International SEO with 27 TLD`s

[Sie.SAS]

Hi Guys!

Would like to have your expert opinion on the structure of a big international company.

They are active over 27 regions, with all their own local TLD website.
Some of them are translated, but most of them are in English (big duplicated content, you know it).

Next to that they have a webshop on 4 subdomains of theses 27 local TLD's.

In my opinion it would be best to merge them all back to the .com domain and set-up a 301 redirect for all local TLD`s.
However what is your opinion on these 4 webshops? should I make them in the following structure : .com/region/shop (for example .com/fr/shop)

Thanks for the feedback!

Kind Regards

S.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Ideally, if you have different regions, you should have different areas of your site dedicated to that region. I would focus on the following items:
Use hreflang for language and regional URLs (Google)
International SEO (Moz)
International SEO Checklist (Moz)
How to Tell Bing Your Website's Country and Language (Bing)

Do not merge and 301 redirect, that is a bad user experience, especially if you have local listing links.

Also, set up individual Webmaster Tools for each section and look to Country Target those sections.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments - good luck!

[Sie.SAS]

Hi Patrick,

Thank you for your input.

Local listings are not really important.
The main goal is to increase online visibility for all regions.
The market is not really competitive.
Hardest part will be to manage all regions centrally as they do not have the manpower nor budget to optimize each cctld.

Next to that there will be no difference in the us website and the uk website so it will be hard to use canonical lang tags for that.
I was thinking of putting them all under the .com domain and sort them by language.

kr

S.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

You will still need to differentiate the content on the website based on the location and language you are trying to capture, regardless if it's on the same site or not. If you sort the site, even then you will still need to categorize content. For example:

www.example.com
www.example.com/uk/
www.example.com/fr/
www.example.com/es/
www.example.com/ru/
etc.

or

es.example.com
fr.example.com
ru.example.com
etc.

That being said, look into the information that I sent prior as this will help you structure your site and tell search engines where section targets what audience - UK english and US english are still two different languages in crawlers eyes as they are two different regions with two different audiences.

Good luck!

[katemorris]

Hi S.

Good issue you have here. I agree with your sentiment below, if you can't maintain separate ccTLDs, they might not be right for you. I am not saying don't do it, as a ccTLD is a strong signal still, but if it doesn't work for you, the structure you mentioned works just fine.

Just to make sure you have the right structure though, can you visit my tool here, answer the questions, and let me know what the result is? It's the best way I have found for determining international site structure.

Once you have that, we can discuss what the right structure is for you.

Kate