Multi-lingual SEO: Country-specific TLD's, or migration to a huge .com site?

[linklater]

Dear SEOmoz team,

I’m an in-house SEO looking after a number of sites in a competitive vertical. Right now we have our core example.com site translated into over thirty different languages, with each one sitting on its own country-specific TLD (so example.de, example.jp, example.es, example.co.kr etc…).

Though we’re using a template system so that changes to the .com domain propagate across all languages, over the years things have become more complex in quite a few areas. For example, the level of analytics script hacks and filters we have created in order to channel users through to each language profile is now bordering on the epic.

For a number of reasons we’ve recently been discussing the cost/benefit of migrating all of these languages into the single example.com domain. On first look this would appear to simplify things greatly; however I’m nervous about what effect this would have on our organic SE traffic.

All these separate sites have cumulatively received years of on/off-site work, and even if we went through the process of setting up page-for-page redirects to their new home on example.com, I would hate to lose all this hard-work (and business) if we saw our rankings tank as a result of the move.

So I guess the question is, for an international business such as ours, which is the optimal site structure in the eyes of the search engines; Local sites on local TLD’s, or one mammoth site with language identifiers in the URL path (or subdomains)?

Is Google still so reliant on TLD for geo targeting search results, or is it less of a factor in today’s search engine environment?

Cheers!

[Francisco_Meza]

This is what I did.

1. example.com (English)

2. example.com/de (German)

3. example.com/mx (Spanish)

I went to Google Webmasters and did a Geo-Country in Germany for my German folder example.com/de.  Since I translated example.com/mx into Spanish and wanted it to rank in Mexico, I geo-targeted for Mexico in Google Webmasters.

You can repeat the process for all the countries.

[Burgo]

I'm facing a similar situation. I recently asked Tiffany Oberoi (google) at the SMX Conference in Sydney whether she suggested taking our respective TLDs and moving into a subfolder format (ie. example.com/au, example.com/nz, example.com/uk etc).

Her response? Stick with the TLDs. I don't think the geotargetting option in GWT is as reliable as it's made out to be.

[Ted_Prodromou]

We have a similar setup but slightly different.

1. example.com (English)

2. example.de 301 redirects to example.com/de (German)

3. example.mx 301 redirects to example.com/mx (Spanish)

All of the regional websites are mini-sites in each language and reside in a subfolder of example.com. We're in the process of creating full in-language sites for each region and we're debating whether to host them on their own domain, example.de or to set them up as de.example.com. We would 301 redirect example.de to de.example.com. We don't want to lose our current rankings in each country so does it matter if we host them on example.de or de.example.com if we're using the 301 redirect?

[Francisco_Meza]

If you redirect to a sub domain, the page rank (link juice) won't transfer.

If example.de 301s to example.com/de, then Pagerank flows through. In addition, your DA helps out too.  So if you example.com has a PR 5, using example.com/de will be easier to rank because you are not starting off from scratch. You are using the PR power of the site.  "IF" you create de.example.com, you are starting from complete scratch as if was a new website. subdomains are treated as almost like a completely separate site.

Geo Targeting works for me.

[Doc_Sheldon]

Interesting, MWD. I would have thought that PR would flow through a redirect to a sub domain. Now you've got me concerned. By any chance, can you point me to a source that explains that in more detail?

[Francisco_Meza]

http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/11526/any-link-juice-love-from-wordpress-subdomain

This is answered by SEOmoz staff