en etc) and then re-direct them to folders within the .com site.

Is this the correct way to produce sub folders? If not how is it done?

I'm sure that this would be an incredibly expensive venture for us, but yet an incredible profitable one for them.

[AndieF]

It may be a bit of miscommunication on their part Thomas.

While there is likely to be development work for these country specific sites, you shouldn't have to get a new site built for each country, that's most likely insane!

What they're probably suggesting is to launch country sites at yourcompany.com/de/ but then registering domain names such as yourdomain.de which would just redirect to that - not for SEO use but just to protect your brand and for those who try to access it from those domains.

[LynnPatchett]

Agree with Andie, probably a slight miscommunication.

They also might saying that you will get more 'seo value' out of local domains which might be true to a point but depends on a number of factors both technical and procedural. There is evidence that stand alone country specific domains give more local 'value' in terms of rankings, but you need to weigh this against the need to build links and gain domain authority for all these separate domains individually rather than leveraging the existing domain authority of the main site which you would be doing if you used sub folders. Gianluca has written a good roundup of the considerations to take into account when looking at this kind of scenario and also includes details on geo-targetting in webmaster tools setup and using the hreflang attribute well worth a look: http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

[CoGri]

Hi Andie, I hope your right about their miscommunication.

I just wanted to pick up on when you said "While there is likely to be development work for these country specific sites", what kind of developments would need to be made?

Many thanks

[G2W]

Hey Thomas,

It is considered acceptable to create a country specific domain for each nationality your company is active in, in fact, this is what many large international businesses do; for instance Adidas has adidas.co.uk, adidas.de, etc.

However, it is not necessary to do so, and you would need to begin building links back up from "ground zero". It seems it would be both more SEO-friendly and cost effective to go ahead and use a new folder, or subdirectory, for each country.

Check out this previous Moz thread for more info.

This article may help explain directory structure to you a little bit.

At any rate...I'd recommend subdirectories as your best bet, so you're on the right track. Hope this helps!

[CoGri]

Hi Lynn, thanks for your post.

I highly agree with you that TLC's are the best option when it comes to SEO. Unfortunately, our company don't have the resources to build up each individual site, and hence would look to benefit from consolidating all of our links using one website.

Many thanks,

Tom

[CoGri]

Sorry not TLC's I meant TLD's

[Aleyda]

Hi Thomas,

The "ideal" scenario to target different countries is through ccTLDs: yourbrand.es, yourbrand.com.mx, yourbrand.co.uk. If this is feasible for you (from a technical and resources perspective), then you shouldn't use sub-directories, but show the content directly through your ccTLDs, targeting each relevant country with them.

On the other hand, if ccTLDs are too expensive for you at the moment, what you can do is to buy them so you can "protect" your brand for the future, and right now only use sub-directories for each country that you want to target inside your generic domain: yourbrand.com/es/ for spanish, yourbrand.com/uk/ for the UK, yourbrand.com/fr/ for France, and directly show your country targeted information through each one of them.

Since you will be using sub-directories to show the information to your international audience, then what you should link internally through your site and share with your users are the different sub-directories versions (not the ccTLDs), although since your ccTLDs will be "parked" you can 301-redirect them to their relevant countries sub-directories, just in case someone arrive to them.

Then what you can do is to geotarget each subdirectory through Google Webmaster Tools to the relevant country, where you can register each one of them independently.

Additionally, you can use the hreflang annotation in the different country versions, pointing out the language and country of each HTML.

For more information about international SEO please take a look at this checklist that I just published a few days ago at Moz, with the main aspects that you should take into consideration when going International.

I hope this helps and if you still have any question please let me know!

[CoGri]

Hi everyone,

Many thanks for replying to my concern.

However, not to be ungrateful, but rather than knowing which solution would be best, What I'm really looking for is how you set up the subfolders as I'm really unsure.

My third party web developers is telling me to just type in "en-us" (if I was to create an American page) into a field called folder everytime I build a "hidden page".

This doesn't seem right to me, I'm expecting that the developer needs to create these subfolders to which I can then work in. But to do it this way my web developer is telling me that I would need to create a ccTLD for each region and then 301 redirect them to a hidden page on the "main website".

This just doesn't seem logical, so if you could shed any light on this I would be really grateful.

Many thanks,

Tom

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Tom,

I think this is getting into specifics of your particular cms/site setup that we are not going to be able to easily answer.

it seems that your web guys are saying that you can set up a url that will contain /en-us/ by adding that info to the folder field. If this is the case then it should work in terms of giving you the language sub folder in the sense that you do not actually have to have a real en-us folder on your server to have urls like www.example.com/en-us/page.html. It is creating a virtual sub folder so to speak that exists only in the url but not as a real folder. In technical terms, all other things being ok this setup should work as expected as long as you recreate all the relevant pages of the site in the language you want and add the same folder name in that field. I assume you will probably have to edit all the onpage links also to reflect the /en-us/ url.

In term of the TLD/redirect setup again this seems specific to your setup, To be honest it seem like they are suggesting exactly the same thing in this case, I still don't see a reference to a 'real' en-us subfolder. It looks like  your site/cms is not ideally setup to handle languages and also that it is not easy to copy the entire site into a subfolder to have a second language version of the site available in this way. It is impossible to advise on the best way around this without having a much more thorough look at your setup, there are many variables involved.

[CoGri]

Thanks Lynn,

I appreciate this is a tough question to answer but I think you have a given me some great information.

Much appreciated,

Tom