I am currently preparing 3 new projects which will be available in 3 languages each. From a maintenance point of view, it would be easier to deal only with the .com domain and use directories for each language like:


domain.com/en/
domain.com/de/
domain.com/kr/


This just makes life easier uploading files, maintaining the sites, checking and replying to emails (3 email accounts instead of 9).

I know that some local search engines prefer or only allow certain country TLDs, but what about the major search engines like Google?

Will I get a noticeable boost with major search engines by using country TLDs?


domain.com
domain.de
domain.co.kr


Thanks a lot!

Hi Pixelcop,

In terms of a boost that has not been my experience. In the "non-filtered" global database the TLD has no impact since it is the "most relevant" page in any language or TLD. The same is true with Google Korea - the filter criteria is either "global" or "Korean Language" so having the site in Korean is all you need.

Germany is another story... with Google Germany there are 3 filter options, the "global" "German language" or "Germany" this is because German is spoken in a number of countries. If a searcher chooses "Germany" as the filter, only those sites that are hosted in a .de TLD OR on a German based IP address will be returned. From my experience with some large multinationals and a usage presentation at the SES Munich conference, I believe only about 1% of German users of Google restrict to country so you should be ok as long as the German language is dialed in.

All that being said, we find a lot of people search for the local version of the site it does make sense to get the TLD and do a 301 redirect to the domain.com/country version of the site.

GlobalSEO,

thank you very much for your response!

Yes, I already secured all country TLDs, and I am now thinking about how to structure the sites.

I agree, not many people using google.de will limit the search to "Germany", but to "German" if they need to filter their search.

So, the TLD does not matter, because the SE knows what language the page is in?

Is this the correct way to specify the language?
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="de" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="kr" />

Another thing which just came to my mind: If I have 3 different TLDs, it will be 3 times as hard to get good backlinks.

Those language meta tags are correct.

Yes, the search engines do a great job of detecting to top 30 languages as they crawl the site and classifying them that way. As a secondary validation, they look at the meta language since many sites are coded incorrectly.

As far as links, you are going to want to get links to the local language home pages -- preferably from local language sites.

As far as links, you are going to want to get links to the local language home pages -- preferably from local language sites.

After posting, I had the same thought, getting backlinks in the appropriate language will be much better than getting backlinks in a variety of languages.

Maybe, I should go with the different country TLDs ...?

All that being said, we find a lot of people search for the local version of the site it does make sense to get the TLD and do a 301 redirect to the domain.com/country version of the site.

GlobalSEO - I'm not exactly following you on this. If you get a domain with a local TLD and redirect it with a 301, the domain with the local TLD effectively vanishes (if you linked to it or typed it in, you would be taken to the domain.com/country version of the site, but you would see the domain.com/country url, not the local TLD url, in the address bar).

If you set it up that you did see both urls for the same content, say by using server aliases, you'd be having a dupe content issue.

What are you suggesting?

GlobalSEO - I'm not exactly following you on this. If you get a domain with a local TLD and redirect it with a 301, the domain with the local TLD effectively vanishes (if you linked to it or typed it in, you would be taken to the domain.com/country version of the site, but you would see the domain.com/country url, not the local TLD url, in the address bar).

If you set it up that you did see both urls for the same content, say by using server aliases, you'd be having a dupe content issue.

What are you suggesting?

As I understood, GlobalSEO just meant that - if I should go with only domain.com - it would be good to register the other country TLDs in case s.o. just types "domain.countryTLD" instead of "domain.com".

Robert,

I should have been clearer about what I meant. There are people who will type in a "company.tld" to locate a site. For that reason it is good to have the local domain as well as prevent squatters from getting it.

We had a case of a multinational that did not own the local version and had been trying to get it from the squatter in that country. One the things we learned was that there were 5,000+ visits per month to that local domain from those just typing company.tld.

You can also use the shorter local domain in advertising as well that makes it easier to remember.

It is optimal from a number of marketing reasons to have the individual domains and sites but for the past few years I have been working with a number of F100 companies and their international operations and they will not change it and there is no marketing value that will get them to change it since the logistics of it make it both cost prohibitive and unmanageable.

Small companies can totally take advantage of this. Some of the larger companies who have some legal obligations as well as those who have bought local operations with an existing infrastructure like eBay it makes sense to keep them separate domains.