SEO geolocation vs subdirectories vs local search vs traffic

[facupp1]

My dear community and friends of MOZ, today I have a very interesting question to you all.

Although I´ve got my opinion, and Im sure many of you will think the same way, I want to share the following dilemma with you.

I have just joined a company as Online Marketing Manager and I have to quickly take a decision about site structure.

The site of the company has just applied a big structure change. They used to have their information divided by country (each country one subdirectory) www.site.com/ar/news  www.site.com/us/news . They have just changed this and erased the country subdirectory and started using geolocation. So if we go to  www.site.com/news  although the content is going to be the same for each country  ( it’s a Latinamerican site, all the countries speak the same language except Brazil) the navigation links are going to drive you to different  pages according to the country  where you are located.

They believe that having less subdirectories PA or PR is going to be higher for each page due to less linkjuice leaking.  My guess is that if you want to have an important organic traffic presence you should A) get a TLD for the country you want to targe… if not B)have a subdirectory or subdomain for each country in your site.

I don’t know what local sign could be a page giving to google if the URL and html doesn’t change between countries- We can not use schemas or rich formats neither…So, again, I would suggest to go back to the previous structure. On the other hand…I ve been taking a look to sensacine.com and although their site is pointing only  to Spain

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They have very good rankings for big volume keywords in all latinamerica, so I just want to quantify this change, since I will be sending to the designers and developers a lot of work

[Ikusa]

I can't seem to figure out your specific question, but I do agree that one news page with dynamic, location-based links will be a more challenging site to rank.  Obviously, engines are accustomed to sites for multiple languages and countries.  The extra subdirectory is of no real concern to the engines...they "rank pages, not sites" right?

Of course, managing various news pages could be a technical headache, which is prompting this change.  That said, I think your approach is going to be easier for search engines (those dynamic links, ouch!).  Sadly we have to balance SEO and such with business needs...

[gfiorelli1]

Hi.

Normally changing the content but not the URL via scripts is not a good idea in International SEO. A good example of this use is Dropbox, which geolocalize different languages but does not change the URL of its homepage, which remains always dropbox.com.

Regarding Sensacine.com (a site I know well, because I live in Spain), the success it has also in Spanish Latin America is quite surely due to its very good link profile, and surely not to meta tags like:

because these kind of geotargeting metas are not taken into consideration by Google, but only by Yahoo! and Bing (and also for them they are not the most relevant geotargeting signals).