What is the best way to manage multiple international URLS

[MartinJC]

Hi All

Our company is looking to expand into Europe (we are a UK based company) and we are planning to copy over our current .co.uk site to a .com one and create 301 redirects to maintain our SEO rankings.

With the .com domain we were looking to use this as our main ecommerce site and then create sites for different countries in Europe.

What we are unsure about is the best way to execute this in terms of the domain.

Would it be best to have it setup as a domain structure such as:

UK = www.example.com/gb/
Ireland = www.example.com/ie/
France – www.example.com/fr/ and so on.

Or would we be better served creating sub domains for each country, example www.gb.example.com.

Our main concerned is what is the best way to do this without hurting our SEO rankings.

Thanks for the help.

[benesmartin]

Hey Martin,

The best way would be like this:

_UK = www.example.com/gb/ _
_Ireland = www.example.com/ie/ _
France – www.example.com/fr/

If you will create sub domains, Google will see them as different domains. The Domain Authority would be split which could negatively impact your rankings.

Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Clear and simple

[gfiorelli1]

The answer of Martin is correct. Moreover, the use of subfolder at the start is a good way of giving some strength to the new geo-targeted versions thanks to PageRank flow through internal linking.

However, in the middle term, I suggest you to start monitoring if the new geo-targeted versions are earning enough traffic and conversions (both metrics must always go together) to eventually justify the migration, for instance, of the french version from the subfolder to a .fr domain name.

In the meanwhile, though, remember that, even if the new geo-targeted versions are living into the .com domain and earning authority from the backlinks earned by the .com site, you should consider them as if they were totally separate domains in terms of authority and relevance. In other words: you must build links for your /ie and /fr versions if you want them to really rank for competitive keywords.