Multi Regional website - Folder strategy

[AymanH]

Hello Seomoz people !

I've been struggling for some time now with an international website project.

It's gonna be an:international website with joomla.

To sum up:

• We have an international company
• The company has 13 subsidiaries worldwide (same products, different names)
• The company doesn't have enough resources to get 13 independent websites
• Some subsidiaries work in one country / one language, some others on a region (several countries, several languages)

Thanks to your community we decided to:

• Get a main website company.com

• Get subsidiaries folders (middle east, oceania and south america will be easier to link to their subsidiary)

  • .com/asia
  • .com/middle-east
  • .com/oceania
  • .com/south-america
• • .com/uk
  • .com/usa
  • .com/fr
  • .com/es
  • .com/de
  • .com/ma
  • .com/dz
  • .com/it

We also need to:

• Get some websites in different languages
  • .com/asia-cn
  • .com/asia-en
  • etc.

Now how do we do to manage:

• Regional websites (the first 4th on the upper list)

  • Google allows to affect a website to a country not region
  • Will they compete with the .com ?
  • How do we set up them for google ?

• How do we avoid duplicate content and keep local ranking

  • .com/asia-en/services1.html will have the exact same content that_.com/services1.html_
  • If we use canonical from _.com/asia-en/services1.htm_l to _.com/services1.html , d_oes that mean /asia will not rank in asia ?

Hope you can help us to figure us the best solution for this good project !

Thanks a lot.

Florian

[TommyTan]

Hi Flo,

You can use he Geo Target Tool in Webmaster to tell Google that .com/asia-en/services1.html is targeting only people in Asia.  You can use this for each of your location pages to tell Google each page has a specific Geo target and this should avoid duplicate content.

Furthermore, you can also use the href=language tag in HTML to tell Google this page will be in english or spanish and targeting different locations.  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/05/multilingual-and-multinational-site.html

Using these two tools mentioned above hand in hand will help you avoid duplicate content issue within the same website (company.com).

I believe that if you use the geo-target tool in webmaster, it wouldn't compete with your .com website.  Your country subfolder sites will be found by people in that country via search engine and your .com website will be found in US.  They are targeting different location; therefore, I don't see any conflicts.

Hope this helps.

[AymanH]

Helo Tommy Tks for your reply. However I have a couple of more questions regarding your answers " Geo Target Tool in Webmaster to tell Google that .com/asia-en/services1.html is targeting only people in Asia " -> But in Google webmaster tools I canno't specify asia as country, right ? http://awesomescreenshot.com/050wdlae8 " the href=language tag " -> This is fine, but it will not with region, right ? -> And if asia can be considered as TLD , is there any way to do the same with africa and middle east ? TKs a lot !

[gfiorelli1]

Regions like Asia and Europe can't be geotargeted in Google Webmaster Tool.

Neither you can use hreflang for regions/continents.

[AymanH]

So what can we do for those ones ?

[TommyTan]

Hi Flo,

I thought I replied to your comment but I guess it didn't go through.

Like Gianluca said, you can't target Asia/Europe.  Sorry for not making it more clear in my response above.  You can create different website targeting .hk .jp .kr.

The best way to go to either create different subfolders you mentioned in your question for each country or purchase the ccTLD for each country you want to target.

[AymanH]

Hello

Thanks for your help.

I think the best in my case gonna be to keep the strucutre /middle-east and /asia but to use a robot.txt for those subfolders (apart the who are we page).

As explained I have to work also on the brand names which are different in those cases.

So the main SEO effort will be on the .com.

The other sub-folders will be more for users.

Tks for your valuable help !