International SEO Subfolders / user journey etc

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

According to all the resources i can find on Moz and elsewhere re int seo, say in the context of having duplicate versions of US & UK site, its best to have subfolders i.e.

domain.com/en-gb/

&

domain.com/en-us/

however when it comes to the user journey and promoting web address seems a bit weird to say visit us at: domain.com/en-us/ !?

And what happens if someone just enters in domain.com from the US or UK ?

My client wants to use an IP sniffer but i've read thats bad practice and should employ above style country/language code instead, but i'm confused about both the user journey and experience in the case of multiple sub folders.

Any advice much appreciated ?

Cheers

Dan

[TopFloor]

I want to start by saying I am not a user experience expert! I can tell you that from an SEO perspective, building international sites with subfolders can be advantageous because those international sites will inherit the main domain's authority and you can have one linking strategy that can benefit all areas of the site.

As for the user journey, I can provide some ideas for what we've done in the past with our clients. The first would be to have a window display on the main domain.com page that will allow a user to choose their country, and that will then forward them to the appropriate area of the site.

Another tactic we used was to purchase domain names that are unique for each country/language that would then redirect to the appropriate area of the site. We would typically only use these domains in offline marketing material (brochures, business cards etc..) and that way you can tell your prospective customers to visit you at domainuk.com instead of domain.com/en-gb/.

I hope this helps!

[Hannah_Smith]

Hey Dan,

The challenges with international sites are many and varied. The 'best' international strategy really depends on your resources

Here's how I see the advantages / disadvantages of each approach:

Subfolders - ranking may be 'easier' as domain authority is consolidated, but URLs are ugly

The sub-folder approach is often utilised where there's insufficient resource to market and maintain separate international ccTLDs (e.g. .co.uk, .com, .fr etc). The advantage with the subfolder approach is that you're consolidating domain authority - so the links to /en-uk/ (NB do use en-uk NOT en-gb incidentally) pass authority to /en-us/ and vice versa.

You're building one strong site, rather than trying to build two, three (or more) strong sites. However, as you've identified URLs get long and a bit ugly.

ccTLDs - Arguably nicer for users, but might not rank

Conversely, whilst ccTLDs (.co.uk, .com, .fr etc) are nicer from a user's perspective, you may struggle to rank if you're not able to spend sufficient time and resource on marketing and building links to these domains.

If you have the time and resources, I'd probably go down the ccTLD route, but if you don't, then the subfolder route is probably best.

IP redirects

In terms of the IP sniffers etc - be careful

Googlebot typical crawls from the US, and as such is likely to be redirected by your sniffer too. Essentially you're in danger of making any non-US versions invisible as far as Google are concerned. For that reason rather than doing a hard redirect I prefer Amazon's approach - if you visit Amazon.com from a UK IP you'll see a message which says: "Shopping from the UK? Visit Amazon.co.uk.".

That way users get the nudge to direct them to the right site and the bots can still crawl and index all of your content.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks for your comments but im looking directly into subfolder option (since TLD not an option and sub-domain considered bad practice from what i can gather after many days research on Moz etc

As a result this is what ill issue to a clients development team in this circumstance is as follows for where sites preferred structure is sub-folders/directories:

1. Implement IP sniffing on the home page ONLY

2. Then have Sub-Folders named after the official country abbreviations which will create a better user experience than both country and language i.e. domain.com/us/ as opposed to domain.com/en-us/ or domain.com/en-gb/ etc etc. This way it will only manipulate the homepage crawling and not site-wide indexing issues.

3) Target these folders to the correct countries in Google’s and Bing’s Webmasters Tools. Use the official country and language codes in the Hreflang mark-up as per point 4.

4. Set up site maps for each subfolder and rel="alternate" hreflang= according to Google guidelines. Here's a great tool to help with correct implementation: http://www.themediaflow.com/resources/tools/href-lang-tool/

5. Specify the content language/country by adding the 'country-language' meta-tags in the html head

6) Link between each country/language version in a crawl-able and visible manner (for SE and Users)

7) Create individual profiles in GWT & Bing Webmaster Tools for each country/language sub-folder and geo-target accordingly

Create individual profiles within GAnalytics for each country/language version and configure to track internal activity between different versions

9) Localise content so has US currency, contact details, spelling etc

10) Other localisation techniques ( such as marking up contact details with schema places code)

Note RE: HrefLang & Canonicalisation:

An extra advantage of using hreflang is that it will provide a degree of canonicalisation. Should canonical tag be employed in the future never so across language versions if site expand into non English versions. More info here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igbrm1z_7Hk