Different country, same language

[IM_Learner]

I have read the blog posts by Rand and other community members at YouMoz but i still have a question on trageting and domains / sub-directories usage.

Suppose, my business is located in France but my prospects are in US and UK as well. The issue is, they are not English speakers but French.

• If i use ccTLD, i don't think it will rank well in US and UK.
• gTLD will not be a good option for prospects in France.

What should i do?

Regards,

Shailendra

[Andy.Drinkwater]

So to confirm, you might want to target French speakers in the UK and US as well as France?

Just to check, have you had a watch / read of this?

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

"_Option B, of course, being subdomains. You can see Wikipedia doing this. They have en.wikipedia.org, de.wikipedia.org. You use that subdomain to segment the language and country targeting. The problem with subdomains, at least as I see it, is that sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes the subdomains don't inherit all the domain authority, trust, value that you might get from separate subdomains or from all of the content being on a single root domain. So, de.RogerMozbot.com, maybe that will be interpreted the same way that www.RogerMozbot.com or fr.rogermozbot, or ca.rogermozbot, but it might not. That can be a frustrating experience as well. _

Option C is probably the best way to do the domain authority collapse. We'll talk through some of the weaknesses here, too. But this is essentially saying, you know what, everything is going to be on RogerMozbot.com/DE. You can see some sites, Microsoft owns a wide variety of sites that do precisely this. They've got like an EN-US and an EN-UK, saying essentially that is our English language site targeting the UK and they do it all in subfolders, so the Microsoft.com domain is getting all of the domain authority assigned to it and hopefully that is passing through to these subfolders. In most cases, it is going to."

Regards,

Andy

[IM_Learner]

Agree but it's difficult for a sub-domain to compete with a main domain self as well as competitor. Wikipedia brings in lot of trust and authority that businesses rarely possess. Having said that, if i use ccTLD for France and sub-domain for US and UK, will that work for me? Will i be able to get rankins provided i spend optimum SEO resources on it?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I haven't actually used that approach myself at any point, having always favoured individual domains. However, if you go down the route of a ccTLD for France and sub domain for the UK and US, then all that is going to happen is that the two sub domains will share page rank, rather than if you were doing all three.

Regards,

Andy

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Shailendra, we're going through some of the older questions that are marked unanswered and following up to see if you still need advice, or if you'd made a decision and can share any of the results with us. Thanks!

[lonniea]

Have you considered using an IP GEO redirection script? Using a redirection 301 for custom users does not hurt your site's SEO according to Google. This is what i use for specific niche products and my SEO is strong as ever. At least for the past 8 months anyway.

[ClassifiedsKing]

I would get a non country specific TLD like site.com and assign it to the USA.

This way you can even have your entire site in French and receive all French queries in the USA.

How to: Go to Google Webmaster Tools > Site Configuration > Settings >  Geographic target, and click "Target users in" and select "United States.

[Seaward-Group]

Once you do this its worth looking into Google's new HREFLANG tag which they announced in December 2011.

Its worth reading this example as John Doherty has done some testing (even though I can't see it in his source code).

You'll still want a non county specific domain such as .com as Mozo suggested.

I'll be implementing HREFLANG into my sites this year, it'll be interesting to see the results.