Multilingual webshop SEO

[Mat_C]

Hi,

I have a question concerning multilingual SEO for webshops. This is the case: the root domain is example.be, which has several subdomains. One of these subdomains is shop.example.be which is used for two webshops (Dutch and French), being shop.example.be/nl and shop.example.be/fr .
The other root domain is example.lu (for Luxemburg) which is only used for the subdomain for the Luxemburg webshop in French, being shop.example.lu/fr.
The content on the .lu/fr webshop is a small part of the content on the .be/fr webshop, and the product descriptions are the same and are both of course in French. The webshops will be redesigned and restructured, and the question is what to do with the .lu/fr webshop.

There are two possibilities:

• Integrate this webshop for Luxemburg in the existing .be webshop, since most of the products are the same and the .lu webshop doesn't get a lot of visitors because of Luxemburg being a small country. The only thing to do then would be setting up a 301 from the .lu webshop to the .be/fr version to transfer link value.
  People in Luxemburg already sometimes get pages from the .be/fr webshop in the SERP anyway because these already have a bigger authority than the .lu/fr pages.
• Keep the .lu/fr webshop and use hreflang tags so the correct pages with similar content are shown in the correct country. I know that when using different TLD's this normally isn't an issue anyway, so implementing hreflang tags even isn't really necessary.

Please feel free to share your thoughts about what would be the best approach.

Thanks!

[katemorris]

Huh. You have a really good head on your shoulders. They are both good options. Unless there is something that makes the .lu/fr imperative to have for the users, I think I prefer option 1. Your logic sounds good there and is customer first.

Good luck!