Subdir vs Subdomain vs ccTLD

[sah90]

Hello Community,

I'm running a .com website with India targetted audience on Webmastertools from 2 years. Now I want to start a separate zone for US.

.us domain is not available for my domain right now. So what is your suggestion for best results:

1. domain/us (Subdirectory)

2. us.domain (Subdomain)

3. new domain (separate website)

I think Subdomain can work great if I will pass place a header link sitewide. Or that can reduce authority as mentioned on few blogs?

Let me know your thoughts

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi

There has been a slew of these types of questions recently - everyone must be expanding worldwide!

Go with:

domain.com/us

Then make sure you implement hreflang tags sitewide. These must self-reference and then reference the other version of the page.

This is exactly what the hreflang tag is for, to tell Google that each subfolder and page is targeting a different country and possibly language, and so is not duplicate content.

If a page exists like this:

yourstore.com/category/product-1
yourstore.com/us/category/product-1

As long as both pages have an hreflang tag pointing to themselves and the other version you will be absolutely fine, no duplication, no worries!

Read more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

You could then expand internationally with

yourstore.com/uk/category/product-1

and consider moving to

yourstore.com/in/category/product-1

For India at some point. I hope that helps,

Regards

Nigel

[sah90]

Thanks, Niger

Is it important to do "yourstore.com/in/category/product-1"

As my current traffic is to "yourstore.com/category/product-1" for India and redirecting may impact rankings.

[Nigel_Carr]

I don't think so - you can leave as is.

At some time in the future if you start adding a lot of countries it might look more sensible, but I wouldn't do it straight away.

Regards

Nigel