Top Level Domains

[RADMKT-SEO]

Howdy Everyone,

I have a website that will span multiple countries. The content served will be different for each country. As such, I've acquired the top level domains for different countries.

I want to map the cop level domains (e.g. domain.co.uk) to uk.domain.com for development purposes (LinkedIn does this).

I'm curious to know whether this is adviseable and if mapping a country-specific TLD to a subdomain will maintain local SEO value.

Thanks!

[NickPateman81]

If I read your first paragraph right, you have multiple ccTLDs for the same company? That will make your SEO efforts a lot more difficult and is only really appropriate in rare cases (Amazon for instance).

To make your life a lot easier, I would suggest using directories instead. i.e. domain.com/us, domain.com/au, domain.com/uk as more PageRank passes from the root level to these directories than from root level to the subdomain. Then it comes down to geo-targeting.

To sum up:

Directories > Subdomains > Unique Domains (purely in terms of SEO).

When you say you want to map the top level domains, do you mean redirect domain.co.uk to uk.domain.com? afaik, redirecting .co.uk to uk.domain would not retain any local UK SEO value directly - other UK signals may come with the redirect though.

[perfectweb]

I agree that directories would be a better way to organise your content.

I would aim to get people to use www.domain.com/uk etc. as a linking source, but potentially still use www.domain.co.uk in offline marketing and use 301 redirects to www.domain.com/uk. If that makes any sense?

The TLD will certainly have offline local value even if it doesnt have SEO benefit.

[NickPateman81]

Gary has a point that considering offline marketing is important in many situations. Seeing .co.uk instead of /uk definitely gives a more local feel.

Great response anyway, to follow on from that:

If you want to use www.domain.co.uk in offline marketing then you may want to consider using a rel canonical redirect. It may be a bit more time consuming to set up (there are different ways you could go about doing this) but it may help from a conversion point of view. Probably minimal I admit, but people generally don't like being redirected.

Either way, I wouldn't worry about what domain they use as a linking source if your redirects are set up correctly.

[RADMKT-SEO]

Thanks guys, great insights!

@Nick

1. I do have multiple ccTLDs for the same site. The content for each, however, will be significantly different.
2. By 'domain-mapping' I meant actually getting into the DNS records and mapping the ccTLD URL to a sub-domain
3. Rel canonical redirect: I'm assuming that the .com.uk would be the canonical page? If this page is the canonical page, and the com/uk/ is the 'discounted' page, what happens if the rest of the site uses the .com/uk convention? (In other words, is it advisable to have this inconsistency [both from a usability, index point-of-view]?)

@Gary

I think this is a very interesting point. I agree with both of you that if I saw a billboard for domain.com/uk, I might think it to be slightly odd. However, I'm not sure if consistency trumps familiarity or not.

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Further down the rabbit-hole:

I will have multiple languages (let's say en, fr, es). I want this to utilise sub-directories (I want to avoid super-fancy AJAX whatnot. I HATE Google's help page URLs, for instance).

domain.com/us/en/
domain.com/us/es/

The idea here is that the site rank for multiple languages, within a country (without creating super-duper long URLs). Any ideas/tips?

Maybe a quick outline might help:

1 - Main (sort of a splash/navigation page)

1 -  USA

1 - EN

2 - ES

2 - UK

1 - EN

3 - France

1 - FR

2 - EN