How to set-up international URL structure for e-com shop?

[JeromeEcom]

Hi There

We're currently running a successful international online store on a .com domain. We are located in Europe but most of our visitors are coming from the U.S. We display all the prices of our products in USD to all our customers.

We are considering to set up multiple stores for different regions, so we can display different currencies per region, shipping methods, banners etc.

We were thinking about the following set-up:

• eu.domainname.com (for EU excl. UK, currency €)
• uk.domainname.com (for UK, currency GBP)
• www.domainname.com (For rest of the world, currency $)

All shops are in English. Would this be a good set-up? What should we take into account to avoid duplicate content?

Kind regards

Jerome

[donford]

Hi Jerome,

I actually thought I responded to this from the office, but I must not have hit submit.

If the goal of these new domains is simply to provide ease of use to the consumer, I suggest you use parameters instead.

Example of using parameters: Recommended if goal is to help users by showing local currency.

yoursite.com is the default (USD)
yorsite.com?cur=EUR  (EURO)
yoursite.com?cur=GBP (Pounds)

You would then set up canonical tag on your pages that could accept this parameter to point to the default (point to itself). This would prevent any duplicate problems.

Sub directories make more sense if you're going to localize the domain for specific regions. Like language, currency and locations. Since you're using the same language, and likely not setting up servers / locations in those areas, I feel your best bet would be to use parameters. Most eCommerce Suits offer this in one way or another, and its not particularly hard to code if you are not using a CMS.

My thoughts,

Don

[JeromeEcom]

Hi Don

Thanks for your quick reply.

Unfortunately we are not able to set-up parameters like you describe. We are using a SaaS platform and this functionality is not included.

Furthermore, we'd like to localize in terms of shipping, payment and marketing. Therefore we need to create 3 different shops. Setting this up is not a problem and this can be done very fast, however we need to know how to set-up the URL structure of the 3 shops.

Please find below the URL structure of Topshop as an example:

US: us.topshop.com (currency USD)
UK: www.topshop.com (currency GBP)
NL: eu.topshop.com (currency EUR)

Most of our traffic is coming from the U.S. What should we take into account to avoid duplicate content, since all product and category pages have the same content?

Thanks in advance, Jerome

[StephanSolomonidis]

Hi Jerome,

1. If your SaaS vendor allows it, you should use subfolders for the countries instead of subdomains. So www.example.com/uk instead of uk.example.com, for example. The reason for this is that the subdomains won't share link equity as effectively.
2. You should implement hreflang -- Moz has a great introduction to the topic here -- on all equivalent pages (I'll explain what I mean by that in a second).
3. By all means choose sensible default currency options (for example GBP should be the default currency in the /uk directory), but preferably do allow users to change that default value if they wish. If they do change it, do not direct them to a different URL. Use a cookie to store their currency preference.

Now, more on 'equivalence'. The point of hreflang is so that you can have identical or very similar pages targeting different country/language combinations, and have Google discard these pages as duplicate content. The pages don't have to be completely identical. For example, Americans and Brits use different spellings for common words. If my product was online math(s) lessons, my two equivalent URLs may look like this:

• www.mystore.com/us/online-math-lessons
• www.mystore.com/uk/online-maths-lessons

The language, tone, and general marketing pitch of each page may be different, and tailored to their respective audiences, but they're each fundamentally selling the same product. So I would add the following hreflang tags to these pages (both tags on both pages):

Be careful to use the correct country codes: en-UK is not valid, for instance, but en-GB is. Read Google's guidelines on the topic.