Correct site internationalization strategy

[robertorg]

Hi,

I'm working on the internationalization of a large website; the company wants to reach around 100 countries. I read this Google doc: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en in order to design the strategy.

The strategy is the following:

For each market, I'll define a domain or subdomain with the next settings:

1. Leave the mysitename.com for the biggest market in which it has been working for years, and define the geographic target in Google search console.
2. Reserve the ccTLD domains for other markets
3. In the markets where I'm not able to reserve the ccTLD domains, I'll use subdomains for the .com site, for example us.mysitename.com, and I'll define in Google search console the geographic target for this domain.

Each domain will only be in the preferred language of each country (but the user will be able to change the language via cookies).

The content will be similar in all markets of the same language, for example, in the .co.uk and in .us the texts will be the same, but the product selections will be specific for each market.

Each URL will link to the same link in other countries via direct link and also via hreflang. The point of this is that all the link relevance that any of them gets, will be transmitted to all other sites.

My questions are:

• Do you think that there are any possible problems with this strategy?
• Is it possible that I'll have problems with duplicate content? (like I said before, all domains will be assigned to a specific geographic target)
• Each site will have around 2.000.000 of URLs. Do you think that this could generate problems? It's possible that only primary and other important locations will have URLs with high quality external links and a decent TrustRank.
• Any other consideration or related experience with a similar process will be very appreciated as well.

Sorry for all these questions, but I want to be really sure with this plan, since the company's growth is linked to this internationalization process.

Thanks in advance!

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Everything seems good to me. Just make sure that you use proper hreflangs or canonicals for content, which can potentially be duplicate, make sure that you have proper/correct sitemap and there are no problems with crawlability and accessability.

Good luck

[robertorg]

Thanks Dmitrii.

Any other opinions will be appreciated aswell, this process is really important for this webpage.

[gfiorelli1]

You wrote this, and I'd like you to explain it better:

Each domain will only be in the preferred language of each country (but the user will be able to change the language via cookies).

Why people - for instance Italians - should be even feeling the need to switch the language from Italian to English?

Sincerely, I find it useless.

What you should do is doing like Amazon does: let people visit whatever version they want. For instance (I live in Spain), when I am in the UK and I want to buy something in Amazon, I visit amazon.es. Even if Amazon knows that I'm in the UK, and advices me that maybe I may prefer to shop in the .co.uk website, it lets me stay, navigate and buy from the .es one.

You, then, say this:

Each URL will link to the same link in other countries via direct link and also via hreflang. The point of this is that all the link relevance that any of them gets, will be transmitted to all other sites.

This is not that true. At least, not literally. In fact, the PageRank any page of yours will earn via internal and external links will just partly be passed to the other country versions corresponding pages. This because the PageRank flows through every link present in a page, both internal and external links, and "evaporates" in case of nofollow links.

About your questions:

• Do you think that there are any possible problems with this strategy?

Overall it is correct (being the only doubt the "cookie" thing you talked about)

Is it possible that I'll have problems with duplicate content? (like I said before, all domains will be assigned to a specific geographic target)

If you use the hreflang, you should not have issues related to duplicated content.

Each site will have around 2.000.000 of URLs. Do you think that this could generate problems? It's possible that only primary and other important locations will have URLs with high quality external links and a decent TrustRank.

Having millions of URLs should not be a problem... if it was so sites like Etsy, Home Depot or Amazon would be suffering it, wouldn't they? When it comes to Big Sites, the most important thing is having a very solid architecture and work very well everything internal linking.

Any other consideration or related experience with a similar process will be very appreciated as well.

When implementing the hreflang annotations, try not using as many hreflang as country versions are present.

In other words, apart the home page (for obvious localized brand visibility and for avoiding having, for instance, the .com version outranking the local one for being more authoritative), in the internal pages use only the hreflang annotation in order to suggest Google what version to show in case of countries sharing the same language.

For instance, let's take that www.dominio.com/page-a is in English and targeting the USA, then the hreflang annotation would be only relative to all the others URLs of pages in English and targeting others English speaking countries, but you should not add the annotation for the spanish speaking versions or italian.

Why? Because the languages are different and such a strong signal that you don't need to explain to Google that it should present to Spanish speaking users in Spain the URL of the spanish country version instead of the American English one.

[robertorg]

Thanks so much Gianluca, I'll take all your ideas into account.