Internationalization without losing SEO

[mobic]

Hi everyone !

For years we've had our e-commerce site targeting only our Brazilian customers, thus our domain name was domain.com.br . We've built a very strong AdWords account with the URLs within this domain and we've got a considerable SERP positioning as well.

Now we've also bought the domain.com (without the country extension ".br"), to target international clients. Our plan is to build the site using the following structure:

domain.com/en-US/
domain.com/es-ES/
domain.com/en-GB/

and also

domain.com/pt-BR/ (for our brazilian audience).

We thing that just dropping off the original domain.com.br and redirecting everything to domain.com/pt-BR/ would not be a good move, as we would need to redo all our AdWords campaigns (the domain is different) and would lose all our reputation/quality score. In terms of SEO I don't know how Google would react with the redirects (if we would keep the quality or not).

So our plan is to keep both the domain.com.br and domain.com/pt-BR/ working simultaneously, but then there's the problem of duplicate content. Should we use the "canonical" tag and if so, where should we say the original content is?

Has anyone been through this before, ie. expanding a country-level domain to a .com with multiple languages, but keeping the reputation gained by the original language.

Thanks for any advice!!

P.S. - We've also though about setting up the new structure with subdomains such as en.domain.com , es.domain.com, fr.domain.com, but we though it would work better using subdirectories. Any thoughts on this is also very welcomed.

[The_Sage]

The simple answer:

1. Keep your .br site for AdWords campaigns. Keep your AdWords landing pages live, but canonicalize them to the en-BR subdomain.
2. For the non-AdWords landing pages, do a 301 redirect from your .br site to the en-BR subdomain.

This allows you to move all your organic traffic to the en-BR subdomain while not losing your AdWords domain strength. Have your cake and eat it too!

Over time, take your highest performing ads:

1. Make 5 copies of your ad exactly as they are
2. Make 1 copy of your ad pointing at your new domain

This will send 15% of your keyword traffic to your new domain. Once Google sees that your new domain performs just as admirably as your old domain (a few weeks, at most), you'll start seeing the Quality Score for the new keyword rise. When you hit 10/10, dump the old domain. Your AdWords account is fully transitioned.

[MickEdwards]

"When you hit 10/10, dump the old domain."

10/10 QS - that's ambitious!

You can't have more than one domain used per ad-group.  This would only be advisable to have in a new separate campaign within the account.  But if I understand you right then you are competing for the same keywords so both campaigns go in the bid auction and can push up your CPC.

[Dr-Pete]

If it were a brand new site and the target markets were pretty equal (or the Brazilian market was relatively small), I think the sub-folder approach is a good bet. You could use <rel="alternate" hreflang...> for language-equivalent pages, and the combination of a .com plus language/country targeting should work fairly well.

In this case, though, since the Brazilian market is so strong, and you're already dependent on that .com.br domain, I think making the switch completely would be very high-risk. From an organic standpoint, I would advise against redirecting the .com.br domain to the Brazilian sub-domainfolder

I'd suggest either launching the new domain with  <rel="alternate" hreflang...>and no Brazilian sub-folder, or, as you said, setting up <rel="canonical"...>from the sub-folder to the .com.br domain (and keeping that the main site for Brazilian visitors). As the new site gains ground and you see how it performs, you can always switch them out later.</rel="canonical"...></rel="alternate" hreflang...>

As Michael said, make sure you're not double-dipping on the Adwords side with two domains in the same region. That could land your account in hot water. For now, if the .com.br stayed canonical for Brazil, AdWords should continue to use the .com.br site. You can set up regional/country campaigns for the .com site and target them specifically. That shouldn't be a problem and will give you time to build up the quality score and history on the new domain.